Online advertisement is an effective way for businesses of all sizes to expand their reach, generate new customers, build brand trust and get more engagement with the customer. Though the concept might seem a bit intricate for newcomers if conceptualized and worked well, can get good results for your business. It involves a few certain steps that one needs to follow to yield the benefits of digital or online marketing.
Customer Profiles
When you think of online advertisement, you think of customer profiling. It refers to segregating your customers into different sets of customers based upon different criteria. Customer profiling plays an essential role in online advertisement. It, therefore, becomes important for a businessman to figure out what kind of customers is he or she going to deal with?
Who all would be interested in your product or business? It helps businesses to make important decisions by tracking customer information, such as trends, demographics, and psychological graphics. It is much easier to attract more customers when you actually know about your current customers. Before even starting to market a product to potential customers, it’s important to take the time to carve out the ideal consumer profile for your products.
Competitive Analysis
This involves an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. For any sort of business, you must have deep knowledge of your competition in the market.
What are there unique selling point (USP), what are their strength, weaknesses etc? You need to figure out, if you launch a similar or same product in the market, then why should the customer come to you and not go to your competitor? Scanning competitor’s ads can reveal much about what that competitor believes about marketing and their target market. You can put yourself in customers’ shoes and then find out the good and bad things about your competitor. Now when you know almost every in and out about your competitor, you can carve out the best strategy to operate the business in the market and counter your competitor.
Prototyping
The prototype is a stage between formalization and evaluation of an idea. It can be termed as an initial stage of implementation of your campaign wherein you figure out almost everything about your product/campaign. Prototyping would give you a fair gist of how your product would function once implemented and what sort of result it would yield.
It is always suggested to prototype your campaign/product before getting the final version in place. It will point out the loopholes that need to be bridged during the implementation of final products. It is important that you stay aware of your challenges as a marketer and therefore you can develop a strategy to overcome them. While the online landscape changes so quickly that we may have new challenges in just a few months, these are some challenges we know are important right now, and developing a strategy for them is all you need to do.
A/B Testing
When you set up your business, it is mandatory for you to choose the correct way that can yield the maximum results for you. Defining the correct solution might not be a cakewalk and that is where A/B Testing comes into the picture. You decide two different versions of your plan for your business and experiment those on different sets of the customer.
Ultimately you choose the version that gives a better result. Interesting Facts: It is a form of statistical hypothesis testing or “two-sample hypothesis testing” as used in the field of statistics. A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable typically by testing a subject’s response to variable A against variable B, and determining which of the two variables is more effective.
For Example: An emailing campaign example
A company with a customer database of 2,000 people decides to create an email campaign with a discount code in order to generate sales through its website. It creates two versions of the email with different call to action (the part of the copy which encourages customers to do something — in the case of a sales campaign, make a purchase) and identifying promotional code.
- 1. To 1,000 people it sends the email with the call to action stating, “Offer ends this Saturday! Use code A1”
- 2. and to another 1,000 people it sends the email with the call to action stating, “Offer ends soon! Use code B1”
All other elements of the emails’ copy and layout are identical. The company then monitors which campaign has a higher success rate by analyzing the use of the promotional codes. The email using the code A1 has a 5% response rate (50 of the 1,000 people emailed used the code to buy a product), and the email using the code B1 has a 3% response rate (30 of the recipients used the code to buy a product). The company, therefore, determines that in this instance, the first Call To Action is more effective and will use it in future sales.
Monitoring and Adjusting
Many a time your very first strategy about your business might not meet your desired objectives. Hence you need to redefine your strategy and, therefore, reviewing your ad and the kind of result it is yielding is an essential step to ensure whether your objectives are being fulfilled. Monitoring helps you assess the loopholes your product or service might have. It also helps you figure out the kind of approach you need to have towards your business. To define a concrete strategy for your business, you need to monitor every step of your business to figure out the best practices.
Conclusion
In today’s highly competitive market, when there is’n’ number of entrepreneurs doing the same kind of business like yours, making a single mistake can mar your business. You, therefore, just can’t afford to ignore monitoring and then adjusting accordingly.
