Tips on How to Advertise Effectively When Growing Your Homebased Business

When most new small business owners are first starting out, they probably don’t have much of a budget to spend on advertising. However, as your homebased business grows, investing some of your profits in ads can really help boost your business and bring in even more profits.

The main thing to consider is whether or not your ads are getting the best return on investment (ROI). Fortunately, online ads can give you a big bang for your buck if you plan ahead and watch your metrics carefully. Here are some tips on how to advertise effectively when growing your homebased business.

Set a Goal for Each Campaign

Do you want more:
* Traffic
* Subscribers
* Sales
* Brand recognition

This will affect the wording of your ads and which type you will use. It will also determine your call to action (CTA) for your target audience to take the next step now that they have seen your ad.

Niche Ads

One of the reasons online marketing is so successful is that it allows you to target a niche using keywords. Whenever someone searches online at Google, for example, if you have an ad running in their AdWords system, your ad will be shown.

In terms of social media ads, you can choose keywords or interests, age groups and more. Smart niche marketers create what is called a marketing persona – a profile of the ideal customer they wish to target. They might be a woman, married with children, aged between 31 and 40, who has pets, and so on. Social media ads such as those at Facebook would actually allow you to choose every single one of those if you wished to ensure that your ad was not being shown to people who would probably not be interested.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

The other key feature of online marketing is the PPC ads. You only pay if a person clicks on the ad to obey your call to action. The percentage of people who complete the CTA are referred to as the click-through rate. A good click-through rate means your ad is effective. However, a poor completion rate of subscribers or sales would mean the page you are sending them to is not converting well for some reason.

Create a New Landing Page for Every New Campaign

An easy way to track click-throughs and conversions is to set up a unique landing page for each campaign so you can track the ROI on your ad. If you see your visitors are not converting, you can edit, test and track alternate versions of the page until you come up with a winner. For example, you might change the headline, add more reviews and testimonials, or create a stronger call to action. Tracking and testing does take time, but the higher your conversion rate from the same amount of traffic, the better.

Doing the Math

An average conversion rate would be 1%. That means one out of every 100 people would buy. If you are selling a product for $20, you would need to make sure you were spending less than that on your ads.

But what if you could boost your conversion rate to 5%? Then you would get $100 per 100 visitors. If your ad has a high click-through rate, then you can keep repeating this process over and over again – in which case, the ads will more than pay for themselves.