A common mistake many owners of small and medium businesses – an attempt to sell their goods to everyone. “Well, we have such cool fans / cases for smartphones / online courses!” It’s time to put up with the truth: your product is not needed by anyone, because the choice on the market is always great and there are many competitors. Therefore, advertising online is an important fact for all kinds of business.
Whom, in the end, the buyer chooses, depends on the advertisement, which should be higher in the search, more convincing and attractive than your competitors. It is highly desirable that the cost of attracting your potential client at the same time remains within reasonable limits.
Here are some practical tips to help you achieve this goal …
1) Do not cut budgets, but increase expertise
Most entrepreneurs are familiar with the basic tools of advertising online, and, it would seem, everyone knows how. Nevertheless, an experienced consultant after a cursory review will say that up to 30% of the advertising budget is spent inefficiently. The costs of network marketing can be conditionally divided into two full parts. The first of these is money, which, however, determines only half of the efficiency. The second is the effort you put in, the experience you apply and the new ideas.
By setting the right goals, choosing the tools that are optimal for yourself and not lazy to establish control points, you can double the effectiveness of advertising online.
Whatever promotional tools you use, they cannot do without your direct involvement, so the best way to optimize costs is not to cut the budget, but to pay closer attention to detail and nuances. In this, modern technologies for analyzing audiences, cost of clicks, choice of sites, etc., are very helpful. These are tools that must be learned to use.
2) Make a portrait of the ideal client
The basis of any advertising online is target audiences. Three things are important here: division, division and once again division. Identify a group of potential customers, break it into subgroups, and then do the same with them. Consider the maximum number of criteria: gender, age, marital status, income, place of residence, education, social status, hobby, place of work, psychological comfort, political beliefs, pets, favorite sport, lactose intolerance, favorite colors, etc.
The girl at 18, at 24, at 29 and at age 35 is four different people. Just like a bachelor, married or having children a man. It is important even the time spent in marriage – 1 year, 5 years or 10 years. Does your potential client live in a city of a million people or just in the regional center? How fast is their Internet, how often does they go online with a smartphone?
Do your clients prefer a country holiday? Use in advertising online associations with nature. Their prosperity is above average? Then, environmental friendliness and “new developments” are important. Do they partially overlap with gamblers? Then the word “discounts” will be more effective. Do they have more than two children? Use calm messages and focus on comfort and reliability. Sometimes the solutions are not obvious, but they are extremely simple. The same pet stores target the owners of private houses as the target audience. Why? As statistics show, they are three times more likely to breed pets.
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3) Select the correct message
The resulting client groups are best summarized in an Excel spreadsheet: an average of 5 to 12 lines will be obtained. In the first column there is a conventional symbol of the ideal client, in the second – its typical interests, in the third – situations in which it can stir up interest in your products or services, in the fourth – network portals that they usually visit, where they search for information, read experts or exchange tips, in the fifth – messages that can attract attention. The sixth column is a priority promotion model.
I advise you to divide all clients into those who are actively searching and those who do not plan anything, but may be interested. This is important to consider when writing a message. For the first – a short and highly competitive information. For the second – the fascinating chips.
4) Do not impose, but entertain
Direct contact with the client is an important part of both sales and targeting. Any action, any discounts and special offers should be tried taking into account the maximum information about the client: gender, age, incomes, interests, priorities, opinions – all this should be included in the short questionnaire. If someone receives a financial bonus, he is more likely to sacrifice a couple of minutes of his time.
There is a more elegant way – tests. And not commercial, but most entertaining. “Find out which of the Hollywood actors you look like”, “In which country of the world you were supposed to be born” or “How your friends see you”. But why is this necessary? It’s simple. First, make yourself a list of questions that you would like to ask a potential client, and then reformulate everything as if he should understand your “strengths” from your questions.
A simple example. Do you want to understand if your clients are keen on sports? Question test: “How would you like to spend one of the holidays?” Conditional options: pictures with a bicycle, a TV, a book, a mug of beer. Want to create a new packaging for the product and hesitate, which color scheme to choose? Then in one of the items put photos of neutral landscapes with different combinations of colors and evaluate the results. In the final test, give a set of 8-10 abstract results, any of which is extremely flattering to the client. What for? Users like to share these results in their stream, and you get good feedback and free clicks.
5) Separate the “passengers” from customers
Surely most of you regularly receive from your employees a report on the amount of traffic to the site. But absolute numbers should not mislead you: if it’s free traffic, then the rule is simple: the bigger it is, the better for you.
If you use promotional tools, it is important to divide the visitors into customers and “passengers”.
Here we look at the cost of attraction and conversion. We want more sales – we set up targeted and contextual advertising online, we wait on the site of ordinary visitors – we work with social networks and publications in the media. So immediately put advertisers the right tasks, any report must necessarily contain conversion numbers, so that there was an opportunity to minimize expenses for sites from which “one-click” visitors come.
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6) Offer interesting content
Despite the “overfeeding” of Internet users with information, meaningful and interesting projects can promote themselves. Here the first place is not the budget, but the quality of the content. You already know your potential audience and areas of interest, make it a point of reference. The ideal post for social networks should be small, emotional, charged, carry something new, accompanied by a picture-lure.
SMM-specialists are quoted in the advertising online market low, but they take a little for their services. The only reason to resort to their help is to make several posts look super-popular (with dozens of reposts and hundreds of likes). And let the overwhelming majority of these “active users” be completely useless as customers, they will create their share of visibility.
In social media, you can use the technology of partial post locking: to read the text in full, the user should bring your page to friends or put it. As the statistics show, about 0.3-0.5% of people visiting the page mark it as they liked, just to get access to the main content: after all, to see how a hamster eats tiny sausages, one can make a non-binding click.
7) Make your posts super popular
For most companies, the only reason to engage in SMM can only be the generation of well-distributed content. Recover the time and financial costs of working in social networks can only be provided a large number of likes and reposts. If this does not happen, then the corporate blog is no more than a mirror of the company’s website. How to successfully distribute your content on the network?
For big prizes – luxury smartphone and laptop – with the right positioning you can get a few thousand reposts. By the way, it is not necessary to expose your own goods (especially if you do not have them), you can connect partners. For example, at one time I had a contract, which offered the opportunity for users to download e-books from their library for free. And since interesting publications can be selected for almost any target audience, this partnership looked very worthy and brought a good result.
Another technique for distributing content is to attract paid “volunteers”. There are many users on the network who earn mini-SMM campaigns among their friends and subscribers. Their services cost a minimum of money, the achieved figures are easily read, and the final price can be reduced by offering recommendations, lines on the resume or long-term contract.
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8) Use the video
To promote your company, you can use not only a text format, it is excellent, if your business, goods and services can be accompanied by a video. Videoblogs, reviews, master classes and are a promotion strategy designed for a long time. If the time of active life of the text is one to two days, then the videos are viewed during the year, and sometimes they can shoot after a considerable time after filling. In terms of information noise, most users, including even teenage girls, have learned to identify advertising online content in the first few seconds. Therefore, show cleverness: videos on your subject will be most in demand with maximum informativeness and bringing practical examples that will be useful to ordinary Internet users. This is a great way to tell about the business for free.
Some more useful tips
In your advertising online campaign there will certainly be failures, surprises and force major. But this does not mean that risks cannot be reduced.
First, always store all information in at least two independent databases. Optimum use of not only your own equipment, but also cloud storage.
Secondly, by hiring a contractor-outsourcer, talk to his competitors, in advance learn the working conditions with them, in order to switch to a reserve option in case of surprises. If you work with speakers or experts, be prepared that at the last minute they can cancel any activities, and prepare for the speeches of internal specialists.
Counting the load on your site, immediately calculate the maximum possible value in the current year, and then increase it by five times, because no one canceled the suddenly shooting stock, seasonal fluctuations and a holiday factor. Have access to a site from mobile devices – in all offices there are problems with the electric power, and at any providers – with communication. Finally, make it your habit to put yourself in the shoes of customers. Evaluate your advertising online not as a seller, but as a buyer.
Flyers of mass distribution can be used to pinpoint certain groups of the population, when the main factors are territorial factors or type of property. It is just as easy for this advertising medium to cover many different categories of the population. With the help of these and similar methods, it is possible to fairly accurately identify and cover specific groups of potential buyers or, conversely, to ensure full coverage of towns, cities and larger territories. If you wish, you can include coupons and even product samples in the mailing list.
Advertising sent by mail has such distinctive features as: high audience selectivity, flexibility, absence of competitors’ advertising in postal items, personal character, but relatively high cost, image of junk. Well, advertising distributed by principle to each house has certain advantages over advertising sent by mail: envelopes are not needed, you do not need to write down the address, invest items and pay postage, and the exact delivery date can be combined in time with the propaganda program.
Today your advertising can be delivered by postmen. Advertising leaflets work most effectively when their distribution is part of a comprehensive program. But, advertising, distributed by principle to each house has its own drawback, in the minds of many this type of information dissemination is associated with ill-fated word advertising, which is often used in a dismissive sense, otherwise this property can be called trash.