Online advertising allows you to increase traffic, sales, and conversions through clicks. All of which will ultimately increase your revenue. Learn how much your business would need in order to advertise well online!
We’ll outline the importance of advertising in business and how your marketing strategy will take your operations to the next level.
Table of Contents
Benefits of Advertising – Key Takeaways
Advertising can help with the following:
- Providing basic information such as contact number or website address
- Changing people’s attitudes and perceptions
- Creating a distinctive brand
- Spreading political messages to voters
- Creating a niche position
- Spreading the word about a social issue
- Promoting products with special activities
- Talking about upcoming events
Brands should focus on creating quality advertisements to capture audiences’ attention in a highly competitive market. Initially, it may be difficult for you to find what works best for your brand, product, and audience, but strategies can be refined over time as campaign performance metrics are tracked.
How to Stand Out From the Competition
As the market evolves, so does the competition. The rate of business expansion has led to endless similar products appearing on the market, making it imperative for brands to set themselves apart.
Consistent advertising helps manage competition and is a differentiating factor between brands with a high audience base and those without. Innovative marketing strategies such as customized and audience-specific advertisements and customer support solutions work wonders by providing value to consumers, thus elevating sales and revenue.
Effective campaigns consistently generate a new audience base that adds to overall revenue and awareness.
To achieve this, brands should align their marketing campaigns with their goals, pushing relevant and relatable content for target audiences. Convey customized messages that compel leads to take specific actions, increasing product demand. Remember that marketing efforts aimed in the wrong direction will lead to wasted time and resources if target customers are not interested.
Brands can expand their audience base with the following tools:
- PPC ads
- Social media ads
- TV and print ads
- Email marketing campaigns
- Consistent presence on social media platforms
How to Amplify Sales and Revenue
Driving sales and revenue is critical for running a successful business in the long run. This creates opportunities for growth and expansion with new branches, more stores, and product verticals.
Advertising leads to brand awareness, and broader audiences mean more sales and opportunities for conversions. A successful brand sets itself apart from its competitors, so consumers are happy to flock to its offerings for repeat purchases. Happy customers become unwitting brand ambassadors when they personally recommend a brand to their friends, family, and followers.
Apart from online and print advertising, brands can leverage geographical retargeting to engage segmented audience groups and further increase sales and revenue.
How Much To Spend On Paid Advertising
One of the most common questions we hear is “How much should I spend on paid advertising?”.
The truth is, it will vary depending on a number of factors and it’s critical you do your research before diving into paid advertising.
For example, if you’re an ecommerce store selling a £10 product at a 20% margin, it may be very difficult for you to even advertise at a profit (unless you generate a LOT of repeat purchases).
In theory, you’d need a maximum CPC (cost-per-click) of £1 and a website conversion rate higher than 50% to be able to make ANY profit (and that’s not factoring in additional overheads!).
Well, the average number that small businesses pay for advertising depends on the industry we are talking about. For example, industries like furniture stores, jewelry, leather goods stores spend around 4.4% of their revenues on advertising. Next, we have real estate business that spends a bit less – around 3.8%, while restaurants or specialty food stores spend around 1.9% of their revenues on advertising. The bottom line is that on average all industries pay 1.08%.
Advertising online – average costs
If you are new at this, here are some online ad costs you should know about :
- The average cost (per click) for Facebook ads is $1.72
- The same thing on Google Ads (Adwords) costs $2.32
- The average Facebook CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is $7.19, while on Instagram you need to pay around $5.
- if you want to promote very competitive and used keywords, you need to pay a bit more – $50 or more, per click.
What is a “Good” Ad Budget?
While there is no cookie-cutter solution that works for everyone, that doesn’t mean there’s no good answer for you and your business. You see, the proper ad budget varies based on several factors that you need to consider:
- What industry are you in?
- What are the industry’s current trends?
- What platform are you most likely to reach your audience on?
- How high is your average order value?
- Do your customers tend to be recurring spenders, or are they typically one-time shoppers?
- What is the average CPC on your desired platform?
While all of these questions may not appear significant, something as seemingly trivial as the platform you pick can make or break your ad campaign’s success. The answers to these questions like average CPC can also fluctuate over time, so if you want to keep up with your competitors, you’ve got to make sure your data is accurate and up-to-date.
How Much Should I Spend on Paid Advertising?
Ideally, at LEAST 10-15% of a company’s budget should go into marketing, advertisements, and SEO. This tends to be an average across a range of industries but some predominantly online businesses will actually spend significantly more!
Below is a chart detailing an average of how much each industry contributes to overall ad spend:
| Industry | Percentage of budget |
| Consumer Packaged Goods | 24% |
| Consumer Services | 15% |
| Tech | 15% |
| Media | 13% |
| Mining/Construction | 13% |
| Consumer Service Consulting | 12% |
| Education | 11% |
| Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals | 10% |
| Wholesale Retail | 10% |
| Finance Industries | 8% |
| Transport | 8% |
| Manufacturing | 8% |
| Energy | 4% |
As you can see, there is a big difference between the budget most consumer industries have and the marketing output of other sectors.
That’s because business-to-consumer (B2C) sales have to grab the attention of every individual they want to sell to, plus, do it well enough that thousands will see their ads and eventually buy their products.
In contrast, industries focused on business-to-business (B2B) sales only have to convince department heads and KPI (key people of influence) that they’re worth working with a smaller and more niche target audience.
Ready to Drive Targeted Paid Advertising to Your Website?
Now that you have these tactics in your toolbox, you should be able to put together a simple strategy for getting more people to your site. Remember, though, that this isn’t a one-off exercise, nor do you have to try everything at once or use only one tactic at a time.
Try something. See if it works. If it fails, stick at it a little longer but bring something else into your roster. Most importantly, make sure the technical aspects of your site are running smoothly — if you need targeted audience, for example, we’ve got plans to suit any budget!
You can target users based on their demographics, psychographics, geolocation, online behavior, type of device, and operating system. Retargeting options and weather-dependent offers are available as well. Web Targeted Traffic has partnerships with numerous big ad networks like Smaato, InMobi, AdColony to grant you access to even more publishers. Its attractive features are omnichannel advertising and AI-powered optimization.
Just like with most internet marketing services, there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. If the traffic is junk, and if you can’t choose how long your traffic campaign will be, specify an exact number of visitors, and target your visitors location and interests, then what’s the point in buying traffic at all? We give our customers the best targeting options and flexibility, which sets us apart in this industry.
