Moving into the online advertising space can be great for your company, but you shouldn't be going in blind. That's why we asked 13 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:
Q. "I am new to online advertising but would like to begin. Where do I start?"
1. Pixel Everybody
The first thing you should do is add a retargeting pixel on your site even if you are not ready to start your advertising for a few months. This will allow you to target the right folks from the beginning, as these people expressed interest in your product/service. This will also lower your cost-per-click for acquisition. – Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster
2. Study Someone Successful in Your Field
Our head of paid advertising, Scott Trench, is going through this learning process right now. He suggests studying someone successful in your field. Search for a similar product in Google. Click on their ad. Go through the entire process and see how they sell. Then decide where you can outdo them, what parts of their funnels are weakest, and what you should adopt as part of your own strategy. – Joshua Dorkin, BiggerPockets
3. Start With High-Quality Content
Before you start looking at PPC, social media, or any sort of distribution, think first about what your potential customers are going to be interacting with on your site. Focus on creating awesome on-site content first, then focus on great gated content to capture leads. And lastly, begin publishing to online publications to draw in qualified leads that will engage with your on-site content. – Kelsey Meyer, Influence & Co.
4. Build a Simple Landing Page
When starting out, building a simple, one-page landing page to direct all your traffic. This will ensure that the important information about your offering is shown, without risking the customer getting lost in your main website and potentially bouncing. Add a call to action at the bottom, and see interested leads come through instantly. – Jürgen Himmelmann, The Global Work & Travel Co.
5. Start With Analytics
Before developing an online strategy, know where you are starting from. Dive deep into your site analytics and determine who is coming to your site now, what they are viewing, and how long they stay. After you know where you are currently, you can develop goals and craft a strategy to meet those goals. Your goals will determine which online outlet/content strategy is right for you. – Angela Harless, AcrobatAnt
6. Create an Amazing User Experience
First and foremost, make sure your customers are going to a user-friendly site. Once you have that in place, you can start sending customers to your site. You'd be surprised at the difference a good user experience can contribute to your overall profitability. – Elliot Bohm, Cardcash.com
7. Invest in a Good PPC Campaign
Figure out your target market and then look into how you can easily find them online. Once you know where your demographic will be, only pay for pay-per-click campaigns. That way, you'll have tangible results and only have to pay for interested parties. A non-targeted advertising campaign is simply a waste of money. – Josh York, GYMGUYZ
8. Build a Mailing List
A mailing list, which can also be called an opt-in list or newsletter, is a way to build up a list of subscribers whom you can reach out to whenever you want. While other advertising methods can be profitable, it's good to work on growing your mailing list along with other tactics you are using. With a list, you can send out promotions for free (or at very little cost) at any time. – Shawn Porat, Fortune Cookie Advertising
9. Implement Drip Emails
If your company has a user on-boarding process on your website, then implementing drip emails would be a great way to start. By defining member behaviors, time of registration, and data-driven patterns, you can set automatic emails that are personalized and designed to influence your members to convert. This is a strong form of internal online advertising which is cheap and will provide results. – Dalip Jaggi, Devise Interactive
10. Do a Competitive Analysis
Before you start paying for online ads, take some time to do a competitive analysis using resources like Alexa.com or Quantcast. Look to businesses in your field with similar resources and audiences, and determine both their successful advertising strategies and their misses. This will help paint a picture of the paid ads of your competitors, and will ramp up your expertise of web advertising. – Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.
11. Test and Measure
There are many ad platforms, so it’s important to test and measure. Start by picking a few platforms where you think your target market is most active. Familiarize yourself with all the options for targeting your audience. The more targeted your ad, the more conversions you will see. The key is to set a budget, test different platforms with different ads, and see which ones perform best. – Justin Beegel, Infographic World, Inc.
12. Connect Your Online Media Platforms
Connect every part of your online presence (Twitter, website, Facebook, blog, analytics, AdWords, etc.). Make it easy for users to jump from one platform to another; this will spread your traffic out across platforms. Set it up before creating a PPC campaign to get the most bang for your buck. – Andrew Namminga, Andesign
13. Get Comfortable With Testing Models
Many people jump into online advertising by evaluating tools -- I recommend a very different approach. You need to first become comfortable with models and assumptions. Build a model (i.e., X visitors times Y conversions times Z dollars equals something). Once you have your model in place, you can then test multiple tools to see which yield the best results based on your assumptions. – Adam Roozen, Echidna, Inc.
