Online advertising can get your message in front of a much bigger audience. There is little doubt that every business should have an online presence. Although it is hard to record, most data suggests over 75% of people research a purchase or company online before even getting in touch. So even if you are a local brick and mortar business, it is important that people can find you.

Being found by those people is not as simple as making a website or a Facebook page. This is still the foundation, but as more and more businesses go online, the space is becoming increasingly crowded.

Using online advertising is a way to shout louder. But before you go diving into the complex world of paid advertising it is important to be clear on what you want to say and what you want to achieve. As with all marketing efforts, you need to be focused. Targeted campaigns are like the laser pointer to the spray and pray water cannon. You might hit a lot of people with a water cannon but how many are interested (not in getting soaked… in your message!)? Probably not very many, they probably just happened to be walking past and got caught in the crossfire.

Using a targeted marketing approach means identifying a very specific group of people that you want to say something to so that you can come up with something very specific to say. That way the people that see and hopefully respond to your add will be valuable customers rather than haphazard clickers, they could cost you money.

Promote your content with online advertising

Say you want to share a great blog post with potential customers. Think about the demographic of your customers and which ones are mostly likely to be interested in that post. Are they more likely to be interested in business news or graphic design? How old are they, where do they live? The more specific you are the better the results should be.
You can use all this information to create a social media advert to promote your content, hopefully securing more shares/likes and increasing your brand awareness. For example, Facebook allows you to be really specific about whose attention you wanted to get. Take a look at the screenshot below…

The target age and gender have been set and the area is just a 25km radius of one town. The key is to scroll through the many detailed targeting options in the drop down menus or the search bar and refine your audience. You can do this by all manor of factors and then narrow this by requiring a match to another set of criteria or you could exclude things.

The advert set above is an example of a target audience for a company like Avon or Anne Summers using online advertising to promote content. In this case, blog advice on how the young mum can create a work-life balance with a view to generating new recruits in the Chelmsford area. The targeting requires an interest or employment in working from home AND being an expectant mother or have children up to 5yrs old.

The result is an audience size of just 150-280, which means only those who are genuinely interested in your content will see it, making each click more meaningful and increasing the relevancy score Facebook assign your ad. That score can help define how much each click costs you as they don’t like spamming people with irrelevant content.

Depending on your goals, you could be a little more broad, say you were looking to sell art supplies to teachers in England and Wales, you might take this approach:

How you refine your audience will really depend on what you want to achieve with online advertising but the more specific the better. The best bit is that with Facebook adverts you can have a budget as little as £10 and see success, a well-refined campaign could cost pennies per click.

If you have found this useful, sign up to our blog below for next week’s installment on Google Adwords. While you wait you get some tips on how to drive traffic to your blog or Facebook page by integrating print marketing with your online channels.

Lisa Cooper

Lisa Cooper is a photographer and marketing writer working for Print-Print Limited, promoting business and building your brand through quality print marketing.

If you’re interested in small business promotion then please get in touch info@print-print.co.uk