How familiar does this scenario sound? You are planning to make a spaghetti dinner this weekend for some visiting family members. Throughout the preceding week, you spend time searching for recipes for various sauces, sides, and desserts, as well as talking about spaghetti recipes with your parents over the phone. After a few days, you realize that now the ads displayed on your phone’s various apps are showing ads for devices to make your own noodles, or to buy fresh-baked garlic bread at a local grocery store.
Surely every one of us has felt our world become a little bit smaller when we discover that we have been identified by our local SEO’s almighty algorithm. When this happens, we might wonder how this is even possible, and if we run our own business, how we can marshall this algorithm to work in our favor.
Creating the Best Targeted Ads
There are three things that every marketer should know before attempting to create an ad. These are guiding principles for us here at Gravitate Online, and we use them to help us become one of Utah’s best options for web design and advertising optimization. These principles are:
- Know the Tools of the Trade
- Understand Your Client Persona
- Sell the Big Idea
If you imagine these three points as the legs of a stool, then you get an idea of how important each one is to the overall success of your advertising. Not only is the existence of all three, working in concert, going to produce the best results, but they also represent a forward progression of thought on your part; one leads to another, which leads to another still. Let’s discuss each of them briefly, and you’ll have a better understanding of why Gravitate Online stands as a leader in search engine optimization and targeted ad creation.
Know the Tools of the Trade
With monolithic corporations facilitating much of the world’s online advertising power, there is no shortage of platform tools, management portals, and creation suites to help you make the perfect ad. Many of these organizations come with a built-in distribution model as well, so the ads manager becomes a one-stop-shop, making everything easier for the advertiser. The challenge with having so many platforms, even ones that ultimately make your job easier, is staying abreast of how each one works and any updates that are patched in.
In addition to simply knowing how the platforms work, there’s another aspect to knowing the tools of the trade, and that is literally learning which tools are available to you. Proficiency in advertising is a cocktail of essential traits that must exist in the marketer. This mixture is equal parts
- Control: the ability to manipulate ads and targeting to fit your needs
- Saturation: having your ads show up everywhere your audience can be found, be they sidebar ads on their web browser, optimized search engine results, billboards, podcast ads, commercials on TV and streaming services, and more.
- Creativity: Making the ads funny, thought-provoking, or otherwise attractive to look at. Creativity also helps with creating a clear Call to Action that people want to engage with.
Knowing the tools of the trade is an unending endeavor, as the development of new technologies effectively moves the goalposts each time. Continued efforts will make a shallower learning curve, however, which means you can make effective ads quicker than ever.
Understand the Client Persona
Determining the client persona is a thought exercise in which you attempt to understand what about your target audience is drawn to your products. This is a holistic approach to selling, as having a firm understanding of your clients will help you make better, targeted ads with every campaign. The client persona means having a generalized understanding of your audience’s age, gender, home dynamic, belief system, priorities, income, hobbies, and political leanings.
Of course, for professional marketers like us at Gravitate Online, we have two client personas to bear in mind each time we invest in search engine optimization or a big advertising campaign: that of the purchasers who will see the ad come up on their phones or computers, and that of the company we represent (for they are our client). Finding the right audience for your ads means being true to your own company’s persona as much as that of a potential customer. In the end, you’re not just selling one product, you’re selling the idea of your company for them to buy into.
Sell the Big Idea
This dovetails nicely into our final point: sell the Big Idea. Chances are that your product has more benefits than just one. If it indeed has only one, then discovering the Big Idea might be easier﹘but not always. Your product’s Big Idea is characterized by the bedrock purpose of its existence. Being able to distill the importance of your product﹘something you might have very well spent large amounts of time and money developing﹘into a singular, simple entity will drive truer into the hearts and minds of your customers than if you tried to overwhelm them with too much information.
This feeds back into search engine optimization since people will likely be searching according to the Big Idea. They might be interested to know all that your product can do once they look into it, but more often than not the search that brought them there (and that influenced the algorithm to adjust the way it targets them for ads) will likely be some form of “best X to get Y.”
Finding the Big Idea will test how well you know your product and how it’s designed to provide a service to the customer. If you know that and can communicate it, then people will want to buy it.