Paid advertising
on the internet has become a very powerful medium of generating sales for your
business on a regular basis. Done well, it should (although not always
immediately) pretty much not only pay for itself but help you make a profit
every single time you run a campaign. It is fast to set-up, has a very wide
reach and provides means of effectively targeting specific people. Furthermore
its results can be monitored and improved and it can be linked to your valuable
online resources to increase the chance of generating interest amongst your
audience.
So why do many
campaigns still end up sucking money out of businesses without generating real
results, while others create a sustainable flow of customers? The very first
reason is naturally knowing your target audience well and providing them with
what they need. If you still do not know much about your target audience, use this free document to gain an understanding. If you already know about your
target audience, here are some proven tips that contribute to the science of
successful paid-advertising campaigns.
1. Calculate Your Cost-Per-Click Well
Calculating
smartly how much you should be paying for every click is essential for your
campaigns. If you pay too much, your campaign will straight-out not make business
sense and you will lose money and if you pay too little you will be missing out
on opportunities. How much money does your business afford to pay for every
generated sale? How many clicks do you need to be able to generate that one sale?
Therefore how much should you pay for every click?
Here's how to do it: If
you afford to pay €10 for every sale and
you know that your website converts 1 visitor into a customer out of every 100
visitors, then you cannot pay more than 0.10c for every click or else your
campaign will not be profitable. Of course you can always either get professional help to increase your website's conversion rate so that you
would not need 100 clicks to make a sale or find a way to afford to pay more
for every sale but that is beyond the scope of this article.
2. Use Call to Actions
An effective
sales campaign should generate action which in result lead
to sales. It is a well-known, proven fact that people take much more action
when they are specifically asked (or told) to take an action then when they
have to assume or think of taking action themselves.
If your advert
instructs your audience to take action in a clear and enticing way, rather than
simply saying what you are selling, you will have more interaction from your
audience and therefore more results. A call to action can be anything from
"Watch a Demo" or "Check Out The New Collection Today" to
"Book Your Seat Now" or "Buy Now!".
3. Encourage Urgency
When you create a sense of urgency, people
take even more action. This is due to the psychological need of not missing out
on something that could be good for you. Without a need for urgency, people
will generally procrastinate and decide to take the action tomorrow, or next
week (psychologically again, due to the fact that most people delay making
decisions out of fear of making a bad decision).
To create a
sense of urgency you can use terms like "Limited Time Offer" or
"Last few items available". You can even be more subtle and use terms
such as "Until Stock Lasts" or "Snatch a Copy now" which slightly
hints (using a term like 'snatch) that if you are not fast enough you will lose
the opportunity.
4. Create Curiosity
A good advert
should catch the audience's attention and generate an interest by showing them
something they want to know more about. The advert should tell you enough to
make you curious to know more and therefore get the click. By sparking
curiosity in your audience, you will definitely get more traffic to your
website and therefore, assuming it is a good website (and you have a good
product and price obviously), more sales.
Generating
curiosity is a bit of an art in itself and can sometimes be a bit tricky. You
can always get a good content writer to help you along or use terms that are usually already known to be effective. Make sure to generate curiosity in
your target audience and not everyone else, otherwise you will be wasting money
on useless clicks.
5. Write Catchy Headings
The heading is
the first (or one of the first) thing your audience will see and its job is to
get the attention towards the rest of the advert. The title should explain what
the advert is about while making people want to know more, and therefore, read
the rest of the advert. This is like a series of steps, always adding to the
curiosity and interest of the audience until they reach your website where you
have your offer laid out effectively, ready to make another sale.
6. Selling Benefits, Not Features
Any good sales
approach focuses on the benefits that the customer will get from the product or
service and not on the features (only) of the item. If people want to buy a
hammer, it is probably not because they particularly love and want hammers for
the sake of having a hammer but because they want to be able to get on with
their DIY projects. It is the benefit of being able to work with nails easily
and effectively whenever they want to, for as long as possible that gets them
to buy that hammer. It is therefore not so effective to explain the colour of
your hammers, the exact shape of the handle or the very exact weight as much as
it is important to explain how long-lasting, effective and low-cost they are. It
is therefore important to create the advert in terms of how your audience
thinks.
