Which Online Advertising Should I Use?

I started my Beauty business at the very time Facebook came to be. Not a stranger to advertising, but a complete novice to electronic marketing (we all were!), I learned electronic advertising from the ground up. Today I am going to try to shortcut this ‘advertising online’ options for you into two broad categories – Social and Search. It’s a huge topic and can be extremely involved. Today I am writing at top line only and will drill down in more detail in future blogs.

I caution you also that whatever works today and how it’s executed may not work next year. Online advertising changes ALL the TIME. You have to keep up – or have someone keep up for you! The other really key thing to remember about online advertising is that you are not the only person using it… read on!

Key Point Number One: Be relevant and be interesting – in a way that is specific to the medium you are advertising in..

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Linkedin – all are available for advertising, Facebook being the most common globally, and Instagram quickly gaining ground.

This is key with using Social Mediums: consumers come into each of the mediums with an expectation on what they should see there. You MUST show them appropriate content to meet their expectation of the platform and you MUST make it interesting – whether it’s a post or an ad.

On Social Platforms, promote and advertise areas of your business that have an ‘intrigue’ factor: such as looking younger for longer. or interesting ingredients – or anything people might not have considered and probably would not have Google searched – if you see a plumber advertising drain unblocking on Facebook, you probably won’t click through, but if you see a plumber posting about how to save water by installing some gadget, you might. The same goes in every industry – create a demand by being interesting. Let people get to know you and feel comfortable with who you are and what you can offer them.

On Social – outside of advertising – around 1 in 10 communications can be an offer. This is the single greatest mistakes Beauty businesses make on social – they spam relentlessly. Talk value not price. Deliver relevant information in an interesting way. Be surprising and be fun. Be real. At the end of the day, people really don’t care how many gaps you have in your day – they just want to know if you are relevant to them.

When placing ads on Social, the relevance of your ad to your targetted audience is the single most important thing. Ads that are deemed relevant to the audience will get far more exposure at far less cost. Happily, you can select SO MANY facets about your audience and their lifestyle when targeting ads on Social that being relevant to your ads becomes much easier and extremely affordable. Every business can afford to advertise on Social. The skill is in selecting the right medium and crafting the relevance of your ad.

When advertising on Social, drill down as far as you can to get the smallest, tightest audience to fit with your ad – and show them something that they will be sure to be interested in. Put multiple ads in a campaign and let the market decide which is stronger or more interesting and relevant. This drill-down factor is super important to your Social advertising success.

In this way you can have several tightly targeted advertising threads running at the same time independently of each other, each with multiple ads via multiple delivery channels (mobile, tablet, desktop).

I could write all day about Social Media Targeting and how incredible it is, but for today I’ll stay with the broad brush strokes.

Key Point Number Two: Think about whether or not the customer will actively search out your service.

Going beyond Social Media, if you have a product or service that people will be actively looking for at the time that they need it and otherwise not, advertise it in a place where they will look – here is where you use Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is the perfect place to put an ad for a local service that people will want to seek out – such as beauty therapy. There are three broad options for Adwords – Search, Display, and Video. For situations as described above, where people will seek out a service when they need it, use the Google Search option.

Adwords is also largely about being relevant – you need to find the right keywords and phrases to use, then you need to nominate how much you are prepared to pay for them, and how far up the list you want to go. Relevance to the customer’s search is everything. Think about the time of day your target customer will be searching – and schedule an ad campaign to run during that time only, using as a headline the phrase they are MOST likely to search on. Adwords takes time to finetune and perfect, but it is time well spent. Most of my ‘new’ Beauty Therapy clients came in from Google Adwords, as did a large number of the IPL clients in the early days.

Key Point Number Three: Think about who else might be advertising.

Think online silent auction. How Google Advertising works is that the highest bidder with the most relevant ad copy wins the highest [desired] place in the online listings. For some industries – beauty included, this can increase keyword costs considerably. However, there are ways and means of securing top spots without getting into a keyword price battle. If some other player has much more budget that you and wants to get the top spot, change your settings to target second or third spot and work on your ad’s relevance. While this challenges every word in your ad and definitely the headline for the ad, it is effort well spent. Keep trying until you hit something that works, then monitor it.

Run multiple ads and continue tweaking them over time. Set up mobile-only campaigns to change out to, and scheduled campaigns to start and finish at different times of the day to become unpredictable in your own patterns. Assuming relevance of your ads are high, running multiple campaigns is the single most difficult thing for competitors to track.

Which to use – Search or Social.

My recommendation is to use both – with low budgets. Think of it as a push/pull effect, with Social Platforms providing the ‘push’ (creating interest) and the Adwords Search ads providing the ‘pull” – reeling them in. You will found that the people you are targeting think you are everywhere – especially if you add remarketing to this mix, but actually, you are positioning and targeting closely so that you are seen frequently by those who you want to be seen by.

This topic of online advertising/online presence is so broad and has so many critical ‘outlying’ factors such as website SEO, Page Post Management, Google Display, Google Video, Remarketing and Custom List Marketing that I have tried to stay strictly with online advertising. Stay tuned for future blogs on the broader zones, or call/email me for a chat if you want future depth on how these areas can work for you.