Do you find it challenging to draw traffic to your website? Paid advertising offers an effective way to reach out to the right audience and you can use them alongside other marketing tactics to grow your brand. The results are easy to measure and track, so you understand precisely how they work for you and how to get the most from your ads. Another advantage of paid ads is that they work quickly so you to gain new revenue right away rather than waiting up to a year for other digital tactics to see revenue gains.
There are different platforms for running paid ads and you can choose the most suitable according to the type of products and services you offer, as well as where your target market hangs out. It’s also essential to bear in mind current trends and the online habits of your target market.
Top 9 types of paid advertising to promote your business
Search ads
Search ads are the ones that appear at the top and bottom of the Google search results pages, commonly referred to as CPC (cost per click) ads. You create these ads using the Google Ads platform. The content, headline, and keywords you use in these ads are key to their success as well as your cost per click. It’s wise to work with an agency that specializes in this type of advertising such as Unravel SEO to ensure the highest quality score, which determines where your ad places in search results in the same way SEO determines placement in organic results. An agency offers professional insights and experience to discover what will be the most effective ad strategy for the type of business you run.
Google shopping
Once you designed a high-quality website, paid ads help bring in traffic so potential customers can browse your amazing products. With Google shopping ads, you pay for your products to appear in the top section of search results before other paid ads. This way you use beautiful pictures of your products (Google Ads are text only) and pricing to entice potential customers to click on the link to your site. It’s a non-aggressive way to advertise your products as users find out a bit about them first (see below).
Discovery campaigns
Google Discovery campaigns enable you to reach your target market through a variety of platforms including YouTube and Gmail. In order to create a Discovery campaign, you provide Google with a series of images, headlines, and descriptions of your products, which Google rotates to find the most effective combinations. You can also use the new ad experience on Google to create Gmail ads separately. These appear in the Gmail inboxes of targeted consumers and users can expand them to show video content, images, and links.
YouTube ads
If you’d prefer your ad to appear in-stream on YouTube, you simply set up your ad to run that way. With YouTube ads, advertisers pay for impressions, or views in this case. It’s easier than you think to create a simple video ad that is very engaging and effective. There are different ways you can advertise on YouTube and it’s important to choose the best route for your business. Here is a complete guide to YouTube advertising.
Social media ads
You can also pay to have targeted display ads appear on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is now a collaboration of Microsoft and their ad campaigns have many new advanced features. You can target people based on their demographic and location, for example. You can learn more about them from this basic guide to LinkedIn ads.
Facebook is a popular platform for advertising because it’s the world’s largest social network. It also offers micro-targeting features allowing you to reach your most profitable niche. In a sense, you only pay to connect with the most potentially valuable customers. Here are a few tips on how to advertise on Facebook.
Influencer marketing
If you can get your brand endorsed by a respected influencer in the field this can be very lucrative indeed. Work with an influencer with a large following and a strong reputation within your target niche. Here are some examples of influencer marketing. An influencer might advertise your product by using it themselves and writing a review, for example, or recommending the product to their followers. You can reach out to influencers by offering them discounts, freebies, or by organizing a contest with incentives for the winner. Hence, influencer marketing isn’t truly advertising, in the purest sense, but you’re still paying to host your ads, so we included it here,
Display advertising
Display ads appear on Google partners and third-party websites. The standard format is an image with a short descriptive text and a link. There are many advantages of display advertising. You can choose industry-related sites for your ad to appear on, ensuring you’re reaching leads that are potentially interested in your business, for instance. These types of ads appear as a banner and their purpose is to build brand exposure. The number of people who click on the paid advertising tends to be lower as it’s a more obvious type of advertising. The brand recognition it creates, however, gives your business credibility as you appear more legitimate. Display ads are created on the Google Ads Platform.
Remarketing
Although certain business owners were dubious in the past, there are many benefits of remarketing to reach prior visitors to your site. For example, if somebody visits the website of your company, an ad then appears later on social media or relevant sites they use or in searches related to your brand, if using CPC paid advertising. Remarketing not only helps create brand awareness, but it is also considered the final step in securing a lead, as prior visitors are already interested in your brand.
Online users often get distracted before making a purchase and remarketing encourages follow through. You can also run a more specific sequential marketing campaign. In this case, your messages follow a sequence, for example, your offers increase in customer value with the passage of time since the person visited your site.
Local service ads
Local service ads are exclusive and only available to certain types of businesses. These include locksmiths, electricians, garage door businesses, or plumbing or HVAC services. These types of businesses are often reliant on location. For this reason, you can use local service ads to appear in specific local searches. These could be based on a zip code, for example. Your business will appear at the top of the search engine results pages along with the name, phone number, and a star rating based on your reviews. Here is a guide to local service ads for more information. If you offer these types of services, they could be very lucrative for you.
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