In order for your online store to survive in this digital-driven business world, you need to leverage the best online advertising channels on the internet.
Fortunately, there are a lot of advertising channels available for us to leverage, but if you’re on a tight budget, identifying the right advertising channels for your online store can be difficult.
In this article, we’ll help you identify the right advertising channels for your online store and also how to make the best out of them so that your time, money, and efforts don’t go astray.
Below, we’ve shared the 7 most effective advertising & marketing channels that will benefit you most in 2020.
Paid effective advertising channels
Google search ads:
Google is one of the biggest players in the advertising world so far, and especially using it is one of the fastest ways to see the result.
Google search ads help put you in front of relevant users that actively search for products like yours. You will always be on their radar even if they aren’t gonna buy from your online store right away.
Google search ads make it most favorable for you to get high-intent customers. You can meet customers at the critical stage when they want to buy.
If you’re targeting keywords like “ find cloth manufacture ” or “clothing manufacture in the USA” and have a strong ad that explains what you can offer, you have a good chance of getting a click and finding new clients quickly.
Let’s see Google search ads best practices to help you tap into its potential.
Show value and be specific: With Google search ads, you have limited space, so it only performs best when you craft convincing headlines and descriptions to convince customers why they should choose you.
If you were to see an ad that said “Buy house plants online at Canada’s succulent store, Free shipping over $100”, it wouldn’t be as appealing as this “Free same day shipping, we carry major brands, a free gift for every order”.
Leverage ads extension: It would be best if you craft your ad extension strategically to gain the best result.
These are perhaps both good examples of ads extensions. While the first ad uses one of the most powerful words in advertising – “On Sale” and call-to-action such as “Log In” or “Buy Gift Cards”, the third ad goes for showing categories that most of their customers want to see and save time on navigating in the store.
Use negative keywords wisely: This is an essential part of an ad. You can save a lot of money by excluding keywords you don’t want your ads to appear for. Let’s say you sell robot lawnmowers and someone is searching for “robot lawnmower DIY” might not be your target customer.
Google display ads
While Google search ads bring you relevant audiences, Google display ads help you to create demand and introduce your product to those who may not be searching for or know about your existence.
It has ads displayed to people falling to your targeting on sites within the network across the internet. Also, Google display ads cost less than Google search ads, which help you manage when you have a tight budget.
The reach of Google Display Network is enormous with over 90% of internet users can see google display ads. What should you do with Google display ads to gain the best result:
Utilize remarketing: Remarketing is one of the best things about Google display ads. It increases the chance of purchase while showing ads to people who have previously visited your site and saw your product.
For example, someone visited a specific product page and the check-out page would probably be toward the bottom of your sales funnel.
Create simple and visually-appealing ads. Simplicity and visual are your best friends when it comes to google display ads. You may want to use eye-catching images and colors that draw visitor’s eyes to the ad. And remember, in a limited space, a simple and clean design that utilizes white space and a clear hierarchy can work incredibly.
Even this ad has used contrasting colors to highlight the key point, however, the main block contains too much text and the orange is used here and there, which seems really distracting.
This ad, while using the same colors as the previous one, however, has manipulated the dark and light areas to make the focal point pop.
Facebook Ads
Besides Google, Facebook is an exceptional platform and rules the world of social media. It has 2.45 billion monthly active users (2019) and has been a powerful online advertising channel.
However, when first using Facebook ads for your online store, you might find it a bit intimidating. All the options that they offer, while overwhelming, also offer immense customization and control over ads.
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There are a lot of reasons why you should invest in Facebook ads, one of them is thousands of ads targeting parameters such as geographics, demographics, interests, behaviors, audiences.
For example, a company selling yoga mats could target users who joined in yoga groups or even who have purchased anti-stress supplements. Imagine the ability to speak directly to customers about how you understand their suffering and help them to combat stress.
Facebook also allows you to advertise in the standalone Messenger app by sending messages to your targeted customers.
Facebook Ads Best Practices:
Take a deep dive into audience behaviors and interests. Before jumping to set an ad, learn your customers first. Get as much detailed information as possible. Demographic data now goes beyond gender, age, or household income, it can include things like relationship status, homeownership, travel habits, eating habits, etc.
Use lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences let you reach totally new customers but having a similar buyer persona with those who are your current customers. Once you provide the data related to your wanted lookalike audiences, Facebook will analyze their profiles and analyze parallel users based on similarities.
Take advantage of the split testing tool. You cannot know which are better for a specific audience group. Facebook’s split testing tool makes it easy for you to test your audience, ad content & design, or ad placements.
Instagram Ads
Apart from Google display ads and Facebook ads, Instagram advertising has been a rising star. The strategy of Instagram is to make the ads look the least like ads and make users comfortably watch ads.
Instagram ads feature Facebook’s targeting abilities, including geographic, demographic, behaviors, and interest parameters. Instagram ads help you to reach these goals:
- Brand awareness: show ads to more prospective people that are likely to be attracted by your brand
- Reach: show ads to a specific number of people
- Traffic (for clicks to your website or the app store for your app): send more visitors to your website
- App installs: send more customers to the store where they can purchase your app
- Lead generation: collect email information when someone clicks on your ad and confirms his/her entry
- Conversions: helps you to convert leads to purchase customers
How does Instagram advertising service display ads to your audiences? Here are all the options:
- Stories ads
- Photo ads
- Video ads
- Carousel ads
- Collection ads
- Ads in Explore
How to get soared sales with Instagram ads, check out these best practices:
Use more video stories ads. The first few seconds are essential for capturing and maintaining your users’ attention. You have to prevent your audiences from skipping your stories ads right after they see them. Videos can serve this well. It can be a short motion video, a trailer video or a slide show, just make sure it can create eye-catching effects.
Rotate the ad types to choose the best result. Instagram provides you with a lot of ad form choices, and you’ll never know which ad forms work better than the others toward different content types or design styles.
Prioritize visual stimulus, make your ads look as beautiful and appealing as possible. Impress your audiences by using vibrant colors, interesting illustrations, beautiful flat lays or cool portraits, and capture their interests to make them discover your online store.
YouTube Ads
Youtube is the largest video sharing platform until now. On TV screens specially, watch time was more than 250 million hours per day as of March 2019, according to the company. Not to mention the PC screens, Youtube has been significantly boosting its footprint.
Youtube ads, thereby, can become an effective advertising channel for your online store. At the moment, Youtube offers two ad campaign types which are display and video.
In details, here are options for YouTube ads:
- Youtube in-stream non-skippable ads: short ads that play before, during or after anther videos
- Youtube Sponsored card ads: ads that are stuck on the relevant Youtube videos on the YouTube watch pages
- Youtube overlay ads: ads that appear overlaid on the bottom of the YouTube video player on the YouTube watch pages
- Youtube bumper ads: ads are less than 6 seconds, don’t require your audience’ patience, are short but work extremely well if you know how to catch the attention
Be relevant, be helpful, be sincere. At best, your Youtube ads should offer valuable content, which works much more like blog posts than social media advertisements.
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How to create Youtube ads that convert more sales? Here are the best practices.
Diversify ad content. Don’t show but explain. If you think your prospective customers don’t understand your products well, create product review, how-to, behind-the-scenes short videos. These kinds of ad content always keep audiences engaged and motivated.
Monitor ads performance frequently. Under the Analytics tab, you can find many critical figures for your advertising campaign. For example, you can learn which ads your customers have been watching, how long they have watched them, which points they have disengaged, and also, you can figure out which ad types perform best.
Unpaid high-powered Advertising Channels
Your social media channels
Social media is a dominating force in the marketing world at the moment. As mentioned above, you have many indeed powerful social media platforms with a diversity of all cold, warm, and hot audiences.
Your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even Linkedin pages could be your effective advertising channel if you focus on providing helpful information.
Customers are initially looking for brands they are interested in and many of them make purchasing decisions on social media. Keep in mind that all followers and audience engagements on social media meant to be conversion possibilities.
In social media, you focus on relationships, not sales. Once you provide enough value to your customers, you will get sales.
Building social media content helps you to keep in touch with customers and increase brand awareness. These attempts will result in triggering purchases or at least put them through the awareness and consideration stages.
Content marketing and SEO
Content marketing is an effective indirect advertising channel for your store if you can deliver interesting and helpful content to your customers.
It’s like a savings account, as time goes by, you can get compound interest, your content will become more valuable and provide lead generation capabilities.
Regardless of your business industry, posting original content regularly is an extremely effective way to connect with your target audience. Your evergreen posts can offer SEO benefits for a very long time to come as people continue to search them out.
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How to drive sales by content marketing and SEO:
Provide value. For example, if you are writing about when a broken line should be replaced, you don’t want to just say “when they break”: You should provide visual and text explanations for why it breaks, how it breaks, and specific problems to look for.
Use keywords and CTAs. Although content is an indirect advertising method, you still can use them to actually reach something, instead of just writing posts you want to write.
Advertise your content. Instead of writing and publishing your posts, you should actively distribute them through social media or newsletters. This lets your audiences talk about your posts and further remember your shop.
Conclusion
There are more online advertising channels than ever before and it’s difficult to know which channels will work best for you. Even the most sure-fire advertising channel can misfire if it doesn’t show ads in the right place and at the right time.
The foundational elements of successful online advertising campaigns lay in in-depth market research and a strategic marketing plan. Test the above online advertising channels with some best practices and consistency. It will help you get a return on investment.
