, , , , , , ,

Google Ads Are Great for Small Business

Google building hosting ads great for small business

It’s a misconception that the monolithic online advertising platform of Google Ads is only for large businesses. Google Ads provides a platform that is actually advantageous for small businesses to grow their reach and brand discoverability. Scalability, precise targeting, and detailed reports make Google Ads great for small business. If you’re curious how, keep reading.  

Budgeting that Scales

Scalability is one of the central reasons Google Ads is perfect for large and small businesses alike. Google Ads doesn’t require running a full marketing platform of every kind of campaign with a massive budget. Instead, small businesses can start with a single targeted campaign and expand as you determine what methods are successful. After that, it is easy to scale up and down as needed. This is great for small businesses who occasionally have product or service launches, special promotions, or more active seasonal periods. Google Ads makes it easy to run those additional campaigns at the appropriate times and scale back to more standard ads when its timely.

Pay Per Click Model is Great for Small Businesses

Google Ads run on a pay or cost per click model, i.e., a business only pays for each click on the ad. The rates for these ads are according to the search terms set for the ad. More popular key terms will have a higher fee than those searched less frequently. This is great for small businesses because they often operate in a niche, meaning their ad key terms can be more focused and cheaper. Furthermore, you will only be paying for the ads that are working, meaning an ad’s cost is directly relational to its performance.

Targeting Locality

Today, many small businesses benefit from online sales, but they still rely largely on local customers and clients. This makes Google Ads especially great for small businesses. Over 46% of Google searches are for local information. This means nearly half the searches made by those near your small business are providing ideal advertising opportunities. With Google’s Geotargeting, you can define your ads to appear specifically in searches made in the area around your business. Google’s detailed metrics even allows you to target certain demographics within those locals. Overall, Google Ads are great for increasing your business’ local presence and discoverability.

Customizability where Ads Appear

Google Ads can appear in Google searches, shopping suggestions at the top, maps, Play apps, and partner websites. This provides a small business with a wide assortment of places to put their ads. These further allow a business to target a specific demographic or potential client. For example, product-based businesses can have their products appear at the top of any search as a shopping suggestion, increasing your business’ discoverability as a shopping option.

Clear Metrics and Transparent Results for Small Businesses

Google provides thorough and clear statistics and reports for any ads and campaigns you run. These statistics will indicate which leads generate clicks, where ads are most effective, and what kind of ads people respond to. For small businesses that will be creating fewer and more targeted ads, this provides immensely valuable information for tracking performance and selecting and creating the most effective ads. Those metrics also include detailed budget tracking that is highly beneficial for small businesses. These clearly show the ROI of each ad and campaign so you can properly scale and allocate your advertising budget appropriately.

Great Feedback for Small Business SEO

Advertising tends to provide more immediate results for determining what generates clicks and visits to your business’ website than building up its search engine optimization (SEO). Smaller businesses tend to add pages slower to their websites, since they inherently have a smaller content production pipeline. This can make optimizing search engine performance a lengthier process for a small business. However, SEO is vital for the performance of your business’ website in searches and growing your brand’s discoverability. The performance metrics from Google Ads are great for a small business to determine what potential customers or clients are interested in, helping you tailor your site’s content to organically appear more often in their searches.  

Getting Started with Google Ads

Hopefully this short list of key features of Google Ads makes it clear how the platform is great for small businesses. It’s scalability, local functionality, diverse tool set, and detailed reporting make it ideal for small business advertising. Want to start growing your business’ discoverability with Google Ads? Contact Rosewood and ask about our Google Ad services to help you get you started!

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , , , , ,

Getting Results with “Calls to Action”

Typewriter which has written "call to action" on a page

If you have even only dipped your toes into online marketing, you will have come across the term “call to action” (CTA). They’re ubiquitously mentioned because of their efficacy. Calls to action display a click-through rate (CTR) of 4.23%. That’s more than double the average CTR of Google search ads at 1.91%, and more than ten times the rate of 0.35% for display ads. A single CTA in an email can improve click rates by a staggering 371% and purchases by 1617%. Including well-crafted CTAs in your digital marketing is essential, so Rosewood’s digital marketing team has put together everything you need to know about calls to action to get you results.

What is a call to action?

Calls to action are a staple of effective marketing. They are the main way to motivate and direct your potential customers and clients to complete a certain task that’s being promoted in your marketing. An ad, email, or social media post may show an enticing product, service, discount, or piece of content to pique their interest. It is the call to action’s job to then rouse someone to click and follow their curiosity. 

CTAs are found in every kind of digital marketing. They are prompts in the text of blogs, posts, and ads. They are buttons on websites and ads. Even email subject lines can have calls to action. You may have followed a call to action to reach this blog from Rosewood’s own social media and you’ll find them in this article. They are everywhere because they are an essential conversion method of digital marketing. The ability of effective CTAs to convert marketing into revenue makes them integral to increasing your marketing’s results and return on investment. 

What makes an call to action get results?

There is precision to creating an effective call to action with impressive click-through rates. Here are the staples for crafting successful CTAs that get results.

Intentional – Know the results you want

To create any call to action you need to have a clear intention, a defined goal and result for that piece of marketing. The CTA will result in a click, but it needs to be associated with another action attached to that click. It could be a specific purchase, redeeming a promotion, or contacting for information about a service. Establishing that precise goal allows you to set the impetus of the CTA and where it leads.

Directional

CTAs are meant to guide someone, and that is only possible if it provides clear direction and guidance. Most call to actions include a simple command or suggestion. Some common examples include “Read more”, “Check it out here”, “Buy now”, or “Follow the link in our bio”. All of these make it clear where they are steering a user. That direction also needs to continue beyond just the written prompt. Every call to action should be linked so that it leads to the relevant page or contact method. The last thing you want to give a viewer is the first direction and then leave them lost on your homepage wondering if they need to take the next right or left. They are more likely to just leave from confusion.

Clear and Concise

That direction should be clear and concise. Short and sweet is the standard practice. Simple commands like “read more” or “buy now” explicitly and concisely tells a user what they need to do. Providing longer or more complicated CTAs reduces clarity and clicks. 

CTAs should also be visually clear. Hyperlinked text should be visible so that it is immediately recognizable that it leads to the relevant page. Even better are button CTAs with strong colours and text. These make a call to action more visually prominent and so they have better click-through rates. The average CTR of a button call to action is more than 1% higher than average at 5.31% with the highest performance at 70%.

Personalized

As with most marketing, the most effective calls to action are personalized. These identify a person by name, their location, language, or interests. A Hubspot study of over 333,000 CTAs found that personalized ones perform 202% better. Such personalization isn’t usually possible in social media, but Google and Meta ads and email marketing can utilize user information to create personalized marketing that speaks directly to your audience.

FOMO

Calls to action are about motivation. One of the most effective motivators is the “fear of missing out” (FOMO). This is not actual fear or anxiety but an incentive. FOMO incites someone to make an action a priority rather than forgetting and not following through later. Create this excitement by indicating time sensitivity. Identify clearly there is time limit on a promotion or that stocks are limited. Pair this with a call to action that creates urgency with words like “now”, “soon”, “today”, or a phrase like “don’t miss out” to inspire that click. Avoid making every CTA evoke FOMO, or users will soon become numb to its effects. If everything is urgent, nothing is.

Restraint and Focus

Lastly, calls to action are a crucial aspect of your marketing, but practice restraint. Don’t flood every piece of marketing with multiple to try to generate clicks. CTAs turn from motivating suggestions to tedious, overwhelming commands if they are a constant stream. Every piece of marketing should stick to a clear focus. Longer pieces of marketing like emails or blogs can have multiple CTAs; however, they should still be restricted to a thematic few that fit the overall piece of content. 

Start Creating Your CTAs Now

Now you have the essentials to start crafting effective calls to action to see more directed results from your marketing. Want some assistance in creating or honing your CTAs for social media, blogs, ads, and emails? The best time to start is now. Talk about CTAs and the most productive for your business with our digital marketing team today. See? Urgency, clarity, and direction. 

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

Google + Facebook Ads: Where to Start

Fingers tapping on a tablet with technological icons floating

If you’re getting started with online advertising, the two foundations are Google and Facebook (or Meta) Ads. Google Ads allows you to have ads appear in searches and on any of Google’s services, e.g. YouTube. Meta’s ad platform lets you put ads on the two social media juggernauts: Facebook and Instagram. Naturally, ads on these two have major online coverage. This is why they hold more than 52% of total ad spending worldwide and over 64% in North America. That online advertising is essential for your business’ growth. Creating effective ads with strong leads turns into conversions and sales. Today 65% of people click on an ad before making a purchase. You’ve probably looked at and maybe even begun advertising on both. Are you wondering where to start making those ads, or maybe you aren’t seeing great conversions? Here are three important things to consider when starting any ad on Google or Meta.

Targets

All your advertising should have certain targets in mind. That doesn’t just mean a single general audience. For example, some products or services you provide may have a typically different target customer or clientele than others. Any demographic information may be important, such as gender, age group, location, etc. Certain advertising or communication tactics are going to resonate better or worse with these different groups, so you will want to tailor ads accordingly. If your business’ services are primarily for women around Aurora, ON, there is little to no tangible benefit that a man living in Vancouver, BC see your ads. Use audience segments to ensure your ads are targeting those they are most likely to convert.  

Platforms and Ad Types

Both Google and Meta provide a set of places to present your ads. Google Ads can appear in various kinds of searches such as web, shopping, or maps. They also have ads that appear in Gmail and video ads for YouTube. Meta provides a whole suite of ads, with different kinds for Facebook and Instagram. On these platforms ads can appear as stories, reels, videos, posts in timelines and feeds, etc.

To start creating impactful ads, you need to know where you plan to put ads because that will tailor what kind of leads you need to create. For example, search ads are primarily text. Google shopping promotions will be specific product listing recommendations. Instagram and Facebook promoted stories, however, are primarily visual with an image, graphic, or short video. You will want to focus effort in creating ad content that will reach its target audience on the platforms they use, especially for the Meta suite. For example, Facebook’s userbase is predominantly between the ages 25-54, while Instagram skews younger at 18-34. 

Experiment

Both Google and Facebook Ads provide an incredible amount of data and metrics for your ads’ viewership, conversion rates, and overall performance. However, those numbers will not be especially informative if you have nothing to compare to. It’s best to experiment by running at least two ads to get a sense of how they perform differently. This kind of testing will provide you with a lot of valuable information for identifying what qualities create impactful ads and resonate with customers/client. This is so essential that both Google and Meta Ads provide tools to make experimenting easy and informative.

When running multiple ads for experiments, try to minimize differences. For example, if you change copy and target demographics, and the ad performs differently, you will be left wondering if it was because of the copy, its target, or both. One effective method of testing is to split a similar audience into two segments that each see different versions of the ad (otherwise known as A/B testing). This should provide an informative comparison for discovering what kind of ads best capture and convert.

Once You Start Making Ads, Never Stop

Creating ads on Google and Meta or Facebook is a continuous process. They should be repeatedly updated and/or changed to reflect your business and home in on the developing interests of your own changing audience. Once you start making ads, you shouldn’t stop or settle. Keep targeting, identifying the right platforms and ad types, and experimenting. Remember, if a certain ad doesn’t do as well, that can be just as informative as one that transcends. If you’re looking for help to start your Google or Facebook Ads, Rosewood’s marketing team are virtuosos. They can help you create and improve your ads and identify and interpret key metrics

/0 Comments/by