Here at Highforge, we live for making big wins for clients, which usually means new qualified leads, website traffic, and direct revenue. Advertising is almost always a part of the play, and our digital advertising tool chest includes Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linked In Ads. In our initial meetings with clients, they’re often uncertain as to which ad platform is the best choice for finding their ideal customers, so we’d like to shed a bit of light on the matter
All About Those Leads
When we get new clients coming to us, generally, they all want the same thing. They want more leads. But the reality is, every client is starting from a different place in the race. Some of them have all their ducks in a row, with a killer website, brand, and messaging guidelines, and they know exactly what demographics to pick. They know their message and who they’re talking to. That makes our job easy. But the majority of our small and medium business clients don’t already have that kind of data and developed brand positioning. They just want more leads, and they need help figuring out how to do that. The reality is there’s no way to guarantee out of the gate that you’re going to get the results that you’re looking for.
Market Testing
The solution is to position those types of accounts as something called a market test. When we’re market testing together as a collaboration, the job we have is to find out how to generate leads and how much money it’s going to cost to generate those leads. We will be trying out ad platforms, ad types, audiences, creatives, and offers. Generally speaking, for market tests, you want to spend anywhere between two months to six months, depending on the complexity of your offering to test out different ideas to see what works and what doesn’t work.
It’s a lot like fishing. Initially, we want to start off with the smallest investment possible to find out if we might get good results. So, we go down to the local fishing hole with our bamboo pole and our rubber worm, put it in the pond, and find out whether the fish might be biting. And you know what, if they do, we’re off to the races. We buy a boat and a titanium rod and the best lures bait, and we go fishing where the fish are biting. If we don’t get the results we’re looking for in our market test, we start trying out different ponds. The mission of a good digital marketing agency is to partner with you on a market test to spend the least amount of money to find out everything you need to know about what’s going to work and what doesn’t work in terms of generating leads for your business.
Which Ad Platform is Best?
One of the problems a lot of our clients come to us with is: “We have this budget for marketing, and we have this offering, whether it’s a product or a service, but we’re not sure where we need to be online.” This is a really important question because not all channels are created equal. For example, Google has a search network, and they also have a display network, and then Facebook, for example, is a display network, LinkedIn is a display network. They’re different because different people are going to arrive at your solution, your product, or your service in different ways. For example, if you have a flood in your house, you are going to start searching for somebody to help fix your problem in your house. So, if we are a flood cleanup company, then we need to be advertising on the Search Network because that’s where people are going to be finding our product. They aren’t going to see your flood remediation display ad on Facebook and call you unless they just had a flood in their house. So this type of need-based client offering works best for search ads.
However, if you are selling a product or a service that isn’t well known, like a really cool toy that nobody’s ever heard of before, people will not be searching for your product. They’ve never heard of it, so you need to introduce it to people who might be interested while they’re looking at other things. It’s really important that you advertise on a display network for that kind of person. With a display ad, your toy ad will show up to people who have bought or liked other products similar to that toy in the past. You’ll pop into their feed with a video or testimonial to say, “Hey, here’s this cool thing that you’ve never seen before!”
An easy rule of thumb is: if you’ve got something that people are not necessarily actively searching for, advertise on social media networks and the Google Display Network. If you have a product or service that people absolutely need and will be looking for directly, then use the Google Search Network. It will absolutely save you a lot of time and money being in the right place with your budget. If you need help determining what ad platform to use and how to craft your offer to reach the right customers and create sales, Highforge is here for you. We’ve been doing this successfully for decades, and we have the case studies to prove it. Reach out to our team for help with your digital advertising. Let’s elevate your business together.