How to BOOST Your Business with Online Ads | 9-Min Challenge

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of our forum moderators and administrator actually, GT, who is asking a question about online advertising. So he wrote in saying, "I've always been a believer in the purpose and value of advertising, but I've never been confident in paying for online advertising." Because of earlier attempts at promoting my business this way, I'm not experiencing any success with it. When you talk to experienced marketers, some say it works, some say it doesn't. I say it might depend on where you advertise. Do you have any paid advertising online? How do you decide when and where to advertise and who to trust or believe their advertising offers and promotions? GT. So thanks for the question, GT. I know a big issue a lot of entrepreneurs face is how to promote their business, and online advertising is actually one of the most effective ways if you do it right, to be able to promote your business. And if you look at, um, any of these, the surveys of the Inc., uh, fastest growing companies in, in the country, you'll find that online marketing, including advertising, is one of the most cost-effective ways that they use to grow their business, and one of the, the most effective anyways, regardless of the cost, to be able to market their company. So how I've done it, and how I might recommend you to look into it, is start looking at where you're getting your current leads from. And I'm always skeptical of dumping a lot of money into something and not seeing results. So I hate spending money until I'm making money. Just a bottom line rule. I hate putting money out until I'm making even a little bit of money in, just to show me that it works. And so at the beginning, I'll always invest a lot of time and effort into launching something and understanding and learning it before I put my dollars into it. And I still do that to this day, uh, as much as possible, and just try to put my time and effort instead of spending any money on it. And if it gets to the point where I can make a little bit of money on it, then I'll invest it to help it grow. So what I would try to do here in this case, and I've looked at it for my own business as well, is I'll start with where am I getting current leads from, even if it's not a lot. And before I start spending money on one of the social networking sites or online advertising, I try to think, am I making anything now? And I try to make it work without having to spend any money on it. So we can look at a couple examples. I'll look at Google, I'll look at Facebook, and I'll look at LinkedIn. These are all places where we've done advertising, or now we're currently doing advertising as well. So Google, you can do it through the AdWords account, right? You have your AdWords on the side, helps drive leads. What I try to do first is see, are you getting leads and business from the search side? If you're getting some kind of business from Google, then it makes sense that your customers are there, and to investigate spending some money on advertising to be able to grow that. If your customers are there, that's where you want to be spending not only your money, but your time. You want to hang out where your customers are, because that's going to increase your conversions. If you're hanging out around non-customers and paying to get your image shown to people who are not your potential customers, which which often happens, people just dump money into advertising, then you're probably not gonna get a lot of great results, right? You wanna hang out where your customers are and spend your time and money there promoting to them. So if you're getting some results from Google through organic search, then I would investigate on a small scale using the AdWords account and looking at investigating new keywords to help drive traffic to your site. You wanna be able to track it as much as possible to a lead. I don't know— sorry, to a sale. I don't know what you're selling exactly, but the closer you can get to an actual sale, the better. And Google AdWords gives you tracking abilities to show which keywords are actually leading to sales. If you actually sell a product, then you can track it right to the sale. You can tell how much money each keyword actually makes you. If you're a consultant or you're selling a service, then it may be hard to track a sale, but you could track to, say, the Contact Us page. So somebody who clicks on your contact page is more likely to be a client or at least a prospect than somebody who just hits your homepage and bounces. So you want to be able to try to track your leads as much as possible. It'll show you quite clearly which keywords generate money and which ones don't. And the benefit of this, which I really enjoy, is you— there's two parts. One, if it works, you can expand, right? So start with a small budget, keep testing out on a small budget, see if it works or not. And if you know you're getting organic searches and that's leading to sales for you, then there should be a way to make work on the advertising side, you just have to keep experimenting with it on a small scale again before you expand it. If you can show that it can work on a small scale, then you can dump more money into it to expand. The other great thing I love about the AdWords side of things is if you think about your own experience, do you click more on the ads or do you click more on the organic results? Probably more the organic results. So the challenge here is it can be really hard to rank organically. It could take you a long time to rank organically for different keywords. But if you can advertise for them and show that you're making money from advertising, then you can invest your SEO efforts and your content creation efforts into trying to rank for those keywords. So you're not just showing up for the ad side, but you're showing up organically as well. Uh, and that'll help drive a lot more traffic. So AdWords is a great way to be able to test different keywords before you start your SEO efforts and your content creation efforts on your own website. So that's, uh, Google. If you look at Facebook, we do a little bit of advertising there as well. Again, same thing, are your customers there? Are the people who you want to reach hanging out on Facebook? If they are, then that's a potential option for you. If they aren't, then don't waste your time on it. Just because somebody else is advertising on Facebook doesn't mean you have to. So you have to make sure your customers are there. If they are, a great thing about Facebook advertising is you can really target your demographics well. So with Google, all you're doing is targeting certain keywords. Where with Facebook you can actually target demographics. So people who live in the United States, who live in Canada, or of this, a certain age, or are married or not, or part of different groups, have certain interests. So you can really hone in on the types of people who you want to reach. A quick example that I'll use for local business. So my wife runs a salsa dancing company here in Toronto, and we'll have different events. So salsa events, bachata events, which is another type of dance. And if you wanted to advertise for it, you could pick people who live in Toronto, uh, who have an interest in salsa or bachata or salsa music or bachata music, and you can show those people an advertisement. And so it's a great way to be able to target people and promote different events compared to doing a search, uh, on Google. So that's a great way to be able to reach people. Again, make sure your customers are there. Uh, the last one I would look at is LinkedIn. So something that we do a little bit of advertising on And with LinkedIn, again, you wanna make sure you're getting some traffic from there. I'd invest your time in posting to LinkedIn, posting on different groups, trying to get involved, and see, are you getting any kind of results here? Right, if you're spending some time and effort and you're not getting anything back, it may mean that your customers aren't there. And, you know, if you spend money on advertising, it's just gonna be a waste of money. So what I've done is we have our profile on LinkedIn, and I'm active in a couple groups, and we get some feedback from the members, and it helped generate some business. So we've done a little bit of advertising there, and what I love about LinkedIn is you can target specific companies. So you can say, I wanna work with— if you wanna target Microsoft, you wanna target Google, you wanna target Hewlett-Packard, whatever the company is, you can target those companies or ranges of employees. So if you wanna target Fortune 500 companies, you can say, okay, people with 10,000 employees plus or 5,000 employees plus. You can target industries. You can target job titles, so if you wanna be able to reach out to the HR managers across companies with 5,000+ employees, you can do that through LinkedIn. And so again, it allows you to really target your advertising in a way that you can't do on Facebook and you can't do through Google. So wherever you're advertising online, uh, there are lots of opportunities to be able to potentially make money, but again, I'd make sure that your customers are there. If they are, you hang out there, spend the time, get involved, be an active member of the community. And if you're getting some kind of leads, even if it's a little bit, then it may make sense to ramp it up through advertising. If you're not making anything, then I wouldn't waste my time and my money by investing into an ad campaign. When you do get started with advertising, start small, prove that it can work before you dump a lot more into it. So start small, test, again, spend a lot of time refining your target market, refining your keywords, refining your message, and when you find one that works, then it's easier to put money in to expand it. So hopefully that helps, GT. Good luck with your online advertising. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you. And if you have a question for me, I'd love to be able to answer it for you if you want to leave it in the comments below. And if you just want to leave a comment to tell me what you thought about it, I'd really appreciate it too. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.