Marketing & Advertising are increasingly shifting online. This is important to you because most likely you work for, help run, or on some level are engaged in a business. Whether it is a large multi-national corporation or a small mom & pop corner shop, the same elements are applied.

Marketing and Advertising are essentially lead generation, or better yet “action” generation tools. There is always an intended action regardless of what kind of marketing or advertising is taking place. Sometimes that action is obvious like a person calling a number, purchasing a product or service, or filling out a form or email. Other times the action is less direct, but someone at some point is spending money, and therefore there is a desired result which is this “action”. As these fields increasingly move online, these “actions” become easier to measure as a whole.

The Basics of the Marketing & Advertising process online

The internet is really one huge “action” network, and it is increasingly moving in that direction. Everything online can be tracked, assorted, analyzed, marketed to, measured, and tested, which previously was impossible. The beauty of the internet is that this allows us to adapt in real-time. We can now, almost immediately, see the results of our marketing and advertising initiatives {actions} and begin to optimize these results.

There are too many aspects of marketing and advertising online to discuss in this post in great detail, however I will go ahead and breakdown the basics of what goes into a well run advertisement. Again, many of these steps can be applied to both a large corporation or a small local business, because in the end almost all actions happen at a local level, even if it is a multi-national marketing campaign. So the following steps should be used in all advertising campaigns online if you want to optimize your results and make money.

Step 1. Identify your desired action. (product sale, phone call, email capture, video view, etc.)

Step 2. Identify your desired geographic location to target for each specific action.

Step 3. Identify your target market using very specific demographics (Facebook demographics – age, gender, interests, etc)

Step 4. Identify what your targeted audience is looking for with Keyword Groups (i.e. Search Engine Keyword Searches)

*Note – advertising platforms focus on different things. For instance Facebook & LinkedIn are examples of ad platforms where you can target very specific demographics, whereas Google and other Search Engines focus more on user intent.

Step 5. Create your Ads based on Steps 1-4. (Notice this should always be plural. One of the biggest advantages of the internet is the ability to test ads against each other to see which are most successful)

Step 6. When you create your ads on certain platforms (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) assign the keyword group you created (step 4) to the ads you created (step 5)

Step 7. The destination of your Ad should link the consumer to a ‘landing page’ designed to initiate the desired action. Landing Pages are pages on a website that are designed to convert an action. I would argue that all webpages should be viewed as a landing page. (Landing Pages that match the advertisement copy and keywords have much higher success rates). In other words, if you send your traffic to a page that matches your ad, your conversion numbers will increase.

Step 8. Split test all individual variables against each other (this may take some time depending upon the volume of traffic). This includes ad copy, keywords, landing pages, ad targeting, etc.

Step 9. Analyze. Make appropriate changes. Repeat.

If you take this step by step approach to marketing, and continue to measure the results, make changes, and repeat, you will slowly but surely optimize your campaigns. This will mean your dollar spent will go further ,therefore increasing your ROI on this campaign. As a business owner or employee you can gain incredible insight into what drives people to these certain actions. This can help your Business in countless other ways aside from achieving the desired results from a specific marketing/advertising campaign.

Tags: Advertising, business, internet advertising campaigns, marketing advertising

No related posts.