Small Business Guide to Online Advertising

If you are a small business owner, you have probably asked yourself these questions when it comes to online advertising:

1. Should I run online ads to promote my business?
2. Where should I run ads?
3. How much should I spend?

These 3 questions will almost always prompt the same answer: It depends. As frustrating as this is to hear, creating a successful advertising campaign will always depend on determining a few high-level factors to answer the questions above. Here are a few items you can expect to answer when determining what type of advertising plan, if any, is right for your small business:

• How much budget do you have allocated for advertising?
• What is your expected return on investment (ROI) from advertising?
• What is your industry? Are you B2B or B2C?
• How much competition do you have in your service area?

By first answering these questions, you will be one step closer to determining an appropriate mix of advertising for your business.

Now let’s dive into the 3 questions you’ve been asking yourself.

Should I run online ads to promote my small business?

To put it simply, if you have potential customers who are searching for your services online, then you should absolutely be advertising online. I guarantee that someone is researching your products or services right now. If you don’t have at least a minimal ad presence online, then your competition will win every single time.

So how do you know if people are looking for your services? Just go to Google and search for your services. See what type of ads are popping up. Go to Facebook and see what your competitors are posting. You can even see what ads they are running by going to the Facebook Ad Library. Go to YouTube and see what type of videos people are posting in your industry and how many views and likes they’re getting. By looking at interaction rates and getting a general idea of what your competitors are doing, you will have a better idea of the need for advertising in your industry.

That leads us to our second question.

Where should I run ads?

Where you decide to run ads depends on those high level factors you answered above. If you have a small budget, Facebook Ads only require you to spend $1/day. The Facebook advertising platform offers a huge potential reach and highly-focused audience targeting. 

Google Ads, also known as pay-per-click ads, allow you to bid on keywords and run ads to people at the top of Google Search, on YouTube, and across the Google ad network. Depending on your industry, Google Ads can be expensive for highly-competitive industries like attorneys, but may only cost you a couple of dollars per click depending on your location and what keywords you’re looking to bid on. You can easily look up the cost of specific keywords in the Google Ads Keyword Planner in your Google Ads account.

LinkedIn Ads are great for B2B advertising. They allow for audience targeting related to skills, industry, job-titles, and a lot more. They do require a minimum of $10/day ad spend, so LinkedIn is a bit pricier than the others.

Just remember to look around at what your competitors are doing. You might not have the same budget as your top competitors, but closely following the competition will help you keep an eye on their tactics.

Our final question is often the hardest to answer.

How much should I spend on online advertising?

If you’re just getting started with ads with no idea where to start, I will almost always recommend you start with a small budget on Facebook and Google. This will allow you to learn the basics of the ad software without too much risk of blowing a huge amount of money on unproductive ads. You will also be able to test different ads and audiences to see which ones are most effective. Finally, there is a huge audience on the Facebook and Instagram platforms, and the potential to reach this audience size has never been easier or cheaper.

Once you’ve gotten your feet wet, there are some good tools that will help you refine your budget and targeting. You have the option to review the available traffic for specific keywords on Google, and you can plug in your ideal audience segment and location targeting to determine the amount of traffic and potential clicks or leads on Facebook’s ad platform. As a side note, ad platforms will always highly recommend you raise your budget, but just use all available data to determine the budget you’re comfortable with. Just because they say you should spend more doesn’t mean you have to.

Getting started with ad spend: When in doubt, start small and increase your spend over time. On Facebook, start with a dollar a day. Create a campaign and test your ads. Find which ones work the best, and then increase the budget to $3 to $5/day. Continuously test your ads and audience by changing out your creative and narrowing or expanding your audience. Just remember to make small tweaks so you can know which changes helped or hurt the campaign.

Follow the same principles on Google. Their platform will give you estimates on how much you could be spending on ads, but start small with a few dollars, refine your ads, build out your keyword list, optimize your ad groups, and adjust your ad delivery. Setting up a highly optimized campaign before you bump up your budget to max will help you avoid wasting your budget on clicks that won’t result in more business.

I hope this small business advertising guide helps you make the decision on where to run ads and how much to start with. There are so many options to consider that it’s hard to know where to spend your money most effectively. Working in the advertising and marketing industry for a decade has allowed our team to help small businesses hit the ground running with online advertising. We would love to help you setup an advertising campaign for your company, no matter how much budget you have to work with.

Let us know if we can answer any questions or if you are ready to take the leap into online advertising. We would love to speak with you more. Give us a call at 615-249-8488 or shoot us an email at crosbydigitalmarketing@gmail.com.