Why You Should Be Running Paid Ads and Paid Search RIGHT NOW
Digital advertising is a thing of beauty, really. The idea that you can get your content, brand name, and website in front of tens of thousands of eyes for the cost of a cup of coffee or two a day is revolutionary. No longer do small businesses have to pay hundreds of dollars to be featured in a magazine that people will hopefully buy and use. No, those days are quite over. In this article, we will go over why you should be paying for digital ads RIGHT NOW - even if it’s just $5 a day.
There are hundreds, even thousands of “experts” crawling through the depths of Facebook and Instagram, luring small business owners in with this appealing offer: “I can help you reach X amount of followers in a month, without spending ANYTHING on ads.” The truth of the matter is, most of them are full of it. They got lucky with themselves and a client or two, but don’t truly understand what drives engagement.
Any claims to increase your sales, follower count, or engagement rates by simply posting on social media are 100% empty claims. There is no fast track to growth, at least not without the willingness to invest a little money.
As a small business owner, it can be easy to lean on the side of trust when it comes to seeking help online. You might want the answers you find to be right so bad that you’re willing to try it without doing a little research first. Sure, people have been able to scale companies organically, but that takes time. And I don’t mean just a couple months. Years, even. If you want to grow your business being dependent on social media and a website, you better buckle up. You have a long 8+ month journey ahead of you.
Neil Patel, a very popular digital marketer, produces high quality blogs and publishes them on his website quite frequently. I would be willing to bet that he knows just as much about organic and paid content as people who work in the nation’s top marketing agencies. Even he admitted that it took him about two years of publishing consistent, quality content to his website before he started to rank on Google’s page 1 search results. Growth doesn’t happen overnight, which is why corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on advertising.
Don’t have millions of dollars to spend on ads? Good. You don’t need it. Small business owners are be able to drive website traffic and increase their sales for just $5 a day in ad spend. That’s the price of your daily morning coffee (or two).
I know what you might be thinking. “I’ve tried that and got nothing,” or “I spent a couple hundred dollars on my ads and didn’t see any results.”
If you’re thinking anything along those lines, then here’s the cold, honest truth.
You were most likely not running your ads correctly. If you are absolutely certain that you were, then you probably did not let them run long enough.
Running ads is not as easy as spending $30 to promote a social media post for a week. It takes research, strategy, eye-catching visuals, and compelling writing. And most importantly, time. Even with ads, you cannot expect to see results overnight. If you are spending less than $500 a month on ads, you can expect your campaigns to take up to 2-3 weeks before they fully optimize.
Of course, there are ways to tell your ads aren’t working before wasting those weeks of ad spend. You should be analyzing your campaign performance from week to week, day to day, and if you are not seeing much improvement, you may want to look into what’s going wrong. Most often, you can notice improvement after 5 - 7 days, so if your ads are remaining stagnate (or performing worse), you will have to sit down and break out a good ol’ excel sheet.
This can take a lot of time to accomplish and even after analyzing the data, an unexperienced marketer would find it very difficult to pinpoint the problem.
If you are going to run paid ads, which I highly recommend you do, you need to take the time to make sure you are setting them up correctly. First, identify your objective. Sales, traffic, page likes, leads, and brand awareness are all common objectives for ad campaigns. Some of these require more work and time than others, but if you set them up correctly, you’ll find yourself running successful ads in no time.
The worst thing you can do is rush your target audience into the sale. Pushing sales and offers on an audience that has never even heard of you is a great way to waste ad spend. Especially if you have a higher priced product/service, there’s no way you’ll be able to run a sales campaign to a cold audience that produces a positive ROI.
Warm your audience up with value, entertainment, or information. Let them figure out who you are first. Then, retarget those members of the audience that engage with your ad by watching at least 3 seconds of your video or visit your website. This retarget audience will be much more apt to visiting your website and possibly even making a purchase from you.
If you would like to learn more about how to make ad campaigns work for you, read our blog article on How to Run Facebook Ads or listen to our podcast on Paid Ad Campaigns.
Paid search is also a great way to get your brand name and website in front of people who are already searching for your product or service. Rather than spending years trying to post consistent content, build links to your website, target constantly changing keywords, and performing daily maintenance on your website to ensure it’s running at top-notch performance, you can spend $5 - $15 a day (depending on your industry) to reach tens of thousands of potential customers on Google, many of which who are already in the purchase stage of their decision-making process.
All in all, paying for search and social media ads will help you grow your business faster than you could have ever hoped for with solely organic (non-paid) content. It doesn’t take a whole lot of ad spend to see results, as long as you are willing to wait a couple weeks before you can reap the benefits.
Don’t leave it up to some “digital marketing guru” you found in a Facebook group or in an ad to determine how you market your product or service. If you’re not running paid ads on social or on search right now, you’re losing out.
Especially with the start of a new year, companies have fresh budgets, consumers are looking for a fresh start, and people are ready to buy your product/service now.
The only challenge one can face when running ad campaigns is setting it up correctly. This means choosing the right audience, timeframe, budget spend, objective, knowing what to say (and saying the right thing), and being able to produce visually appealing static images or videos. Your ability to wait to retarget audiences and push for the sale will also come into play, but patience and knowledge on the subject are key.
The start of a new year always means fresh opportunity for growth. If there’s a time to start running paid ads on social media and on search, it’s now. If you’re looking to begin running Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, or any other form of paid media, sign up for our free marketing evaluation and we will help you put together a marketing plan that guarantees your success in 2022.
