If you don’t understand this one simple thing about advertising your business, you’re going to lose a lot of money very quickly. And that is advertising as an accelerator, not an initiator. Meaning that advertising can take something that you already have. A good offer, a good product, a good service that’s already selling well and can help you get it in front of even more people just like your best customers.
But what advertising can’t do is take a new offer, a new idea, or a new product or service, something that hasn’t been proven yet and just magically make it sell.
Anytime you launch something new to the market, it might sell right away. After all, these are the stories that you hear that all of the Ad gurus like to shout from the mountaintops.
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These things happen but they’re the exception, not the rule. The reality is that advertising is like any other kind of marketing and your ability to succeed with ads and make serious bank comes down to just a few simple factors that we are going to cover here.
Unfortunately, most people don’t know about these things or they ignore them completely. And then just start pumping money into the ad platforms, hoping that they’ll get lucky and something will just mysteriously click.
But that’s not marketing, that’s gambling. And the odds are not in your favor, especially if you’re new to the online advertising world.
Let me explain how things work. Most online advertising is auction based and the winner of the ad auction is determined by three things.
Bid, which is what the advertiser is willing to pay to achieve a desired outcome. The better you know your numbers, the more you’re willing to pay because you can be confident that you’re going to make your money back.
Estimated action rates, which is an estimate of the probability that someone who sees the ad will engage or interact with it.
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In other words, making sure that you’re putting the right message in front of the right people through the ad platform so they don’t just block or unfollow or worse, leave the platform all together. And ad quality, which measures things like feedback from people who view or hide the ad and a bunch of other algorithms that is based quality metrics that try to only show the highest quality ads possible.
The scores from these three things are then added up and the winner is the one with the highest total value. This is why if you want your ads to work, you need to one, spend enough money to outbid your competitors, as well as make sure that you have enough budget to give your ads a sufficient time to optimize and work out any kinks.
Two, create a highly targeted and relevant ad that speaks directly to your ideal target market.
Three, make sure that your ad is interesting and enticing and valuable.
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And lastly, four, make sure that you know your numbers, like your CLV or customer lifetime value, which is going to show you how much a customer is worth to your business over their lifetime and will allow you to determine what you can and cannot afford to spend on ads.
And while obviously getting all of these things right isn’t impossible, it happens all the time, but it’s also not as easy as you may have been led to believe.
Especially today, as advertising costs have risen substantially. Tracking and the ability to pixel people with retargeting cookies has gotten progressively worse and competition is at an all time high with more than enough people willing to step in and pay whatever the ad platforms are charging.
What should you do? What’s the alternative if you want to reach more people, make more sales, and grow your business?
The solution is to use a combination approach which are paid, earned, shared and owned.
Let me break those down for you now.
Paid media is anything that you pay for. Think of advertising like banner ads and display ads and social media ads and basically anything with the word ad in it.
Advertising will always exist in the marketing world in some way, shape or form. And it’s an amazing way to accelerate your reach and get in front of new people and new audiences by just buying ads.
But there are some drawbacks. Namely, when you stop paying for ads, they stop showing them. You need to constantly keep running your ads to keep traffic coming in.
Plus, as we’ve seen, it’s getting more competitive and therefore more expensive to keep using the big players like Facebook and Instagram and Google.
Next is earned media. Earned media is made up of relationships and word of mouth and your network. This is where having a good product or service and building up goodwill in your market and investing in your brand can really pay off big.
It’s also something that’s hard to do and harder to track, which is why so many digital marketers just ignore it but don’t be one of those people. Next is shared media.
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Shared media is organic social media, as well as any partnerships or a community that you have.
Shared media is valuable, but it’s also a little bit sketchy and kind of like building your house on rented land.
And if your entire business is reliant on shared media, like say through a single social media platform, all it takes is a few tweaks and changes to the algorithm to completely wipe you out, which is why the next thing you want to focus on is owned media.
Owned media are the things that you have complete control over. These will be things like your website and your podcast and your email list.
Your goal with all of your marketing, whether it’s for yourself personally, for your clients or for your students, is to try to build up their owned media as fast and efficiently as possible.
The one thing that all of these have in common though and the main marketing strategy that experts have been using and suggesting for more than 10 years now comes down to content marketing.
Content marketing that you can use as shared media on social, earned media to get back links and interviews and other PR opportunities.
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Owned media because you can also share your content on your website and share even more specific and more valuable insights with your email list.
And finally, paid media because after creating content for a website and social and podcasts and videos and more, you get a pretty good idea of what’s going to work and what’s going to connect and what’s not.
And it changes advertising from being a risk into a calculated and strategic business decision. One that’s likely and probable to deliver a very tangible return on investment.
In other words, the money that you invest in advertising is actually going to deliver some positive results.
Shocking, I know. And that’s the secret.
You start by creating content that you think your audience would find valuable.
You then leverage the best pieces across earned and shared and owned media. And then you choose the very best from that and turn it into paid media like ads.
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And the best thing you can do to improve your content is making sure that you have a solid content marketing strategy in place.
