Digital Advertising

The biggest mistake we have watched with paid advertising is businesses creating an account, entering their credit card and never looking at the account again. It also doesn’t help going into your account and making changes when you don’t know what you are doing. This doesn’t mean go hire an agency, the purpose of that previous statement is to help you put in context how important your advertising efforts are. There have been business owners that have spent hundreds of hours trying to learn how to be effective so that they could do these things themselves. There are also business owners that have no interest in marketing and advertising and want to focus on what they love or are good at. It’s important to understand what bucket you fall into and then take the next steps forward that are best your business. 

If you are trying to learn this on your own…

If you have made the decision to learn this yourself, then there are a few resources I would direct you to. You will need to understand how the major advertising platforms fundamentally work. The major platforms would be Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Yelp Ads. Resources to learn about all of those are linked in the titles of the platforms. Now, learning about how the platform works is not the end all be all. Once you have an in-depth understanding of each platform, you need to build out your advertising plan. What are you trying to accomplish? Where are your customers living online? This whole thought process will help you build out which platforms you need to use and how you should use them. Once you have that plan built out, you will be able to start to piece together what your budgets need to be. Budgets are a large topic on their own, but at the very least, you should be able to understand the ratios of budget to platform based on your advertising plan. At this point, you have your high level plan for your digital advertising efforts. Now you will need to get into the setup of each account, set up conversion tracking (tracking actual leads to your business) and developing your creative strategy. Each of those items can be articles of their own, so the advice I would give is finding a way to set up conversion tracking and testing it to make sure it works and then for the creative strategy, always put your user first. 

If you are planning to choose a marketing agency…

We personally promote this route, not because we are a marketing agency, but because we are a marketing agency we know the in-depth understanding that is needed to get the best return on your dollar. We also have witnessed thousands of Ad accounts that have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars with no return because business owners don’t take it as seriously as they need to. Now if you are trying to choose an agency partner, you’re going to have to ask them some tough questions. Contrary to popular belief, there are a ton of agencies that are living in the realm of 15-20 years ago and are not utilizing new technologies and are not focusing on the metrics that will help grow your business. For this section of this article, I will provide 5 questions to ask agencies you are talking to. The answers you should hope to hear from them will be under the Lab Coat Marketing section of this article because we will put our answers to those questions there.

1. What platforms are you experienced in and recommend I use for my business?
2. How do you define success in an Ad Campaign or advertising efforts?
3. What should my advertising budget be?
4. How do you go about improving my advertising efforts?
5. How should I approach Ad Creative?

Working With Lab Coat Marketing:

We look at your advertising efforts as an investment portfolio. Paid Advertising is an investment and you need to expect some sort of return on your investment. You need to understand the value of your customers so you can start to manage and monitor the Return on Investment from your efforts. Along with managing your advertising like an investment portfolio, we also believe heavily in testing. Constant testing and constant experimentation will gradually improve your account over time and in return drive leads to your business at a lower cost. Below are the answers to the questions listed above:

• What platforms are you experienced in and recommend I use for my business?

• We have experience in a multitude of platforms. Some of the main examples are Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Yelp Ads. When it comes to recommending a potential platform strategy, I would need to know more about your business and your target market. Understanding that a little more will help me recommend a well thought out strategy and then you can make the decision if you want to invest in all of that or take a smaller scale approach. 

• How do you define success in an Ad Campaign or advertising efforts?

• ROI and Lead Generation. If you are determining success by clicks and impressions then you can expect to fail in regards to growing your business. I am not saying clicks and impressions are not important, but you need to be tracking conversions (leads) per channel and have a general understanding of what return you are getting on your investment. If you have all of those data points, then you can make a well thought out decision to invest in a certain platform focused on branding where you may not focus on direct leads because you know in your portfolio you have other channels focused on getting you direct leads. 

• What should my advertising budget be?

• This depends on a ton of different factors. Especially on what you have to spend in the case you are a smaller business where finances are tight. We could build out a custom portfolio based on your financial means. 

• How do you go about improving my advertising efforts?

• Constant A/B split testing and experimentation. You can’t improve an ad account by letting it sit there. You have to constantly experiment and test new ideas and new creatives to understand what targets are working best and what creatives are resonating with the end user. 

• How should I approach Ad Creative?

• Ad Creative depends on the platform being used. You need to have your Ad Creative be highly contextual to the market and to the user on any given platform, but also needs to fit well with the use of that platform. A user will use Facebook differently than they use Google Search. In that case, your Ads should look different on and should speak differently on Google than on Facebook. Also constantly be doing A/B split testing and experimentation to learn what is resonating most with your users.

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