In a world where organic growth can feel elusive, the importance of online advertising cannot be overstated.  Advertising online offers B2B marketers an effective shortcut to reaching their target audience, increasing brand awareness and making sales.

However, if you’re new to digital advertising, getting started can feel overwhelming. 

Your organisation has a finite amount of resources. So, how do you know where to focus them so your online advertising budget will serve you best? Do you focus on Google ads or advertising on social media platforms? Just what is programmatic advertising and how does it work? What is the relationship between SEO and SEM? Do you need to worry about the loss of third-party cookies and click fraud?

There’s a lot to think about. However, you don’t have to be a PPC expert to know one simple fact. Advertising works. It always has, and it will continue to prove its worth with the right strategy and tactics in place. 

Online advertising is not a set-and-forget activity. It requires active and attentive management of your campaigns if they are to deliver worthwhile results. In this article, we’re going to look at six key areas of best practice where your focus can help to unlock the opportunities presented by online advertising. 

1. Creative

Have you considered how your customers experience your advertising? As a central pillar of your digital marketing strategy, you need to adopt this mindset.

Challenge your own promotional mindset and put your customers’ needs front and central. Focus on delivering relevant, customer centric ads to improve the overall advertising experience. 

Focus on your Customer

When advertising, it is easy to forget to put the customer’s experience first. However, that is precisely what you need to do for your advertising to connect effectively. 

Use current customer data to guide your ad targeting, copy, and creative. Using the data you’ve built up puts you in touch with more people who are like those you know buy and benefit from your services. 

This data could include demographics, firmographics, or interests and behavioural data. Depending on the ad platforms’ capabilities, you’re able to target audiences using a range of personal and organisational characteristics. 

You can target lookalike audiences that match the characteristics of your buyer personas and ideal customers. You can retarget prospects who have visited your website and interacted with you online. When you know your audience’s interests and needs, you can also display ads using contextual advertising.

Think Value

Millions of ads are served every day. To earn your audience’s attention, your ad must showcase its value immediately. Interruptive ads and overly promotional messaging will be closed, ignored, or turned into spam.

Ensure your advertising is about your customer, not about you. Make sure to speak to your customers’ needs. The ad creative should not be focused on the company, but on what the customer gets from using the product or service. Focus on customer benefits, aspirations, and inspirations. 

Consider testing your campaign copy and slogans with user focus groups to make sure they make sense to your target audience. Your message should be clear and easy for your customer to understand.

Create an Experience

Advertising online has a bit of a bad name. Many consumers’ experience it as disruptive to their online experience. Online advertisements pop up on screen interrupting the flow of regular content on their screens, stealing their attention from what they wanted to be focused on.

Be different and be better. Create advertising that seeks to become an integral part of your customer’s experience. This is true of both format and content.

Your ads should be native to both the platform and ad placement. Native advertising, or sponsored content, should be created to blend into a user's platform experience. This is especially important on social media platforms.

Take, for example, story ads on Instagram that appear between user generated stories. In this context, you want to use vertical videos that cover the entire screen rather than static or text heavy images. 

Pay attention to the sort of organic content your target audience is consuming and creating. This will allow you to create advertising that conforms to the standards of the placement you’ve chosen and the audience you want to connect with.

Your advertising is also often a prospect’s first experience of your organisation, and an entry point to other aspects of your digital marketing. That first click is what leads people into your content. 

Therefore, ads not only need to be consistent with your brand’s look and feel. They need to be part of a congruent series of events. Think about what the customer will see once they click your ad. Does the landing page or article match the ad they have clicked or is the experience jarring? 

Experiment 

An experimental mindset allows you to find out what resonates with your specific audience. There are so many different ad channels and ad formats available to choose from across platforms. A willingness to try new things to see what works is vital for a successful advertising strategy. 

Pay attention to the performance of different ad sets on each platform. Whether you’re running Google search ads, display advertising, or Facebook ads, the platform will optimise your campaign to the ads your target audience responds to. 

Use feedback data from each platform and pay attention to what ad types, copy, and creative is working. Optimise your efforts based on what your audience is responding to.  Create variations on your top-performing ads to create more of what your audience wants to see. 

Use also use a/b testing to help you understand how your ads perform when using different variables like creativity, placement, and audience targeting. In this way, you can formulate and prove specific hypotheses to continuously improve your campaigns. 

2. Build Your Own Platform

Set your company up for success. Own your audience. 

When your customer data is walled up on secondary platforms, like Google and Facebook, you have limited opportunities to use it. You could also lose that data. People often refer to an over-dependence on social channels as ‘building on rented land’. It’s usually necessary, but not sufficient for long-term risk management and success.

Build a bridge from your advertising and invite customers into your own logged-in service. Collect first-party data and first-party identifiers, such as email. By owning your data in its entirety, you own and can shape your customer experience. 

Create multiple opportunities for your prospects to enter into your company, and diversify your advertising entry points. 

How Does an Owned Platform Work? 

Take Adobe Creative Cloud as an example. Their platform allows for a self-led customer journey, creating an excellent customer experience and data collection system. Users can explore products, sign up for services, get support, log in to a console, complete product learning, and access downloadable content. 

This connects the user with the company and external resources, creating a positive feedback loop. Adobe’s users educate the organisation on how to best serve them . 

While you would expect this of a large corporation, technology makes it more than possible for SMEs to emulate Adobe’s success. Whether you create a simple online booking system, gated content, or client portals and onboarding workflows; you can build in interactivity that allows you to own your data.

3. Targeting your Audience

With the removal of cookies, marketers need to find new ways to create effective targeting. The data you own, and that tells you a story about your customer, is key. 

We’ve already spoken about how your advertising should speak to your audience creatively. You also need to think in terms of cohort-based advertising and contextual advertising.

What is Contextual Advertising?

Contextual advertising allows you to target your audience based on the context of the site they are viewing. Advertisers create ads that appear on websites or media that relate to the interests and needs of their target audience. It is commonly paired with display advertising. 

What is Cohort-Based Advertising? 

Cohort-based marketing targets anonymised groups of people based on common interests and online behaviours.

Honing Your Audience 

Create your ads and use your campaign results to refine your target audiences for future campaigns. Knowing who to exclude, and using platforms’ targeting options so your ads don’t appear to them, is key to maximising your campaign effectiveness. 

For example, if you run ads to extend your brand’s reach, you might wish to exclude people who already follow or are actively interacting with your brand on social media. 

4. Keyword Management

Pay attention to and actively manage your keywords. Platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads require deep data analysis to properly manage them. 

Poor keyword management can cost you money. It also lessens your overall brand experience. A customer expects their keyword search on Google to be highly relevant and accurate. General ads are often ignored. 

Understand the markers for an underperforming keyword. Focus on the quality score of your pay-per-click ads. The score covers the ad copy, the landing page, and the relevance of the keyword to the experience. Google prefers people to see good ads, so the quality score is factored into the bidding process. High quality ads have a bidding advantage and are more cost-efficient than low quality ones.

Using the data available, your team needs to focus on refining and narrowing keywords to improve performance. 

As with audience targeting, remember to use negative keywords to sculpt your campaign. Proper campaign management is about knowing who should see your ad and understanding and removing those who shouldn't see your ad. Negative keywords can also help remove click fraud and increase performance. 

5. Budget Management

The budget is one of the most important parts of your advertising campaign. A budget should be broken down by channel, platform, campaign, and even ad type. 

Know what your customer costs to acquire and break down what each lead on each platform costs. Use your CRM or marketing automation platform to help you connect leads to sales. 

Many platforms have built-in tracking systems. Google Ads has a phone call report that allows you to view missed and accepted calls. Each call is associated with its number or area code. Connecting inputs like this will strengthen your ability to break down your budget. 

Some platforms will recommend budget and campaign changes. Listen to what they are suggesting and shift spending towards high-performing output. It is more important to have high performance in advertising than it is to be on every channel. Let channels go if they are underperforming based on your goals. 

Take the time to set up conversion actions. Place a monetary price on each action. Target conversions on valuable actions like sale completion. Be wary of using vague conversions like website clicks. This will not give you the full picture. 

A Word on Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is the process of purchasing ads on an automated bidding system. Companies can sign up with an ad seller to automate the process of ad buying, but it shouldn’t be seen as a set it and forget it solution. 

The problem with large ad purchases is the resources required to properly manage a good programmatic advertising strategy. If you are unsure about what you are doing, it may be worth looking into a 3rd party ad manager.

We have a guide to help you through programmatic advertising. 

6. Ad placement

Ad placement is all about where your ads show up and how they show up. The site your ad appears on is as important as how it looks. Is your placement relevant and capable of reaching the right audience?

Google Ads allows you to set location targeting on your banner ads to ensure your ads are shown on the right sites for your customers. You can also turn off sites in the ad network that do not match your brand values. Some common exclusions are x-rated sites, alcohol, gambling, and violence-based sites. If there is something you do not want your brand associated with, it is best to make sure you are actively managing these exclusions. 

Be firm in excluding low-quality or off-brand websites. This simple tactic can help you decrease click fraud. 

Don’t forget to test your ads. Check the search engine results pages (SERP) and make sure your ads look the way you want them to. Use the platform's review and diagnostic sections. Your ads should look good and be sized accurately. 

Check out our article on how to make your Google Ads a better customer experience. 

Finally, don’t be afraid to test alternative channels. Follow your audience. If you can make TikTok ads work for your business, do it. You can also test avenues like podcast and event sponsorship.

Using an Agency to Manage Your Online Advertising

Online advertising is effective when it is actively and expertly managed. Advertising online requires attention to detail and you shouldn't simply allow it to run without monitoring. Ad campaigns can and will spend the budget you give them. Make sure you are actively managing your campaigns and controlling your spending.

While uncertainties and controversies around online advertising might cause you to be cautious, a robust approach to all aspects of campaign management will help.

If you lack the resources or knowledge in-house, a third-party agency can help to ensure your campaigns perform optimally. There are many online advertising companies, including ourselves. Choose a trusted partner to guide you through your marketing efforts. 

Making Your Online Advertising Bulletproof

So, should you be advertising online? Absolutely. Advertising works. However, there’s a lot to think about. You need to go into the process with an open mind and a willingness to experiment to find what works. You may find you have to work a little harder than the ad platforms let on to get to the right output.

As well as being highly attentive and active in campaign management, your paid advertising should be rooted in creating an excellent experience for your customer. Don’t be guilty of allowing a promotional mindset to overshadow the customer in the process. 

If you don’t have the resources or the know-how, or you’d just like to have a conversation with someone about digital advertising, get in touch. We’d love to help you to explore your opportunities.