In today’s digital age, online advertising has become an indispensable tool for promoting products. With a wide array of tools available, beginners might find it challenging to navigate the entire landscape. Therefore, we provide a guide to help you understand the basics of online advertising and offer a step-by-step approach to get started.
What Does Online Advertising Entail?
Before diving into campaign setup, let’s first summarize what we’re discussing in this guide. Starting with the theory – online advertising broadly refers to any marketing effort that uses the internet to promote a business or product. The main advantages of online advertising include a wide reach and precise targeting of the target customer group. Additionally, for businesses, it is not as costly compared to physical advertising. Thanks to sophisticated tools, you always have access to detailed campaign analytics even during its run. This allows you to promptly respond to any issues and optimize settings for better performance.
Due to these advantages, online advertising has become a global phenomenon. Entire teams of experts compete daily to find the most effective way to deliver commercial messages – working with influencers, creating viral videos, or humorous GIFs. You may also be familiar with purposefully crafted discussions or sales articles that seem to be written by editorial teams at first glance. But how does online advertising for businesses work in practice during assembly? Let’s go through the process step by step.
Guide: Online Advertising Step by Step
Before you continue reading, consider what your business should gain from online advertising. Set a goal based on which you will subsequently assess the campaign’s progress and success using performance indicators. This could include increasing brand awareness, reaching new potential customers, or simply boosting sales. Also, prepare what budget for online campaigns you intend to follow.
- Create Customer Personas
Think about the ideal customer you are trying to reach. Try to get detailed using the following questions:
- Who are they?
- How old are they?
- How much do they earn?
- What do they do for a living?
- What problems do they have that you can solve?
- What search phrases might they use to find a solution?
- …
The more you can empathize with the customer’s role, the better you can utilize the potential of online advertising. Of course, don’t worry about having just one superhero. It’s more than likely you’ll come up with several similar personas. Try naming and sorting them according to key differentiating factors such as age, salary, or place of residence.
WARNING! Although it pays off to have multiple personas and thus multiple potential campaign directions, don’t overdo it. As they say, too much of anything is bad.
- Choose Advertising Formats
While creating customer personas, you were already thinking about where they would most likely be looking for solutions to their problems. Now, let’s elaborate on this step a bit more. You should definitely look for potential customers where their attention is most concentrated. Whether it’s strategies or different channels, consider what your personas do most often on the internet.
Online advertising offers a plethora of different formats to choose from. These typically include PPC search ads, Display ads, Remarketing campaigns, Video ads, or Social media ads. To choose and properly set up a format, you will need one of the tools that offer campaign management. For example, PPC advertising is managed in the Czech Republic either in the most popular Google Ads or Seznam Sklik.
- Prepare Content Including Keywords
Once you have prepared personas and selected advertising formats based on their probable online behavior, you can start preparing the campaigns themselves. Sooner or later, you will get to the details regarding the target audience. This is most commonly based on either geographical areas, interests, topics, or demographic data. In most tools, with each change you make, you’ll immediately see information on how many interactions your set budget is LIKELY to bring.
For even better targeting, it is good to think about keywords while preparing content for the digital world. The most commonly used tools in this regard include Google’s Keyword Planner or the Keyword Suggestion service, which can be found within the Sklik tool.
- Set Up Measurement Methods (Analytics)
There’s almost no point in running online ads if you can’t measure their performance and link them to positive results for your business. Simply put, data tracking is crucial for your campaign’s success.
As an example, let’s choose the Google environment. You set up online ads and strategies for what happens before the ad click in Google Ads. However, all data is tracked in Google Analytics, which you must integrate with your account in advance. In addition to tracking the number of clicks and conversions, they also offer performance metrics that facilitate the calculation of return on investment in online advertising. Various performance indicators should take into account your campaign goal.
- Manage the Campaign Long-Term Based on Results
Although it may seem at first glance that online advertising can be set up quickly and doesn’t require much care, the opposite is true. Setting everything from A to Z might be done fairly swiftly after thoroughly considering personas and strategies, but the best part comes in the long term. Online advertising can be optimized and changed during its course. Therefore, it is worth closely monitoring how it evolves over time and testing different texts or graphics.
Although the previous paragraph may have tempted you to check your campaign results daily, it’s better to let the internet work for a while. Consistent results are achieved primarily if you gather enough data to effectively adjust your campaigns.
Not feeling up to creating and managing online ads? We can help! We provide complete online advertising services for small and medium-sized businesses.