5 Tips To Get Started With PPC Advertising For Online Business Owners

If you’ve read, watched, or listened to our content before you’ll already know that here at RED we’re big advocates for your organic marketing strategy, as we’re often championing all things, social media, email marketing and content.

But when it comes to strategy there is a range of paid-for advertising options you can use to expand your reach and actually get more customers. These could be people who have never heard of you and might never hear of you without the power of paid ads. 

Exploring PPC ads is often the next step for online business owners, once they become more focused on their marketing. At a first glance, they can look really complicated and a little bit scary…

So, if you find yourself saying “how do I even get started”, don’t worry, to help you avoid some of the confusion that comes when stepping into PPC marketing, we’re sharing our top 5 simple tips you can use to get the ball rolling with your ads.

But wait… what are paid ads?

Before we start diving into our 5 tips, let’s unpack what we mean when we say paid ads.

What we’re basically referring to is the Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Instagram, or social media style of advertising platform, or even something along the lines of Google Ads and Bing Ads. 

These platforms allow you to outline an audience that you want to advertise to, upload some content that you want them to see and put money behind it to make your content seen by them. 

Sometimes when we refer to ads people think of the individual posts on social media. What we’re actually referring to, in this case, is when you put money behind a particular campaign.

Tip 1. Organic first!

Before you start with paid ads, it’s important to consider why you're looking at ads in the first place and what they're useful for. 

Although ads can be a fantastic part of your marketing, it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to put out ads and build a sustainable business on just an ad centric presence. You're going to need a strong organic strategy first, so an organic strategy should always come before running paid ads. 

If you’ve already done the groundwork when it comes to your organic marketing campaigns and strategies, running ads can be a great ‘foot on the gas’ element of your strategy to expand your reach, however, they shouldn’t be your sole strategy.

So really think about why you're considering ads, if it’s because your social media platform is shiny and new and you've only just got started with a few posts and very little traction - don’t panic, this is to be expected, keep doing what you're doing and grow a little bit of momentum to grow a strong foundation. You’ll then be in the best position to get great results when you decide it’s time to focus on ads.

If you’re looking for more details on how to do that, we have tons of videos on our Youtube channel, lots of resources on our blog or you can book a call with us if you want to find out more about your strategy.

Tip 2. Retargeting

Have you ever thought of something you really want to buy at one o'clock in the morning, looked it up, then fallen asleep and forgotten all about it? That is until an ad for the same thing pops up a few days later and reminds you to press purchase!

This is retargeting (sometimes called remarketing) and it allows you to re-engage people who've been on your page, visited a particular page on your website or have connected with you in some way previously. 

Using tools like Facebook Pixel or Google tags, you can identify people that performed a specific action,  you can then advertise specifically to those people so that they don’t forget about you.

It can take multiple touchpoints to actually turn somebody into a customer, so this is one of the most effective ways to advertise through ads. It specifically targets people who’ve already shown some initial interest and are more likely to convert, instead of first-time visitors who could be less likely to convert. 

Tip 3. Lookalike ads

Another thing that you can do on your ads that's really beneficial is something called a lookalike ad. 

If you’ve completed step 1 and have an audience that you've already built organically, you can use your customers or email list and upload them to your ad platform to use as a framework to find and target people that are similar to your current customers. 

Although you can select an audience when you're creating your ads by outlining what your audience is interested in, lookalike ads help you to discover the common threads between your customers and make further targeted decisions on new people. 

And here’s the best bit! It’s automated so you don't have to do anything. The platforms themselves will actually figure out what the comparisons are and build out your lookalike audience for you based on the data that you input. 

For lookalike audiences to work you need to have data, so if you're just getting started with your business you’re going to have to be a little patient and persevere with Tip 1 for a little longer.

Tip 4. A/B Testing 

If you're not familiar, AB testing basically refers to, using two different pieces of content and sending them out to a smaller percentage of your audience to see which one performs best. 

For example, this could look like a Facebook ad with two different images, when you are AB testing, what will happen is before Facebook sends up the ad to everyone, it will show the ad to a small percentage of the potential audience. They’ll then send out the most successful ad to the rest of the users that fit your outlined audience.

This is so good because you're not just looking at what you think people are going to like, but you're actually getting them to almost vote by their actions.

If you're setting up any kind of campaign you should always be using AB testing.

Tip 5. Use the best platforms

Last but not least in our 5 tips is to not limit yourself to Facebook.

We’ve mentioned Facebook a few times in this blog post as it’s probably the biggest PPC ad platform out there, especially in social media, but - it's not the only one. So, make sure that you think about where your ideal customer actually hangs out online and use that platform to target them efficiently.

We’ve actually seen a lot of success on LinkedIn Ads on behalf of our clients and now there are some really, really great things coming out about with Tik Tok ads. 
You might be concerned about your budgets and trying to stretch your money over every available platform at the start. But it's important to either focus on one platform at a given time or be able to allocate a decent budget to a selection of relevant platforms for your audience,  if you want to run ads in multiple places.

If you don't have lots of budget to put into different platforms but you’re not sure which one is best for you we recommend testing them one by one. For example, in the first three months, you might want to focus on Facebook ads, then move over to LinkedIn, and then Tik Tok, then review which ones have been the most successful.  

Bonus tip. Budget

We couldn’t write a blog without talking about budget, so we thought we’d round up our tips with a little preface about what we think you should spend in your budget, as this can often be the trickiest part when you start. 

We always recommend being sensible with your budgets. Your total marketing spend should be roughly 10% of your revenue, however, that doesn't mean that you should put 10% into paid ads, rather that you make an investment when it comes to your marketing - this could look like hiring photographers, different expertise, or working with an agency like us. 

If you’re considering ads, you should factor in what you're already spending when it comes to marketing and use any remaining budget for your ads. So, say you spend roughly 8% of your revenue on your marketing, you might consider using the additional 2% to use in your ad budget.

Should I Boost?

If you’re still feeling confused about paid ads and boosting Facebook posts looks more appealing to you, please - step away from your laptop!

Boosting posts is known in the industry as Facebook's moneymaker and it doesn't really tend to see the best results. Taking time to familiarise yourself with ads manager and some of the more complicated Facebook tools when it comes to advertising will allow you to expand your audience in a more strategic way and you’ll likely see higher performance and a better ROI (return on investment).

So, what is the next step?

At this point, you should have a good understanding of paid ads and how to get started.

PPC can be a fantastic addition to your digital marketing, but it’s quite a technical subject. If you’re looking for some help, why not get in touch with us today? We can help you with PPC management.