3 Online Advertising Tips For Small Businesses

The world in general is moving towards digital and as a small business owner, you ought to be thinking accordingly. Perhaps you have tried in the past and it just didn’t work—studies show that the vast majority of people who try to use e-marketing tools such as Facebook ads experience failure. On the other hand, e-marketing has worked and continues to work for many others who understand the principles. If you are frustrated and about to give up on e-advertising or are still debating the merits of trying it out in the first place, this article is just for you, and we are going to show you 3 useful tips for making online advertising work for your business.

#1. Target look-alikes

Every business student knows in theory, that you can target a certain group of customers who have some similar characteristics. This is primarily because basic human motivations are essentially the same and tend to produce uniform behavior at different levels. A very generic example is the fact that newly married couples tend to look for larger homes when they are expecting a baby.

Thus, if you can predict what particular needs or wants motivate a particular group of people, then you will be better able to predict their behavior in the marketplace and not only will this better equip you for meeting their needs profitably, but you will also be able to reach more of such customers.

Look-alike modelling is used to create better advertising campaigns by taking available data about your past customers and using it to predict the behavior of other consumers who produce similar data. According to statistics, effective look-alike modelling can yield results of up to twice or thrice as much as regular advertising does. For a small business, it is even easier for you to identify your look-alike segments and target them, since your customer pool is not likely to be very large.

#2. Build a community

Using advertising tools such as Facebook ads is a good idea if you know what you’re doing and have an in-depth understanding of look-alike modelling. However, organically created content is still one of the best ways to market your business online, and one of the best ways of doing this is by creating a thriving community. Your online community should be composed of people who share some of the same ideas that motivate your business (this is one of the reasons why you should only run a business you have a passion for), an d are naturally inclined to connect with you because you create content that catches their attention and interest.

#3. Upsell to your loyal customers

Ever gone to a fast food outlet to buy a burger for example, and had the attendant ask “would you like to have that with fries?”. If you didn’t originally intend to have some fries but answered yes to this question, then you were successfully upsold. If you think about it, you have been successfully upsold on lot’s of items without even realizing it happened. For the sake of clarity, upselling is the practice of getting customers to buy a related but more expensive product than the one they originally intended to buy. This could also mean (as in the earlier example) getting someone to buy an additional component that increases the total amount they spend in buying from you.

Similarly, in cross selling, businesses aim to get their customers buying additional but unrelated products. These business strategies could be extremely profitable when targeted at existing customers, simply because it is often much easier to sell new things to existing customers than it is to sell anything to new customers.

Ready to try online advertising and make it work this time? Use these tips to guide you through. If you still feel like you can’t handle it by yourself, you should thinking of getting in touch with a professional consultant to help manage your campaign on a commissions basis.