For marketers everywhere, the question asked when considering advertising a website is, “how much can we afford to spend?”
Marcus Andrews of Hubspot writes that this is the wrong question to ask. Instead, he says entrepreneurs should be asking, “for every dollar I spend, how much will I get back?”
While this can seem immeasurable at first, you will find that web marketing is not only effective in producing leads and business but as well as the charts and graphs to track it better than a standard bookkeeper could. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads both record page views, site clicks, and any level of customer interaction the advertisement produced that a human is unable to, because of security.
Here are four effective and affordable ways to advertise on the web – with your budget, your way.
Google AdWords/PPC:
(PPC) Pay per click and Google AdWords both use ads on a search engine to redirect traffic from any user’s search and back to your site. The idea is to set a budget, as little as 10 cents a click, and pay each time your site is accessed via that ad. The price is fixed, and the ad appears by targeting specific customers. This occurs by using keywords, so that the ad only appears when the customer is searching a product or service with the same tagged words as your ad.
Blogging:
Writing unique articles on subjects related to your business boosts SEO and shows credibility. (Let’s face it, half of the “research” that occurs nowadays are secondary-source articles, right?) Well-written, and especially expertly-titled blog posts are the most likely to get site views if a user has any interest in reading it. There’s actually a bit of psychology and rhetoric behind this. For example, check out Buzzfeed. They publish anywhere from 20-50 articles a day, and upon reading their headlines, none of them look uninteresting. Many of them are eye-catching, using bold and confident language, phrased in such a way that can be comprehended without second glance, yet still leaving room for intrigue. Hubspot shares their wisdom of generating catchy titles in their article, here.
Facebook Ads:
The average Facebook user spends over 8 hours a month using it. No wonder the ROI (return on investment) is known to be so high! Similar to AdWords, Facebook Ads allows you to run an advertisement for a certain period of time at a minimum of $5 a day (and boost posts at only $1 a day). You create a demographic for the ad to appear on those particular newsfeeds. This demographic can be built based on gender, language, location, interests, hobbies, occupation, and more. This avenue is helpful because by setting the time frame you will know exactly how much money, to the cent, that you will be spending.
Retargeting:
Retargeting ads are a way to reel a potential customer back into your site. They use a tracking cookie on a visitors computer, so that when they leave your site, they see your ad appear again to get them to go back. These can be a powerful asset if your site has a high bounce rate or fast click-back time. If the whole goal is to generate new customers, then why give up on losing them so quickly?
Most of these forms of marketing are proven to have a high ROI and can be adjusted to fit your budget. Once you discover which work the best for your company, you can modify the costs to ensure the highest possible return rate.
