Effective Advertising Vehicles To Market Your Site
I have used various platforms to advertise my client's business websites over the years and would like to share my experiences for the benefit of people who are thinking of advertising and looking for effective vehicles to optimize their ROI.
Adwords & LinkedIn remain the biggest money spinners to date, and most effective and preferred options. Both have been around for years and are getting better & expensive with each passing year.
However, for those who are serious about taking the business to the next level, you have little choice but to consider them in your online marketing plan. Lets discuss the ones I have used in the recent past.
If you have advertised your business or professional profile on LinkedIn, you already have an idea about its traffic and conversion rates, which are not really impressive, especially for the kind of cost one is expected to incur, LinkedIn as an advertising option makes you pay through your nose.
In spite of the high cost and low turnout volume people still stick to it, and I still recommend my clients targeting B2B segment to go for it because of the quality of leads you can lap up on this platform. So for those of you (individuals or companies) looking at B2B clients, LinkedIn could prove to be your best bet.
Adwords:
Google's Adwords campaign compared to LinkedIn fetches a lot more traffic, and the conversion is also not bad at all, and spending is far lower. It works well for B2C as well as B2C websites. However, the quality of leads can't be compared to LinkedIn, especially when it comes to B2B conversions.
If what you are selling is a high end (product, service, concept), and requires the buyer to spend a bigger amount, then Adwords is not THE best option, however it can be counted amongst the best advertising options.
Another crucial aspect to fetch the best ROI with Adwords campaign is to word your ads with utmost precision. Use the most appropriate keywords and phrases, conveying the right information, and which reads well for visitors as well as spiders.
Perfect Audience
This platform also nearly works on the same lines as that of the Retargeter. Both capitalize on the user-base that you already have, both use Facebook for re-marketing you (however Perfect Audience does it at extremely affordable rate). On both the platforms you need to change the way your ads appear often to retain CTR and conversion.
However the quality of response or leads that the advertisers generated at Perfect Audience deserves a special mention. In my experience and even some of my clients found it good. If you are looking for a real cheap advertising option to reach your audience, and are willing to change ad design/ banner/button often, it's not a bad option at all.
Stumble Upon
ITs a damn cheap advertising option but I did not find the quality up to the mark, which reflects in their poor conversion. The surge of traffic that it sends your way excites you in the beginning but finally when it boils down to negligible outcome, things become clear. So, it's a good option to start sending social media traffic to your posts but beyond that, if you are trying to sell a product for a price then is something you can do without. At least I do. Without, I mean.
Retargeter
Another channel that people use is the Retargeter. It works well for people who are well networked and already have a decent user-base or fan-following. The spending is not too high, traffic is great and so are conversions. The conversion can be attributed to several factors like the frequently changing ad designs and banners; your user already follows what you offer etc.
The issues that people using this platform do not feel comfortable with are their CTR (click through rates) that shows a decline with time, and their back end settings. However it saves the advertiser a lot of hassle as they offer to optimize you ads; they take care of issues like geo-targeting, identifying the ads they would display that is again based on click through rates, day parting, which reduces advertiser's CPM costs, and improves CTR. If advertiser can manage to rotate his ads weekly on Retargeter, he can fetch a good ROI. These people sometimes go for running a marketing campaign on Facebook too.
I hope you have found this tutorial useful and the tips given here will help you decide the best option to go forward.
I have written about the ones I have used through my clients in the recent past, and have been around (besides Adwords and LinkedIn) But if you have tried others then do share your experiences with us, for the benefit of our readers.
If you need assistance or help of technical nature to market or advertise your products/ business, you can send a mail to me, if I am able to help, I definitely will.
