Session 20: How to advertise your business online

In session 20 of A Marketing Podcast we’re starting a 6 part series about How to advertise your business online. In this session I’ll provide an overview of advertising online and what you need to consider and setup before you spend a cent. As well as how to maximize your advertising budgets and generate quality traffic to your website.

Session 20: How to advertise your business online

This session is the first of a 6 part series on how to advertise your business online. I’m going to walk you through a few things to make sure you’re getting the most out of your advertising spend.

They are:

* What is Advertising online?

* Develop strong targeting profiles (your audiences)

* Messaging and content creation for your campaigns

* The technical setup of your website & Reporting tools

* The time required to manage your campaigns and the process I like to use

Then, for the remainder of the 6 part series, we’ll get into the ins and outs of particular advertising channels, and those are:

* Search Engine Marketing or SEM

* Display Network Advertising

* Facebook Advertising

* Twitter Advertising

* LinkedIn Advertising

What is Advertising online?

Spending money to get your advertising in front of a new audience online.

Much like traditional advertising it requires that you spend money to place your ads in a certain medium or space. In this case it’s online.

Developing strong targeting profiles

Targeting determines who sees your advertising.

Maybe the main thing to learn about how to advertise your business online, is developing strong targeting will optimize the delivery of your ads to the right audience.

Understand that in online advertising, same with traditional advertising, you will inevitably advertise to people that are not in your target audience. This isn’t a failed outcome as much as it’s part of advertising. That being said targeting as finely as possible will limit the wasted impressions.

You should have established a solid understanding of your business’ audiences by now, and this will help with your targeting.

I like to develop my targeting profiles as the first step of any campaign as it helps you develop the right content for each target – yes you should have content for each target group or profile.

Check out Session 4: Understanding and developing your target audiences,  if you haven’t developed your businesses target audiences yet.

Messaging and content creation for your campaigns

Now that we know who our target audiences are it’s time to create content for them.

If you’re coming at your advertising campaigns with a pre-developed offer, promotion, or product you will have already established your content. But it needs to be crosschecked against your target audiences. It’s a little chicken egg to be honest, but ones thing’s for sure – your content needs to resonate with your audience.

Part of content resonating with your new traffic is that the messaging in the advertisement, be it copy or visuals, needs to relate to the page they land on, on your website.

For example, if you’re going to have a promotion for a new product, make sure the user lands on a page that references the promotion and provides a call to action. It’s for this reason that digital inbound marketing works great with advertising. You can find out more by listening to Session 14: All about digital inbound marketing .

Technical Setup of your website and reporting tools

Your website is the main place to drive traffic from your online advertising.