We have excellent news: you don’t have to be an online advertising ninja to promote your business! The simplest and still the most popular form of online advertising are banners, which you buy at a website, paying per a defined number of hits. But the online market is not limited to just so-called display advertising. It is much more extensive. It offers wide possibilities we could only dream of just a few years ago. It is worthwhile mentioning that some of them are really not very complicated.
Display advertising is not a solution that will work for each sector. You should know that an average click-through rate for banners is only 0.05 to 0.4%. The number of views of your banner can be very high (e.g. 100 thousand hits) for a decent price.
So if you’re planning to build the image, it is worthwhile to think about a banner campaign on local portals. But if you want to support the online sales of language courses, try such advertising forms that allow for precise reaching out to your target group.
There are several straightforward systems you should test.
Google AdWords
- Simple text advertising, which is displayed next to Google search results. Its pros certainly include precision and very accurate adjustment to the needs of Internet users.
- Let’s say someone inputs in Google an enquiry “Italian classes London”; if you purchased an ad for a given phrase, your ad will be displayed as: “Italian language school in London”. Demographic profile, location and age of Internet users don’t matter.
- What matters is that at a given time they use Google search engine to look for the course you offer. Google AdWords has very low entry barrier – a test campaign can be launched for just about fifty zlotys per month; if you spend about five hundred zlotys, you can run an effective local campaign.
- Among cons is the complicated system of ads valuation; particularly in the case of bigger campaigns for a large number of phrases you may need help from professionals.
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Check out: Let your clients find you on Google – a short SEO story |
Facebook Ads
- or advertising on Facebook.
- It allows for use of graphics, but its genuine power lies in the possibility to display it to a very specific auditorium.
- When completing their profile, Facebook users provide quite precise data about themselves (age, sex, place of residence, work or school), and then they themselves click on the websites they like.
- This lets you make a campaign promoting a language school targeted at persons aged 18-24 who liked such profiles as for example “British Council”, “English learning” and “English idioms”.
- Just as is the case of Google AdWords, the entry barrier is very low – even about fifty zlotys are enough to start a campaign.
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Check out: Webinar – Recording: Boost your revenue with Facebook |
- power of the service lies in its very high credibility.
- Because it is a service for job-seeking professionals, users’ profiles are extremely reliable – the users want to build a credible image of themselves for other service users.
- This provides incredible opportunities to advertise courses – for example “German for medical doctors” can be advertised to persons who graduate from medical universities or to members of specific discussion groups.
- If we offer courses for companies, we can display the offer to people in specific job positions, for example in HR departments, who most frequently make decisions on the purchase of such services.
- It is good to remember that advertising at the LinkedIn portal is quite thoroughly verified before it can start. If you are short of time (for example the course starts in w week or two) – you’d better give up on this channels because you are likely to have to wait even a week before advertising actions are launched.
- In the past, the entry barrier used to be very high (at least a few thousand euros), but today you can start a campaign even with about 10 euros a day.
How to strengthen the effectiveness of the performed advertising campaigns?
The answer is remarketing, that is displaying ads to persons who already visited your website but made no purchase. Given today’s wealth of offers available in the marketplace, it happens very rarely that an online user visits a website and makes an immediate purchase. They usually become familiar with the website’s content and go on to learn what competition offers or become concerned with something else.
An online user viewed your offer of Russian language courses but did not sign up for them? Make them a proposal: “You still don’t know if you should sign up for a Russian course? Use the promotional code XYZ now, and get a 5% discount. Don’t hesitate!”.
Making of such precise offers is enabled by dynamic remarketing, which helps incorporate in ads those products or services that users viewed at your website. Of course, it is much complicated to configure such campaign, but the effectiveness is much greater. You can use remarketing in all described systems: AdWords, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn.
Have you already used such types of advertising campaigns?
What have you found difficult?
Were you satisfied with effectiveness?
Share your experiences in the comments 🙂