Awesome! Paid Advertising Strategies That Every  Startup Should Go for?

 

So speaking of Paid advertising, it’s considered one of the fastest ways of helping potential customers discover what your brand is and what it offers. 

Paid Advertising allows you to purchase advertisement so you can target specific audiences, instead of relying on them to find you organically. Paid Advertisement is no doubt the future of digital advertising. Just by following this strategy, a company can totally change the way it offers a product or service to its target market. Along with that, you can learn how it can help you in your startup and transform it into a legitimate business. 

What is Paid Advertising?

Paid Advertising is also known as digital advertising. It’s a form of internet advertising that a company or market pays for. You are basically renting space on advertising channels which include Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Yahoo Ads for search engines and Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads for social media platforms. 

Both types of paid marketing are pay-per-click, which means that you only get paid when someone clicks on them. A maximum budget of a certain amount is set, and then the ad runs until the budget is used up. 

Why Should Startups Focus on Paid Advertising? 

Well as a startup, you need to know your customers. Among other reasons, Paid Advertising will help you understand their needs and deliver to them. Obviously, we are aware of the fact that we can’t just sit back and wait for a startup to get sales on its own. You are expecting quick results so you can work on your strategies to excel in your startup. That’s where Paid Advertising strategies come into play. 

It can be easily understood in the form of an example:

Suppose you have an online store and you want to know what your target audience is instead of going for SEO to rank for various keywords and getting conversions. You need to know that you can’t possibly sell a product or service if you don’t even know who needs it? or What kind of product or service you’re trying to offer. Therefore, you need to “break the ice” for your audience by running a few tests with paid marketing campaigns to check what sort of results you get, and how to modify your campaigns to move on the right path.   

SEO vs SEM vs SMM

People often get confused between SEO and SEM, but there’s a far-fetched difference between them. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies are mainly used to increase the chances of a website’s presence within the search engine results, particularly, among the top results. While on the other hand SEM (Search Engine Marketing), the purpose is to get traffic and visibility from both organic and paid searches. It’s also considered pay-per-click marketing.

Talking about another concept of marketing is SMM (Social Media Marketing) its a marketing strategy that uses social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter for brand promotion, target audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales.  

Plan a Paid Campaign for Your Startup 

Until now you got the point that how paid advertising can help you in your business. But now the question comes to how to plan a campaign for a startup? It can be understood after reading above that you can’t just allocate a certain budget and start promoting the content. You need to plan a strategy for making a campaign and test its results. So let’s get started by planning a proper strategy:

1. Set Goals

For starting any sort of business it’s important to set goals so it can act as a direction. In the early phase of your business, your goals might be a little different from how you define success. But for many startups, goals often fall under categories like raising brand awareness and acquiring new customers. Both categories are crucial in the development of your startup. 

Raise brand awareness

So, how can you sell a product or service to your target audience? By letting people know who you are, what do you do, what kind of product or service you can provide.  

Acquire new customers

People try to keep in touch with anything new the market can offer them. If you slow down and fall behind, even loyal customers won’t be coming back. So attracting new customers is important as it allows you to be aware of the needs of clients. 

2. Define Your Audience 

After setting up your goals it comes to selecting your target audience to whom you can advertise your product or services. The purpose here is to target a group of people with the education, goals, interests, and problems as your ideal customer. 

For example, You are running a men’s grooming business. So you would go in search of a similar audience by selecting pages of their competitors. We can select our audience by selecting “Gillette” or “BIG”. We can even go for demographic and search out people of similar interest using keywords like Saloon, Barber shops near them. 

3. Identify Platforms for Promotion 

Almost all the audiences we want to target are available on social media platforms. So if your target audience are senior citizens, a social platform like TikTok probably isn’t your best option, but perhaps Facebook will turn out to be your cup of tea. 

So choose a platform like Facebook, for promoting or advertising your business. It would be a good option as Facebook is popular among a wide variety of demographics, including gender and age which means there’s a good chance your target audience is engaging with the platform, too.

Back to Back Experiments

People often make a mistake after getting little success in their business or startups. They stop experimenting with new marketing tactics. Like they say “Not everything lasts forever” success through certain tactics won’t workout the same way as always. There are many examples to share with you. Myspace was launched in 2003 By 2006, it was the most visited website on the planet, which allowed users to share new music directly on their profile pages. By 2008, it was overshadowed by Facebook and ended up being an afterthought.

So, as a marketer, we should keep on experimenting with different strategies. We can target different audiences on basis of demographics, age, or going for a new market. 

The best way we can do that is by conducting Research:

1. Research

It is considered a smart move to research anything you are interested in or planning to invest in. It doesn’t matter what amount of money you’re spending, even they are thousands or a dime. If you don’t have the slightest knowledge about the medium, is it even good enough to get your desired sales or not?

Almost all paid platform has a featured tool that allows you to research your audience and analyze the budget. For instance, Facebook  provides us with Audience insights. It allows users to easily select relevant audiences and import them into their ad sets through this free tool. Simply select your competitors and add their names to the ‘interest’ section of the Facebook Insights tool. Thus, it will help you to know your target audience and who are interested in your content. 

2. Optimize 

So once you’re done with the research, you gathered all the info related to the platform. Now’s the time for the next step which is marketing the product through the selected platform. 

Well at first your ad cost might get a little bit higher and you might need to optimize them by testing multiple ad sets & ad campaign types to get clarity about what’s going on. Let’s suppose after testing multiple post engagement campaigns on social media we came across the one providing us the best results. So now we can move one with that one and with the data available we can test. By changing budget, demographics, or age. 

3. Scale 

Well speaking of scalability it’s the ability of a startup to take on a larger workload without negatively impacting performance or company revenue. Therefore, it’s important to optimize your campaigns properly. So that you don’t end up wasting your budget. Start with a limited budget and grow it day by day while consistently testing the ad campaigns. You can test an ad campaign by setting it for a week with a limited budget and then go for a bigger budget for a single day after getting your desired results.   

4. Repeat 

Finally, if everything goes according to the game plan and you get the results. So it means it’s a green signal to use the same game plan or strategy for another campaign, or even use the same platform if it can get the same results. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

Why am I not getting sales?

Clearly, there are chances that you might be going with not a proper marketing strategy, not targeting the right audience, or aren’t focusing on conversions. Checkout your competitors and their audience. Keep on testing with a limited budget until you get your desired results. How to know when you have found a winning strategy? 

When is the right time to research new paid advertising strategies? 

Well, if you want to lead the market from the top with your product. You must have knowledge of the market on a daily basis. As the world is advancing day by day, especially in the digital marketing world it’s important to go for new strategies and try new platforms. 

How to improve your paid advertising strategy? 

Just like we mentioned earlier, following steps like research, optimization and scale. Besides that, you can use conversion tools, follow your audience and retarget them. 

Conclusion

As we all know that Advertising is essential for all types of businesses, but it’s even more crucial for startups. Unless people know about your startup and what it offers, they probably won’t buy your products or services. Startups are just like scoring a “century” on a pitch. It’s a tough track from the start but if you stay strong after the end of the day you’ll find success. Just keep in mind that you should keep on experimenting and with time you will learn the trick of getting sales in no time.