Taking your business online is very easy. If using social media advertising, for instance, you only need to create a Facebook page or Twitter profile. What takes the cookie is ensuring that the Facebook page or Twitter profile so created adds value to your business.
Thanks to paid advertising, you can easily achieve this. Some businesses have specialized in using paid advertising tools like Google AdWords to boost their traffic and leads. Though the paid services are very instrumental in a business’s growth, they also have their shortcomings. Below are some challenges you must learn how to navigate so you use these platforms flawlessly.
1. Lack of Retargeting and Tracking
To have effective marketing, you not only need to sell products but also memories. For those running a business, retargeting is very important and this can be done with the aid of social media platforms; remember you can buy Spotify plays if you are just starting. As Mike Markhula would say, ‘customers don’t just buy products, they buy experiences as well. ‘In the life cycle of products, there are innovators, early adopters, late adopters, and laggards. Guess who is the majority?Â
Most of the buyers are late adopters. So if the product is only advertised once, it will not have late adopters who are very critical in increasing sales. As such, ensure that you remarket your paid advertising so that they show up in all places through the internet. There are tools like Google display network that are just made for that. They help people to navigate to other places.
Apple has even made it difficult for advertisers due to the recent introduction of Opt-in prompt for apps. These pop-ups are for individual apps thus users have to consent to track their activities. How will marketers get access to users’ data? How will they track the impact of advertising on their businesses? Most users tend to deny access to their data. Marketers and designers should come together and decide on how they can encourage online marketing while giving the users control over their data at the same time. But how will this be solved? The impact of this is yet to be seen in the years to come.
2. Having realistic goals
Having a direction is more important than moving forward. You could be moving forward but in the wrong direction. Before having a paid advertisement campaign, you want to have specific goals that are relevant to your business. A goal should be measurable and should have a deadline as well. Moreover, don’t go for perfection. Don’t invest too much in coming up with the ad. In the early 1980s, Apple was the company to watch. It was just a young company but it was steering to new heights. This was the case until they caught up with perfection. When designing Macintosh, they invested so much not knowing how the customers would react to the product. They expected more than a million sales within the first two months.
After launching the product, they couldn’t believe their revenues. They only made a million sales within the first six months. Their revenue was reduced, they couldn’t counter the production cost and this led to internal conflicts within different departments. This ended with Steve jobs leaving the company. Apple bleed from this one mistake and it took them eleven years to stage a comeback. You don’t want your product to be the next Macintosh. Don’t allow Perfection to catch up with you.
3. Determining the KIPs
What sets successful people from the unsuccessful ones? They both have goals, they both track their performance, but why do some succeed while others are not. Having goals without plans and mechanisms of achieving them is like doing nothing.
Moreover, systems of achieving them aren’t enough, you want to have key indicators of the impact of your paid ads. Some of these metrics include the number of clicks, impressions, and conversions. If your ads have great viewership but no traffic, you want to analyze and model the ads so that you can have increased conversion rates. Moreover, do the ads change the impressions of the target positively or negatively?
4. Managing the budget
Every business aims at minimizing the cost and optimizing the profits. Advertising is one of such costs. You want to be very keen on how you allocate your budgeting across the advertising platforms. How much should you allocate for pay per click? How frequently should the ads appear?
This is time-consuming and might not allow the completion of other projects. Even so, a PPC can do it. But what if it’s not included in the budget. That is why budgeting is very key in advertising. Before diving into it, ensure that you have your budget together with miscellaneous expensesÂ
5. Increased competition
Paid adverts are increasingly becoming a popular platform. Most companies, even startups have business profiles. What is the effect of this? To paint a picture, think of personal selling.
There are so many persons selling different products that no one gives them time to market their goods. This has become the case with paid ads. There is so many business such that the audience doesn’t want to give a minute to the ads. Moreover, increased competition has led to an increase in the cost of advertising. Since many businesses get into the online platforms every year, search engines have control over the charges incurred and they adjust them as they so wish.
6. Choosing platforms
Social adverting makes all the difference in conversion rates and leads. Your dollars are not fully used if you are using a platform where the target doesn’t spend most of their time in. That’s why it’s important to take your time and know your audience before launching into advertising. Even more than knowing where your audience spends most of their time, know their intent there. With this, you will easily select a platform that will give you the best returns.
To have a positive experience with paid ads, your business must familiarize itself with this challenges and come up with preemptive measures of dealing with them. Have you had a PPC? PPC understands how different advertising platforms work.Â