Do you want to stand out in a crowded industry?

Does your business operate in a niche with a tiny audience?

If your answer is yes to one of these questions, then you should consider niche marketing.

You may be wondering, what exactly is niche marketing and how is it going to help you?

To help you understand niche marketing, let us first define a niche market – A niche market is a tiny, defined segment of a larger market.

Now, let’s talk about niche marketing. It is basically a marketing tactic that is aimed at attracting and converting a particular market segment.

This marketing is specifically beneficial for reaching customers who you can target based on specific characteristics. These characteristics include hobby, demographic, occupation, and commitment to political/social issues.

You can focus on the following categories of customers with this type of marketing:

• Young professionals
• Environmentalists
• Pet lovers
• New homeowners
• Couples who are planning a wedding

Advantages of Niche Marketing

When you use niche marketing to reach small audiences, it benefits you in many ways. Niche marketing not only improves relationships with your customers but also provides you the advantage of word-of-mouth marketing. Here’s a more detailed look at the benefits of niche marketing:

1. Makes Your Business Visible to Relevant Customers

Niche marketing makes you visible to the right audience. This is because you use strategies that are designed for the people who will most likely find your services and products interesting.

2. Competitive Advantage

A majority of brands aim their marketing at the larger market. However, niche marketing helps you market a service or product to a particular section of the market.

When you serve a specific or limited audience, you face lesser competition. This is because fewer competitors would be providing the same offering.

3. Builds Brand Loyalty

Another advantage of niche marketing is that it can help you build brand loyalty. When you engage with a smaller audience, you are able to focus more on providing quality customer service. You also get to develop and nurture a relationship with them. This helps develop loyalty for your brand. You start to become their trusted partner because you take care of their specific needs.

Strategies for Using Niche Marketing to Reach Tiny Audiences

Many niche marketing strategies are useful in reaching, attracting, and converting small audiences that are otherwise hard to reach. Read on to know more about these strategies in detail:

1. Conduct Extensive Audience Research

A challenge that you may face in niche marketing is how to understand the unique demands of your target audience. For this, you need to carry out extensive audience research to know how you can reach them in the best possible manner. Moreover, the research will help you understand their pain points. Here’s what you can do to conduct audience research for a niche market:

A. Create Buyer Personas

To better understand your ideal customers, develop their buyer personas. Buyer personas are research-based and describe your ideal customers. They talk about the challenges they face, how they make purchasing decisions, and what their days are like.

Image Source

B. Conduct Competitor Research

Carrying out competitor research is extremely important for your business. Analyze the kind of audience your competitors reach and the ways in which they engage with them.

2. Create Relationships With Your Audience

We already know that there are only a limited number of customers in a niche market. For success in a niche market, you should try to build relationships with your customers and audience. This is because, when you do so, you can get repeat customers.

Remember, it is always more convenient and cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquiring a new one.

3. Select The Platforms Carefully

When you want to reach a tiny target audience, you should choose the social media platforms they use regularly.

Research points that Gen-Zers prefer Snapchat. On the other hand, we recommend that you try to reach millennials on Facebook.

Image Source

To determine which social media platform to choose, ask yourself questions like:

• Where does your audience shop?
• What are their preferences when it comes to social media channels?
• How do they find products?

Doing so will help you select the right social media platform to establish communication with your target audience. Make sure you tailor your content according to those platforms.

4. Take Steps to Become an Authority in Your Niche

We all can agree on one thing – individuals will listen to those who know best! And for this, they go to the experts in their respective fields.

If you want to become a figure of expertise and authority, you need to be persuasive, well-informed, and creative. This is how people are going to listen to you.

Some ways in which you can become an authority in your niche include:

• Produce Valuable Resources: Resources such as case studies, white papers, and blog posts exhibit your expertise and help develop authority.
• Offer Free Advice: Give some free advice to your niche audience to communicate to them that you understand what they want. For doing so, you can have conversations with them on social media and niche forums.

When you become an authority in your niche, customers find you and recommend your products to their friends and family.

5. Build Brand Loyalty

If you focus on building brand loyalty, you can make your customers your very own brand ambassadors.

Here are some ways you can build brand loyalty:

• Engage With Your Customers: Whether it is email or social media, use every opportunity to engage with your audience. Make sure you add value whenever you engage with them.
• Create Unique and Outstanding Experiences: From your customer service to your products, make sure each interaction a customer has with your business is exceptional.
• Align with the Core Values of Your Target Audience: Aligning your brand with your customers’ core values helps develop brand loyalty.
• Predict Their Needs: Use customer behavior data and buyer personas to check what your customers may need and deliver it to them. It creates the impression that you value them and wish to make their lives more convenient.

6. Dive Deeper Into Your Competitor’s Strategy

When you talk about niche marketing, your best resources are your competitors. Remember, you always get to learn a lot from their marketing strategies.

When you dig deeper into your competitors marketing strategies, you gain a good understanding of:

• The market
• Your audience
• The weaknesses and strengths of your competitor

When you identify who your competitors are, the next steps to focus on are:

• The list of keywords that they target
• The ways in which they engage with their target audience
• The different content distribution platforms they use

When you follow this pointer, you are able to create more effective niche marketing strategies.

Image Source

Bottom Line

With an effective niche marketing strategy in place, you can:

• Gain a competitive edge
• Optimize your marketing budget
• Raise your conversion rates

Remember, your niche market is always searching for someone who understands them. When you understand them and know what they require, get out there and kickstart your selling.

While it is important to understand your niche audience, having an SEO-friendly website for your brand is equally important. This is because it helps generate organic traffic and enhances the customer experience. Since building a professional, SEO-friendly, and niche-based website takes several days, we recommend that you use DashClicks' agency website tool. With this tool, you can make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in seconds. Pretty cool, isn't it?

Coronavirus is not a regular pandemic. It has affected the world on an enormous scale. It has impacted almost every aspect of our lives regardless of our age, gender and location.

It has impacted our economy so severely that almost every industry is affected somehow or the other. It is time for the brands and businesses to work together. Many small and large companies have filed for bankruptcy, and some have permanently closed their shutters. Hundreds of firms have permanently closed in the US alone since the epidemic first broke out in March 2020.

According to a survey of 130+ agencies across the globe by Uplers, 66% of agencies experienced a decrease in overall revenue. The majority, 32% of agencies that the pandemic impacted, saw a drop of up to 30% in revenue.

And last but not least, 80% of the agencies indicated that they would either explore, continue or increase outsourcing to survive and stay profitable.

We, too, believe that outsourcing can be a life-saver for many struggling agencies worldwide.

Relation Between Economic Downturn and Progressive Spending

Due to the COVID-19 related disruption, many businesses have lost their search engine visibility and online traffic overnight. They cannot sustain in this way for a long time. Businesses now need to be more aggressive since they've already lost most of the foot traffic and now depend on digital marketing to keep things afloat.

In the 20th century, businesses that transformed their strategy and restructured their spending with a progressive outlook during the downturn outpaced their competitors who hadn't. So, the companies which restricted themselves took a safe route and refrained from any progressive changes either went out of business or suffered losses.

In an interesting study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, it was found that the strategies adopted by the businesses during an economic slowdown decided their future after the recession was over. Many business leaders used such opportunities to ensure long-term gains and refocused their spending rather than cutting it severely.

11 Tips to Market Your Digital Agency in the Middle of a Pandemic

Here are some of the measures you can take to market your digital agency during the pandemic.

1. Be Sensitive to Your Customers' Needs and Situation --Help, Contribute, Offer Tips

Regardless of whether you have tested positive or not, our lives have been severely affected by the novel coronavirus outbreak at both the macro and micro levels. Now, our movements are restricted, which means we cannot meet our relatives and friends too often. Neither can we visit our favorite eating joints and restaurants or go out on weekends to the movies.

Many people are struggling emotionally, psychologically, and financially. It is time to show empathy and offer help and support during these challenging times as a business.

Tip 1: It would help if you were sensitive to your customers' situation without sound too salesy'. If you can win their hearts, sales will pour in eventually.

Tip 2: You can start by providing the essential tips and encourage more active involvement, such as contributing to the local food banks or assisting people with their medical supplies.

Tip 3: Direct, prompt, helpful, empathetic, and informative communication can do magic for your digital agency regarding client retention during an economic downturn.All your sincere and honest efforts would be paid back with gratitude by the social media audiences, and you will likely reap its benefits afterward. We never forget people or brands that helped us and stood by us during the crisis.

2. Use Social Media to Communicate With Your Customers

If you choose to be an optimist, this is the time when you can go from goodā  to "great." The good news is most people can be found online as they are stuck at home.

In a world that has suddenly become an isolated place, people love to spend time on social media to stay connected with their friends and family.

Tip: Since most people are spending time online, leverage social media to communicate with them.

Always be available for your customers. Go out of your way to help them and use this time to remind them that you are always there for them. And there is no better medium than social media to do this.

3. Increase Your Website's Online Visibility To Add New Clients

As most people can be found online these days, search traffic has boosted even during the daytime. While most people stay at home, they keep looking for updates within their community and avenues for entertainment online. Gaming, searching for information and online shopping are among the other most popular activities.

Anything online these days is consumable. Therefore, it's high time for businesses to strive for top slots on Google's SERPs using SEO tactics. It is the only way people can find your business. Keeping yourself invisible on the web can be disastrous for your business as people like to order from the comfort of their homes.

Here are the top 10 ways to increase your website's visibility:

1. Target your website pages for popular keywords: Every page on your website should target a specific topic. So, first, conduct keyword research to find high-volume, intent-based and relevant keywords. Use those keywords sparingly on your web page and meta tags.

2. Make your web pages easy to crawl by Google bots: First, perform an SEO audit of your site to ensure there are no indexing errors in it. Add keywords related to your targeted topic in the meta title, URL, meta description, and image tags of your page and your web pages.

3. Create more pages: Create more blog posts and offer value addition through them. Choose popular topics and create unique, engaging content.

4. Create your profile on online directories: Increase your online footprint and create listings on online directories such as Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Manta, Local.com, and Yellow Pages, beginning with Google My Business.

5. Collaborate with influencers: Influencers and bloggers can boost your online visibility by bringing your website in front of their audiences, so leverage them aggressively.

6. Create quality content: Create quality content with compelling topics to rank higher on SERPs. Use trending topics.

7. Use Google Ads: Invest in Google ads. It will bring traffic, increase visibility for your website and help you with conversions.

8. Provide outstanding customer service: Extraordinary customer support differentiate you from the competition. It results in positive reviews by your customers, which will again boost your SEO and online visibility.

9. Post to social media: Social media channels are mighty and effective when spreading your word. So, create your social profiles on the popular channels in your niche and post frequently using social media posting tools.

10. Be shareable: Provide value addition, use compelling captions and images, and target the followers of your social media followers subscribers.

For further information on how to boost your SEO and online visibility, you can refer to these posts:

A. Best SEO Practices to Rank Your Website in 2021‍

B. 9 Powerful Tips to Optimize a Blog Post for SEO‍

C. SEO for Mobile vs. Desktop

‍D. All About On-Page SEO Ranking Factors‍

E. Top 20 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2021 and Beyond

Tip 1: Increase your online visibility so more and more people can find you. The more extensive your portfolio, the more stable your agency would be.

Tip 2: Automate your routine tasks that consume your maximum time. For example, in the agency business, generating weekly, fortnightly, and monthly online marketing reports consumes a big chunk of your productive time. Your most productive employees waste hours and hours on these repetitive tasks. You can use tools like InstaReports and InstaSites, which will save you tons of time generating professional-grade reports and building niche-based websites within a few seconds. You can utilize this time to establish better communication with your clients.

4. Try Paid Advertising

Since most people spend their maximum time online, it is imperative to use PPC marketing to connect with these audiences and gain an early advantage, mainly because the cost per click is decreased across many industries.

However, it doesn't mean that every industry will perform better with Google ads during the pandemic. Specific industries such as non-profits and charities, health and medical, business management, finance, beauty and personal care, on-demand media, flowers, and gifts saw tremendous growth and an increase in conversion rate.

According to another survey, these were the top four industries that saw the highest growth during the pandemic:

• Technology
• eCommerce
• Healthcare
• Retail

However, the benchmark study released by WordStream reported mixed results in PPC performance for sectors such as real estate, home improvement, home furniture, automotive and retail jobs, and education.

The industries that were hit hard include:

• Travel and tourism
• Bars and restaurants
• Live entertainment
• Conferences
• Sports and fitness
• Building and construction
• Industrial and manufacturing sectors

With decreased cost per click, PPC advertising has become an attractive alternative for advertising and promotion. You can utilize this opportunity to reclaim your share of the market you lost to your competition.

According to Uplers' survey, 47% of agencies experienced a decrease in leads, whileĀ  27% saw an increase in leads during the COVID-19 pandemic. 90% of the agencies that experienced an increase in leads were proactively spending on marketing, including paid advertising.

5. Focus on Organic Rankings of your Website

If you want to score over your competition, nothing can be better than grabbing the top slots on Google SERPs. The optimization process should continue for the website and the content as a long-term strategy.

If you don't do that, the likely drop in rankings could cost your business thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Pausing your SEO campaign during the downturn is not a solution, as it becomes even more critical during tough times to strengthen your organic rankings. Make sure that you continue to rank on popular keywords. If you lose rankings during the recession, your revenue will suffer later on. If hiring SEO professionals turn out to be a costly affair, try white label SEO services and see the difference.

6. Offer Discounts, Coupons, and Build RelationshipsĀ

Never stop the momentum you build during good times, as you will be able to reap the rewards once the market starts rising again. In other words, you should utilize unique circumstances to create a loyal customer base. You can use tough times as an opportunity to show your concern for your clients by offering special discounts. It will act as a goodwill gesture from your brand and keep your revenue flowing.

As emphasized earlier, many people are online these days browsing for products and looking for discounts to save money during these uncertain times. It's the best time to engage with your customers and offer them discounts. So, instead of going for a conservative approach and keeping a low profile during uncertain times, offering discounts can ensure a steady flow of revenue to keep you in business. It will also help you bounce back faster when the market rebounds.

You can use paid advertising tactics such as pay-per-click and social media to announce these discounts and offers.

7. Pay Attention to Local SEO and Online Reviews

Since we are mostly confined to our homes, we look for supplies and services nearby. Local SEO becomes highly crucial as it helps you optimize your website for "near me" searches.

People will turn to you if you are prominently visible in local searches. People need more convenience during these challenging times, so if you can help your customers with prompt services or home delivery, they'll be happy to buy from you.

The best way to appear in local searches is to set up a Google My Business profile for your business. Google My Business is more than just a free business profile, as it allows you to increase your visibility in local searches and helps you connect with your customers across Google search and Maps. It also boosts your online reputation through positive customer reviews.

Positive reviews boost your local SEO tremendously as they help your prospective customers make a quick decision. Online reputation management will pay off many times over as it helps you to build trust around your brand, especially during these chaotic times when people prefer to read reviews before contacting a business. Providing excellent services and quality products during these times will naturally attract genuine positive reviews. A proactive approach will bring its natural rewards.

8. Be as Flexible As Possible

Flexibility and agility are the two most desired characteristics of a modern business. During an economic crisis, it becomes a decisive advantage for most small agencies and startups.

Tip: Being flexible with pricing for a limited time is a sensible step during tough times as it helps with client retention. All you need to do is to be proactive and reevaluate your contract. It helps communicate to your customers that you know the situation and value your relationship with your customers.

9. Recognize What Your Customers Expect

There are two critical things to consider while doing digital marketing for a business -- first, your customer should be able to access your information in a single click. Your clients should also get basic information about the opening hours, happy hours, and your approach to safety during the pandemic.

Are you doing anything special for your customers during the tough times? It can be disastrous for your business to be absent from social channels or unavailable through online phone or chat support. You should be able to answer people's queries quickly and clearly.

Image Source

Tip: For frequently asked questions, you can use pinned posts on your social media pages. Make sure you answer your DMs quickly. If someone is not available to respond, you can use chatbots to acknowledge that you have received the message and will address the query soon.

What is an AI chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program used to interact with website visitors, take their contact information, and refer them to the sales team. It imitates human conversation and can speak, write, or do both. So, when you open a website, a dialogue box that usually appears on the button right and looks like a human representative is trying to talk to you can be a chatbot. It's designed to assist the visitors with their basic queries about the particular business or the website.Some of the best chatbots are Lobster by EBI.AI, Chatfuel, MobileMonkey, and Aivo.

10. Add Value Wherever You Can for your Clients

Identifying areas where you can add more value to your customers can boost your prospects in difficult times. So, apart from their existing service portfolio, identify the additional services that you can offer. Indeed, it's not always possible, but if you make it a part of your mission statement, you'll soon find many avenues where you can offer value addition.

For example, if you are offering digital marketing services, you can add conversion rate optimization, reputation management, or video editing as additional services, and your clients will appreciate that.

You can occasionally offer discounts, promotions, and bundle offers to engage your customers and boost sales. Focus on increasing customer expectations while creating value-added services.

The bottom line is to make your customer happy by saving their money, helping them achieve their business goals, or making life easier for them by providing exclusive services.

11. Consider a New Niche and a Variety of Clients

While providing more value to your existing clients, you may also want to consider new niches you hadn't considered before. For example, you may have a specific lower limit for your projects in terms of revenue. Also, you may not have accepted certain business types as your clients during good times because they were either low-ticket clients or dropped off frequently. It is high time that you should start targeting those business types to maintain your cash flow and keep your agency operational.

Apart from that, you can target a new niche altogether. For example, let's suppose your client is a digital marketing agency. In that case, you can offer email marketing solutions, Web design, website development, content marketing, and social media marketing apart from the existing services you provide, such as PPC or SEO.

You can select a particular niche to target, such as:

• Real Estate
• Retail
• Restaurants
• Bars
• Fashion
• eCommerce
• Financial Service

It will help you position yourself as an agency specializing in one or more of these domains. This way, you'll be able to achieve a better conversion rate than if you had positioned yourself as a me tooā  agency.

Conclusion

It is vital to have a plan during tough times. Use it as a survival kit when your major clients are either leaving or downsizing their contracts with you. Focus on maintaining cash flow even if it calls for doing what you never did before and focus on industries and clients you never considered before. Try to cut costs wherever possible and keep your agency lean, adaptable, and flexible. Your goal should be to survive the economic slowdown when the timelines are uncertain. Remember, even during a slowdown, there are businesses that are doing exceptionally well. You need to refocus your strategy and change your gears. As highlighted above, our white label platform can act as a lifesaver for digital agencies.

If you're a manager or a business owner handling your social accounts, you must have often wondered about the best times to post on social media.

Recency is a significant ranking factor used by both Facebook and Instagram algorithms. So, the best time to post your content is when most of your followers are online.

But it is easier said than done. There's no unique or universal "best time to post" as it changes drastically across different platforms and demographics. So, it's better to use analytics and the right tools to figure out.

Here we share a few tips to help you find your own best time to post on various social media platforms for maximum reach and visibility.

Facebook

You should use your posts' past performance and follower activity to find the best time to post on FB.

Source: Hootsuite's Social Team

According to the heatmaps of Hootsuite Analytics tools, most of HootSuite's Facebook followers are available around 3 PM EST every weekday. However, according to another metricāpast post-performanceāthe best time to post on Facebook is 6:20 AM and 12:20 PM PST during weekdays. These posting times can be considered the best as they highlight the widest gaps in the routine of HootSuite's social media followers when they spend time scrolling through their social media feeds.

For better decision-making, you can refer to Facebook statistics.

Instagram

According to the Hootsuite social media team, the best time slots for publishing content on Instagram are:

1. 11:00 AM-3:00 PM EST
2. 7:00-8:00 PM EST

The first slot is during mid-morning when people go to offices in New York or evening when they log off from their workstations and check social feeds on their smartphones. For more in-depth insights, you can check out Instagram statistics.

Since Instagram's algorithm works a lot like Facebook's, recency is a primary ranking factor here too. So, to increase your click-throughs, ensure that the content you publish in these slots is fresh and engaging.

Understanding user behavior is essential in social media marketing. Let's have a look at an Instagram-generated heatmap.

Source: Hootsuite's Social Team

When formulating a posting strategy, you can't just rely on a single factor, which is online behavior in this case. You should also consider the past performance of your posts and experiment with different time slots.

Twitter

According to the Hootsuite social media team, the best time to tweet is between 9 AM and 12 PM EST on weekdays. Click-through rate is the most crucial metric on Twitter for engagement. The 9 AM to 12 PM slot receives the highest click-throughs since it coincides with the office hours in the UK and the East Coast.

Though the morning hours on weekends are the busiest, marketers prefer to schedule posts a bit later to avoid the social media rush hour.

However, using the best time to post metric is not suitable when your audience is spread across the globe in different time zones. According to Nick Martin, Global Social Engagement Specialist at HootSuite, you should tweet content round the clock in small intervals for most traction.

Tip: There is no best time to post on Twitter because of its global audience. Schedule tweets round the clock, preferably every hour. You should do the same when running ad campaigns. Target people according to their time zone. For comprehensive Twitter stats for 2021, you should refer to Twitter statistics.

Linkedin

According to the Hootsuite social media team, the best time to post on LinkedIn is between 11 AM and 2 PM EST during weekdays.

According to Iain Beable, Hootsuite's Social Marketing Strategist, people are usually more active on LinkedIn during mornings, lunch hours, and evenings, but the pandemic has changed this. Now, the pattern is more scattered and spread over irregular intervals.

During the pandemic, users have been active even on weekends, especially Sunday evenings. Therefore, your LinkedIn strategy must be more data-driven and based on past performance. Also, keep experimenting to know what works.

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, recency is not as crucial on LinkedIn. Factors such as relevance, quality, and trending content matter a lot more.

To know more LinkedIn facts and stats, visit LinkedIn statistics in 2021 and LinkedIn demographics.

How to Find the Best Time to Post on Social Media?

1. Research When Your Audience is Most Active Online

Though most social media algorithms consider recency when determining organic ranking, you must know when your audience is online on Facebook and Instagram for better reach.

Twitter and LinkedIn are less transparent; they don't reveal too much information about their user activity. Therefore, you should use third-party tools to research audience behavior on these platforms.

Tip: Popular social media tool Hootsuite offers a built-in feature, The Best Time to Publish, which provides hour-by-hour user activity through heatmaps. It will fetch your posting history and help you figure out the optimal times to post that you haven't experimented with in the past few weeks.

2. Study Your Best Performing Posts

You need to use a data-driven approach to meet your social media performance goals. Learn how to use various social media analytics tools to maximize your engagement and reach on different platforms. You should focus on your most successful posts and study all the critical metrics. You can create a social media report to find the top-performing posts.Ā

Use the following metrics to assess your best performing social posts:

• Awareness (consider the number of impressions)
• Engagement (posts with high engagement rates)
• Sales and traffic (posts with highest click-throughs)

Analytics for Social Platforms

A. Facebook Analytics

Facebook provides three analytics tools:

• Facebook Page Insights: It contains information about page and post engagement, post and story reach, video views, and recommendations. It also provides data about follower growth, orders and revenue, and when your audience is online.
• Facebook Audience Insights: It tracks your audience’s demographics such as gender, age, job title, and relationship status.
• Facebook Ad Center: It covers information about ad spend, post engagement, audience reached, and click-throughs.

B. Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics is also divided into three parts:

• Account home overview: Gives information on monthly highlights and the best performing content
• The tweet activity dashboard: Tracks your tweet’s engagement and impressions for a selected period
• The campaign dashboard: Tracks your Twitter ads so you can measure important metrics such as impressions, reach, engagement rate, and cost per action

C. Instagram Analytics

Instagram insights can also be divided into three significant sections:

• Content: Helps you track the performance of your posts and Stories.
• Activity: This allows you to track the audience’s response to your posts and Stories.
• Audience: Gives information about your audience’s demographics and user-behavior by assessing when they are most likely to be online.
  

3. Get Competitor Insights

To get competitor insights:

1. Scroll through the feed of your major competitors
2. Find out their best-performing posts; assess the number of likes and shares
3. Do a competitive analysis to study the patterns
4. Reverse-engineer the strategies that led them to succeed; apply them to suit your specific needs

You can also try social listening to decide what kind of content you should post and when you should post it.

4. Post According to Your Audience's Time Zone

When you target a global audience, make sure to schedule your posts according to their time zone. Or else, publish round the clock. Use a social media scheduler to do it efficiently.

How to use a social media scheduler like HeroPost?

HeroPost helps schedule posts for all social platforms from a single dashboard. It allows you to publish posts directly or schedule them for posting at a later date. It has many valuable built-in features such as ‘Geolocation’ and ‘First Comment to Post.’ HeroPost facilitates unlimited scheduling for months ahead.

5. Test and Optimize

Even after due diligence, you would need routine A/B tests to achieve the desired results. Post the same content at different time slots to see when you get the best response.

According to Nick Martin, testing should be a continuous process. You should test for multiple variables such as the images used, the post's copy, and the posting time.

6. Keep Monitoring and Experimenting

Social media is constantly evolving, and so is the user behavior on these platforms. For instance, businesses resorted to remote work in 2020 following the coronavirus outbreak. It led to increased social media use. Earlier, people checked their feeds during lunch hours, but when they started working from home, they checked it even during their zoom meetings. When user habits shift so drastically, your social media strategy should also follow.

Conclusion

There's no standard or global best hour to post on social channels, especially when time is a variable factor. The ideal time to post may vary according to your audience's social behavior and the platforms you choose. However, a data-driven approach with continuous A/B testing and experimentation will help you get the best results possible and improve your ROI. You need to assess your past post-performance across all social channels. But for Instagram and Facebook, also consider when your audience is online.

It is important to plan your ad spend to make sure that you spend it in the right place. If you look at the sheer numbers, Google is the undisputed king of the web. With approximately 260 million unique visitors and 5 billion daily interactions, Google virtually controls the internet, and advertising on Google is one of the most effective ways to generate revenues for your business.

From Stanford University's grad school dorm room in 1995 to its launch in August 1998, a small search engine named Backrub became Google as we know it now.Ā  The mission of its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Inspired by its astronomical success worldwide, Google launched its advertising platform Google AdWords in the year 2000.Ā  Later on, it was rechristened as Google Ads in 2018.

You must have come across Google Ads and might have clicked on a few of the ads. In this article, you will learn how to build an advertising campaign on Google from scratch. It will also cover features specific to the platform and useful information on how to create, run, tweak and optimize the campaigns for the best results.

In order to be successful on this platform and generate clicks, your ad should be more focused and appealing.

What are Google Ads?

Google Ads come under the pay-per-click (PPC) model where, as the name suggests, the advertisers pay per click on an ad.

Search engines handle intent-based queries and return the most relevant results that match those queries. Google Ads also appear alongside the organic results and these ads can drive qualified traffic and generate hot leads for your business.

Google Ads are considered a sure-fire way to boost your business. You receive qualified traffic and phone calls when people click on those ads and this way, Google Ads keeps your business activities buzzing.

If done right, it may increase your CTR and traffic exponentially. Extra Space Storage launched Google Ads in 2014. Everyone is a potential customer for the second largest self-storage operator in the US. It was a big challenge to target such a wide audience and engage each customer with real-time messaging. They experimented with different ad copies and targeted specific customer segments using Google's ad optimizers to create relevant and timely ads. Through tailored messages and using different ad groups, it grew its CTR by 113%.

There is a science behind why Google Ads are more successful than other types of online ads. Google Ads allow your business to show up on the SERPs when your prospects are looking forā  those products and services. This way, you can reach your target audience right when they need you the most. They look at your ads when it makes sense to them.

Google Ads also help you improve those ads for even better performance.

Google attracts more than 35% of all digital advertising spend on the internet, yet it is one of the most challenging platforms in ensuring the return on investment.

If your ad campaigns aren't properly optimized and targeted, you may quickly lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars without getting any returns.

Introduction to the New Google Ads User InterfaceĀ

If you are planning to kickstart your first Google Ads campaign, consider yourself lucky as they have recently rolled out an update that drastically improves the platform. Not only is the new user interface more user-friendly, but it also offers advanced analytics and reporting features.

Here are a few things the new interface changed:

A. Creating ad groups (crucial to your ROI and campaign success)

B. One dashboard to run the campaigns and access all kinds of data

C. Get campaign snapshots for better analysis and reporting

D. Get advanced insights to better monitor your campaigns

E. New account overview page for a quick assessment of all the campaigns running on it

What is The Quality Score and How To Use It?

You must be familiar with the concept of the quality score to run a successful Google Ads campaign.

The score is controlled by three factors:

A. Your Landing Page: Consider the following factors:

1. Check if it loads quickly
2. Measure conversion rate
3. Measure bounce rate

These metrics will help you know whether you are receiving the right kind of traffic and whether your landing page is able to meet their needs.

B. Expected CTR: Track the performance of your ad campaigns through this metric. Measure it against the average CTR.

C. Ad Relevance: Your ad should be relevant in relation to the search queries being used.

Why is the Quality Score so Important?

According to AdEspresso, quality and relevance scores are directly related to the CTR and inversely proportional to costs per click. So, a campaign with a better quality score is more likely to succeed and yield a better ROI. A good score will also help you rank higher with your ads without having to bid higher.

Should I Advertise on Google?

If you want to know whether Google Ads is right for you, here is a suggestion. Spend on Google Ads only if you have a budget to spare. However, with trial and error, Google Ads can work for most businesses. You don't need a large sum of money to spare;Ā  you can invest a few hundred dollars to test if it works for your business.

If you want to know how much you need to pay for a single conversion, do some simple math. Every industry has an average cost per click and an average conversion rate. So, if an average conversion rate is 5%, it means you would need 20 website visits to get a single conversion.

The total spends required for a conversion is the average cost per click multiplied by the number of visits required. If the cost of conversion exceeds your cost margin, then Google may not be a viable option for you. The objective of posting an ad is to make money and not just to generate sales. You want a positive ROI apart from driving sales.

Types of Advertising on Google Ads

At present, Google offers four major types of ads i.e. display ads, video ads, search network ads, and app ads. Let’s discuss all these major types to understand how they can work for you.

• Search Network Ads

Search network ads are among the most prevalent Google ads that appear as text ads on Google SERPs. So, whenever we search Google using a query, the ads that appear on top are referred to as the search network ads. Obviously, these ads are triggered by specific keywords and you have to bid on them to appear higher on the SERPs.

• Display Ads

Google display ads would appear on the websites under Google’s Display Network and can show up in the form of text or banner ads including Gmail. Display ads are mostly used for remarketing purposes when we want the visitors back on our site for conversion. If you are visiting a website and come across an ad on it, it must be coming from the display network.

• Video Ads

Video ads mostly run on YouTube and they are displayed based on your watch history on YouTube and search queries made on Google.

• App Ads

If you have used a mobile app, you have probably come across some ads while using that app. These ads are called app ads and these are pretty common on free versions of various apps.

• Google Shopping Ads

If you have an E-commerce site, you can implement Google Shopping and you will be able to advertise products from your online store directly on Google.

However, the most common types of ads among all these types are search network ads and display ads. Contrary to what many people think, it is relatively easy to set up an ad. If you want to appear on top of search results and want to attract leads, you can begin with the search network.

Create a Remarketing List

Marketing is all about engagement, conversations, reminders, and persuasion. Remarketing is also an effort to send marketing messages to people who have already been attracted to your website but failed to convert. However, the site is not at fault as 98% of people who visit a website for the first time do not convert.

To prepare your remarketing list, go to your Audience Manager and create a new list based on different interactions such as website visitors, YouTube videos viewers, or app users. You can also create a custom list of your own. It will allow you to target people as per these interactions.

Remarketing campaigns are considerably cheaper and have a lower cost per conversion than the normal campaigns because in these campaigns the target audience has already interacted with your brand at least once and is familiar with it.

In-Market Audiences

Google uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify buyers with purchase intent. Using in-market audiences, Google collects search query data and studies users' online activities including the sites they visited, ads they clicked, and products they bought to find people with purchase intent with a high degree of accuracy.

The process of refining the ads gets better with time as with machine learning, Google understands what is working and what's not. Google also advises you to mix your in-market audiences campaign with remarketing campaigns to get the best results.

Use Competitor Data to Get Campaign Ideas

Spying on your competitors on how they are targeting the audiences on a particular network will help you save money and time and make your campaigns highly effective.

You can expand your campaign based on competitor insights and make them even better. You can use tools like SEMrush to explore the exact keywords that your competitors are using.

SEMrush can do the following things for you:

A. Helps you track your competitors' landing pages and how they are ranking.

B. Provides you with all the data you need to create a powerful campaign to outsmart your competition.

C. Provides you with ad copy ideas saving you time.

Learn to use Google Ads Keyword Planner

Google Ads Keyword Planner is one of the most powerful tools available to marketers that helps them find the most effective keywords for their business. Apart from relevant keywords, it also provides insights on those keywords people are using anywhere in the world to search for the products or services you offer. It also helps you with the suggested bids and the amount you should bid. The keyword tool lets you know how competitive these keywords are. These insights will help you make better decisions for your campaign.

The best thing about this tool is that it will give you a long list of suggested keyword ideas so that you can create a campaign according to your budget and still get positive results.

How to Advertise on Google?

Before you get ready to dive into PPC advertising and reap its enormous benefits, go through the following checklist to make sure you are prepared for the rendezvous.

• A properly designed website and landing page created specifically for the purpose of conversion
• Make sure you are ready with your PPC strategy and have your goals defined.
• Decide a budget for your campaign and also a timeline to test the results

Create your Google Ads account

Before setting up a new Google Ads account, you need to sign in to your Google account. Add your business information on the next page and click submit. After the congratulation message flashes, click on the Explore Your Campaignā  button.

To start advertising on Google, after account creation, follow these steps:

Step 1:Ā  Define a Goal

Click on the Start Nowā  button on the Google Ads homepage and then click on the New Campaignā  once you are on the dashboard.

You will reach a new page where Google will ask you your advertising goals. These goals will help Google know the type of audience you want to target and how you will pay the bid money.

Tip: Defining your campaign's goal is important as it will decide the success or failure of the campaign.

First, you need to learn how to set smart objectives. It will help you to build systems to achieve your campaign objective.

The tool will then prompt you to create a campaign. However, you should skip that step the first time, as your current objective is to know the interface and how it actually works.

Step 2: Add Your Business Name and Keywords

After defining your goals, click nextā . On this page, you will have to confirm your business name. You also need to add the URL of the landing page you want to send your audience to. This information can't be changed, so make sure there are no errors.

The old interface of Google AdWordsā  needed many key inputs after this, such as choosing a budget, selection of keywords, and billing information, etc. However, the new user interface will take you directly to the campaign page, where this information is needed in a different format.

Before you create your first campaign, you need to complete some vital steps.

Step 3: Perform Primary Keyword Research

Keyword research for the Google Ads campaign is a vast topic. However, you should focus on the following key areas to build your PPC keyword list.

A. Website: Look for the keywords your website is targetingB. Use a keyword research tool: You can use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner (for keyword suggestions and details), Ubersuggest (to get the queries and search terms people are using for similar products), and SpyFu to get competitor insights.C. Brainstorming: Think like a customer and come out with your own keywords.D. Include brand terms: Use your own brand terms. For example, Nescafe can use the terms like Nescafe gold, Nescafe coffee, and Nescafe cup, etc.

Your keyword research doesn't stop here, as it's an ongoing process, but these steps are enough to build the initial list.

Using Google Keyword Planner for Keyword Research

From your campaign dashboard, go to Tools and Settingsā  and then click on Keyword Plannerā .

Once you are in the Keyword Planner Tool, go to Discover the New Keyword Toolā .Ā  With the help of this tool, you can find relevant keywords and also get ideas for new keywords to target.

When you enter your product name or the business you are in, click on Get Resultsā .Ā  The tool will return a list of keywords with crucial details about them. It will include the average competition the keyword is facing, average monthly searches, top-of-page bid, low and high range, and ad impression share.

Step 4: Set Up the Ad Groups

Advertising involves lots of experimentation and variation in ads and therefore, you need different types of themes for your ads. An ad group is a group of ads with the same theme and target audience. For example, if you have a restaurant business, there can be different ad groups such as desserts, beverages, and snacks. Each ad group can target different keywords. For example, if you choose dessertsā  as an ad group, you can target keywords such as chocolate cake, ice cream, cupcakes, and cookies, etc.

Before creating ad groups, you can divide your campaigns based on:

• Seasonality
• The location you’re targeting
• Products and services you offer
• Keyword performance and bidding rates
• Brand names and the generic names people normally use
• Keyword match

Step 5: Ad Creation & Landing Page Mapping

The next step is to focus on writing ads and mapping landing pages with each ad group.

Writing ads is the most interesting part of the job - designing an actual ad. Create the ad headline as well as its description and then check it in the preview box on the top right. Google provides you tips during this process with the help of sample ads so that you can do it on your own.

After that, you can proceed with campaign creation and focus on campaign settings. Without properly written ads and excellent landing page experience, your campaign stands high chances of failure.

The most challenging part is to write great ad copy and it's possible only when you know your audience and what appeals to it.

However, the key to writing a captivating ad copy is to know your customers' pain points. If you are able to do that, they will likely click on your ad and convert. You can also do some audience research beforehand.

Writing ads to catch the attention of your target audience and a properly designed landing page is crucial to achieving a higher click-through rate, low cost per lead, and maximum ROI.

Here are some PPC ad copywriting tips you can use.

Tip: Your ad text also affects your ad quality score.Ā

Character Limits for your PPC ads

In a Google ad, your arsenal includes 300 potentially visible characters with three headlines, two descriptions, and the URL to entice a user to click on your ad.

Responsive ads are the latest ad format on Google. To know more, read this article by Mark Ferree.

Add Extensions

Add extensions appear below the ad and advertisers can leverage them to enhance the impact of an ad. You can go through this Google support document to know how to select extensions to use.

Landing Page Mapping

Each ad should direct the customer to a landing page that should offer exactly what he is looking for in a minimum number of clicks. With a shorter attention span and a lack of patience, users may go back to the search engine if they don't find what they are looking for. For example, if a user has searched for Elizabeth Arden perfumes, he should be diverted to the page where he can find most of the bestseller perfumes the brand offers.

With this, your preparation work to set up your campaign is complete.

Step 6: Campaign Creation & Settings

When you are ready with your ad group variations and the landing pages, it's time to go back where you started from ā€” i.e. signing into your Google Ads account.

Go to Campaign>New Campaign

You'll be prompted to a page where you need to select your goal.

You can choose from a variety of campaign options such as Search Network, Display Network, or the combination of both, shopping ads, video or universal app campaigns, etc.

You also have the option to choose devices, languages, and locations for your campaign.

Choose your bid strategy

You can now choose your daily budget. Set this to a realistic number and then modify it as you go ahead and learn from your campaigns.

Google also offers automated bid strategies but you should start with manual bidding and choose a cost per click you can afford for a campaign.

Step 7: Finalizing Your New Google Ads Account

After creating your first campaign, you'll finish and save. Now, you'll be prompted to enter your billing information to trigger your ad. You can also go to the top right corner of the ads interface and select billing & paymentsā  manually if you're not prompted to it. Google also allows you to make prior arrangements to be invoiced through credit cards on a monthly basis. In that case, you don't need to enter your billing information.

Review and publish

It's time to review your ad. Once you are satisfied with all the aspects, you can click on the submit button.

Hurray, you have created your first Google Ad!

Technically, the process of creating your first ad is over at this stage, but a bigger challenge remains in front of you and that is to tweak your ad as per the Analytics' recommendations. You cannot achieve the best results without refining, optimizing, and improving your existing ads as per the insights received by using Analytics.

Tracking Google Ads with Google Analytics

Tracking and analysis is an important part of running an ad campaign on Google and if you are not doing it, you can't gain much from it. When you analyze your data, you can determine what tweaks you need to make to supercharge your campaign. It is important to know that Google Analytics is not integrated automatically with Google Ads, and you need to set it up first. Linking your Google Ads account to Google Analytics property allows you to see the full customer cycle i.e. till a customer makes a purchase.

Have a look at the crucial metrics of click data and costs of your Google Ads on Analytics. Analytics is incredibly important to design future campaigns and perform tweaks after evaluating the performance of current campaigns. In order to track conversions, you can set up event tracking.

Make sure your landing page is optimized and the User Experience (UX) on it is excellent. The Call to Action (CTA) should also be clear and there shouldn't be any distraction.