Banner for online promotional campaign.

How to make your promotion more effective …

[feature_block style=”icon” overall_style=”icon” columns=”1″ icon_style=”2″ content_font_style=”bold”][feature title=”” icon=”Content-Management.png” upload_icon=”” bg_color=”” href=””]Plan a CAMPAIGN that coordinates an offer with ads and follow-up. With any online campaign, the ideal scene to create is a flow of people moving from the first step to the next step and on, until they get to the end.

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  1. Work out the offer.
  2. Plan the flow ( from the ad, to a landing page to sending an email ).
  3. Structure the ads.

An offer

The central idea behind an advertising campaign is an offer. OFFER people something that they’d like and that doesn’t involve any risk.

If you’re promoting to new people who don’t know you then the risk has to be very low and the offer should be for free or very low price.

You can find out the sorts of things that your customers would like by asking them, or by running through this checklist that you can download here …

https://spellboundweb.com/lp1-online-research-plan

The flow

The flow usually starts when people click on an that ad you’re running. The ad should click through to a page that has the offer. It can be on a page on a business website, a directory listing, Facebook or Linked In page etc.

The aim is for the prospects to take up the offer and provide their contact details, buy something, share the page or whatever it is you’d like them to do.

It helps a lot to plan out your campaign ( preferably as a flowchart ) like this …

demo_funnel

Ads

Whether the ad’s being run in google search, or on Facebook or any other search network, it helps A LOT to run several variations simultaneously. After a couple of days, select the variation that does best and and turn off the others.

I like to create a grid in a spreadsheet like this …

There can be 2 or 3 different copy angles and several different types of person / audience – in the spreadsheet above its office mangers, CEOs and small business owners.

Then in Google Search Ads, it translates to an Adgroup for each audience and 3 ads in each Adgroup – one for each copy angle. In Facebook each Adset targets a different audience and the ads vary the copy.

Here’s how an ad campaign looks in Google Ads …

Two other points that get better results …

  1. In Google, run an ad either the  search network, or the display network . Not both at the same time.
  2. Focus the ad on benefits. You can use a callout in the headline, but make sure you define the problem and benefits of your solution.

Here’s a good write-up of best performing ads in 2018 …

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/06/06/best-ads

3 things to avoid …

Too many calls to action

Getting people to move in a particular direction involves removing the distractions – additional links to click on, other messages and calls-to-action than the main one.

Example 1: An Adwords ad sends people to the Home page of a website. A Home page is nearly always a compilation of all the services or products of a company, and full of links that take people to other pages. It doesn’t ask people to take the next step in a specific campaign.

Example 2: A newsletter email is sent out to a company’s email list and it has sections, each one about different things for the customer to do and no main special or deal.

No follow-through

An online campaign needs to have a goal and move people along towards the goal.

Example: An email sends people to a page to get something. They get it and go to a thank you page and that’s it. There are no additional offers or follow-up emails. If they download something, there’s no next step after that.

Risks

People don’t like taking risks.

If someone’s known you for a a while, you can usually ask them to do things, give you info, pay money etc. without too much trouble. Even so, reducing the risk will get you more sales.

But with people who don’t know you, if you ask them for too much information up-front, they leave fast. So don’t send new people to a form asking for name, email, phone, address, message etc, because you’ll lose most of them right there. I only ask for an email address.

If they’re spending money, there needs to be a guarantee that they can get it back if something goes wrong, or that they’re not committed and can pull out of something later.