When and How to Use Online Advertising to Amplify Your Marketing

“If you build it, they will come.” It’s a great movie quote, but not the best marketing advice. 

The truth is you can’t simply open your business and expect customers to come rushing to you. To attract customers, you need marketing and, even more importantly, investing in advertising that amplifies your marketing efforts. 

What’s the Difference Between Advertising and Marketing? 

It’s common to confuse the terms advertising and marketing. Both are often tossed into the same bucket and seen as one and the same. But, there is a clear difference between the two. 

Advertising is one component of a larger marketing strategy. It specifically refers to the tactics used to make customers aware of a business, product, or service. Advertising involves paying a third-party media or channel to promote your brand to their audience. Advertising exists in many forms, from traditional outlets (TV ads, newspaper ads, billboards, etc.) to digital platforms (display ads, search ads, social media ads, etc.). 

Marketing refers to the overall strategy and tactics used to promote a business, product, or service. It is an umbrella term used to refer to market research, brand positioning, audience segmentation and behavior analysis, and all of the marketing tactics in between (website design, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, etc.). You can have marketing without advertising. But you shouldn’t advertise without a solid marketing strategy. You’ll most certainly waste money that way.   

Related: What Is Marketing, Anyway?

When To Buy Advertising 

Now that you know the difference between marketing and advertising, let’s look at how you can tell when it’s time to bring advertising into your marketing efforts. 

Here are a few times when online advertising can support your overall marketing strategy. 

When your brand is new.  When launching a new business, product, or service, you need to build initial awareness. Advertising can help you introduce your brand promise, a new offering, create demand, and build momentum. 

To compliment organic SEO. Content marketing and SEO takes time. If you are working on building an organic content marketing and SEO strategy, you can use search ads to drive online traffic and lead generation in the meantime. 

Related: SEO & SEM - One, both or neither?

When you have offers or messaging you want to test. The best way to know if an audience is going to respond to a message or offer is by putting it in front of them and seeing how they react. Advertising can help you quickly gather data about audience interest and preferences by showing the new offer or message with A/B tests on headlines, imagery, call to action, and more to a large audience in a short amount of time.  

When you want to generate leads. If you don’t have an existing lead or customer list, advertising is a great way to build your database and monitor conversion to customers. Running ads to a lead magnet or offer can be an effective way to grow your lead list and warm up cold audiences or attract in-market buyers. 

When your competitors are. Competitor research can show you how much brands like yours are investing in advertising. If you find that competitors are investing in ads, you can benefit from matching or exceeding their spend to stand out above them. 

When you want to stay top-of-mind. Even loyal customers need a reminder about your brand. Online advertising like remarketing or list matching are great ways to keep your brand in front of audiences you already know something about. When your brand is top-of-mind, customers will be more likely to turn to your business when they need the products and services you offer. 

When you know something is working. Advertising amplifies your efforts. It maximizes reach to increase results. If you’re confident you found a sweet spot for market demand, a working message and fulfillment process that is working on a small scale (audiences are responding to your message), use advertising to promote the messaging to even more people. 

How to Use Advertising 

Not all advertising is equally valuable and useful. Use these best practices to get the highest return on investment for each of your campaigns. 

Tie your advertising efforts to your marketing goals. Advertising can be an effective tactic in your marketing strategy -- but only if it is directly tied to your goals. Don’t launch ads simply because you think you should. First, outline your goals and then only use advertising if it helps you achieve measurable growth for awareness, leads, revenue, and retention or to test something new.  

Consider your audience and where they spend their time. Display ads are most effective when placed on platforms where your audience is likely to see them. Before you launch ads, take time to work on or review your buyer personas. Identify the platforms your audience is most likely to use, and create plans to target your audiences appropriately.

Combine multiple ad strategies. Don’t take a singular approach to digital advertising. Invest in PPC and paid social at the same time, and leverage the variety of options on Google advertising. Getting your message in front of the same audience on different platforms increases frequency to establish deeper brand awareness and motivate audiences to act. Consider layering in digital outdoor, streaming media, mobile advertising to test and find just the right combo for your targeted audience.

Assign negative keywords in search marketing campaigns. When you run PPC search campaigns, you target terms that customers are likely to search for when looking for a brand like you. Keep in mind that the terms Google suggests will not always be aligned with your offerings. Go through the list of suggested search terms and assign “negative keywords.” Negative keywords are phrases that are similar in syntax but not related to your offering. Remove these terms to keep your budget focused on the keywords most likely to convert. Example: Bidding on “tampa agency” may get us the wrong audiences that may click on our ad but could be looking for an insurance agency. 

Don’t spend a lot of money bidding on branded keywords in search marketing. Focus more on targeting terms your customers search for than on targeting your branded keywords. Generic keywords are more likely to reach a new audience and build your customer base. Audiences searching for your brand name already know you, so aim for reaching new potential buyers. The only time to bid on a brand term is if a competitor is bidding on your branded terms and you need to preserve the search result of your brand or your brand is a common term that wouldn’t organically rank at the top of the page.

Send ad traffic to relevant landing pages instead of your homepage. Traffic from ads will convert better if sent to a strategic landing page rather than a website homepage. Create custom landing pages that closely match ad copy to keep audiences on a direct path to conversion. Also, design pages with clear call-to-actions, conversion points, and tracking to improve the effectiveness of each landing page. Good landing pages also increase your quality score that online advertising platforms recognize.

Test more than one offer and message. Instead of running one ad with one message, run at least two versions of an ad. When you A/B test ads with different copy and messaging, you can see which ad performs better. When you identify the higher-performing ad, amplify that ad and consider testing another variation to see if you can develop something that performs even better. 

Review your results and adjust based on what you learn. To get the best results from your paid advertising, you need a process for reviewing results and making new plans based on what you learn. Consider which tactics worked and repeat them. Consider what didn’t work and what adjustments can make the ads produce better results. 

Related: Marketing Analytics 101: How To Use Data To Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Use Digital Advertising to Amplify Your Marketing 

“If you build it, they won’t come unless you tell them to.” That is a more appropriate statement when it comes to marketing. 

Audiences and customers won’t flock to you unless they know about you. To get them to know about you, you need to use strategic advertising efforts to amplify your other marketing efforts. As always iterate, iterate, iterate. Good advertising is never a start it and see what happens tactic. 

If you are getting sluggish results from your marketing, you may have an advertising problem. Let’s talk and see how SpotOn can help you identify ways to use paid advertising to get your message out and attract more customers. Contact us today to get started.