How do you make sure your digital advertising budget is going to the right platform? What are the benefits of different platforms like FB, Google, and LinkedIn to generate leads? And most importantly, how can you create a campaign that actually converts and gives you the most bang for your buck? This blog post will answer these questions (and more). 

How do you make sure your digital advertising budget is going to the right platform? 

Typically platform choice revolves around demographics and exposure. What do we mean by exposure? In this case, we mean what type of placements a platform can offer you. 

Search Ads on Google and Bing

Search advertising is pretty much dominated by Google, although Bing is still effective and provides access to a unique demographic.What exactly is a search ad? When you Google something, a search ad is those text-based ads that pop up at the top of the page. For example: 

Social Media Ads

Social platforms tend to be best at getting messages and brand-related content in front of your specific audience. While not always the first place that people will go when ready to make a purchase, Facebook is excellent for retargeting, brand awareness, and specifically cross-platform and cross-device retargeting. The way that Facebook audiences are built makes it the best platform for getting a reminder in front of people that are interested in or considering your product.

While AdWords is for the most part ubiquitous, social digital platforms offer exposure to a specific valued demographic. Take LinkedIn for example: their demographic targeting uses the amount of career and work experience so that marketers are able to utilize relevant and granular targeting. 

What are the benefits of different platforms like FB, Google, and LinkedIn to generate leads?

In this day and age everyone understands that if you need something or want information you can turn to the internet and Google it. This is why businesses of all shapes and sizes work hard at making sales or getting leads from AdWords search advertising. It has become so efficient that many businesses are now converting on zero-click advertising methods like click-to-call or Google local services. That being said it is even more important that your campaigns are well strategized so that they don’t waste the massive amount of exposure that Google provides you on wasted clicks.

Facebook and the other social platforms are tougher to create lead generations for Home Services and similar industries. By tougher we mean you’re not likely to find someone that needs a plumber right now by searching on Facebook. But with a sound strategy that gives you both brand exposure and an audience to build retargeting campaigns, advertising on social platforms can provide a lot of value. Social platforms can also leverage their user data to make things like Lead Generation easier to accomplish. For example: using a social media company’s in-app lead generation campaigns (which populate the known fields with correct user information) makes campaign setups a whole lot easier and more likely to succeed. 

But on these social advertising platforms, it’s not always rosy. We’ve found that things like the in-app lead gen tools are great for getting leads, but can also result in a bunch of low-intent leads — in other words people who only submitted their information due to the ease of doing so. In order to effectively use that type of tool, including a qualifying question that requires the user to actually give some thought and input the answer themselves can help weed out the low-intent leads and bring in the quality ones.

Building a Cross-Platform Audience

The beauty of the Facebook pixel (at least until Apple’s iOS14 pending data changes), is that you can build your retargeting audiences out of people that find your site from other means. A person may find your business organically but after they visit either a specific page or multiple pages on your site they can then be placed into a Facebook retargeting pixel audience. This differs from AdWords, where the only people you can place into your custom audiences are people that you sent to the website from Adwords. 

With this thinking, when you are advertising with AdWords you can grow both your Facebook audience and the Adwords retargeting audience. 

The additional advantage of this is the number of cross-platform opportunities provided by a user’s web activities for retargeting. Meaning if on your work computer you log in to Facebook and are looking at a new car then that car can be retargeted to you on your smartphone later in the evening. 

LinkedIn is great for those demographics surrounding specific careers and industries. Within those specifications it also seems to lend itself well to business to business and career development offers as well

Most importantly, how can you create a campaign that actually converts and gives you the most bang for your buck?

There are a lot of components that are essential to building out a successful campaign and unfortunately, as much as we may wish it, there is no one secret sauce that guarantees success, but rather a combination of these important elements:

• Know your audience
• Know your platform 
• Have an obvious and measurable objective
• Clear CTAs
• Clear, intuitive user experience from ads to lead generation to sales
• Diverse campaign targeting – lists, in-market audiences, interests, custom audiences based on user behavior, search targeting, native placements
• Refining and optimizing campaigns based on targeting, spend and ad performance

It would be great if there is a simple answer to this question of the holy grail of paid digital marketing. But the reality is, it’s a combo answer and all of these pieces we’ve established here are essential to have a successful campaign. 

One of the biggest value ads that a marketing team can bring to your business’s marketing endeavors is the experience of running, tweaking and delivering leads 100x more than the campaigns needed for your business. Consider that each advertising campaign is a learning experience to further hone in and optimize strategies. That gained wisdom is key to developing effective marketing campaigns and dialing in campaigns that are not delivering.

If you really want to ensure that your digital efforts are made for success then trust in the experts here at Overit!