Should You Start Running Advertisements Online Right Now?

You've decided to kick-start your marketing efforts and quickly settle on running some advertisements. After all, that's just simply how it's done, isn't it? Marketing may as well be synonymous with advertising. Just run some ads and you'll immediately gain new business, new sales, new revenue.

I've got some bad news for you: it's not that simple.

Why Should I Advertise Online?

This is a question almost every marketer has asked themselves. 

The bad marketers say, "To increase sales." Then they leave it at that. They focus on creating some ads, which they pump a lot of money into, then they wonder why they're not getting very good results.

When good marketers ask themselves the same question, they go deeper. They truly consider whether they need to advertise at all, is it the best tactic to help them reach their goals? They consider what the purpose of the advertisements will be, what else needs to be built around those ads and how they'll refine and guide the entire customer process.

The truth is, many companies see advertising as an easy answer to a problem, but they never think it through completely. They just think advertising is something that needs to be done and they do it. But advertising is useless without also considering everything else!

"Let's do some ads to increase our sales" isn't a well thought out strategy, but many think it is. Before you begin advertising, really think about it and whether it's the right time to do it.

How Do I Figure Out If I Should Start Advertising Online?

First of all, consider what your advertising will do for you. When I ask many clients to do this, they tell me that advertising will drive traffic to their website. The more traffic the better!

This is another pitfall of the advertising dream though. Many think that an advertising campaign that drives lots of traffic to their website is a success. But traffic isn't the mark of a good campaign, traffic that converts is.

So before starting on any campaign, it's important to come up with the main end goal, then work back from that goal to your advertisement. Each stage of the customer process needs to be considered. What will happen to your users once they click your ads? If there is no defined process (or funnel) for them to follow, your advertising money will be wasted. Traffic isn't enough. You need to do something with that traffic to be successful.

If you want people to buy your service, is there a specific page (a landing page) that describes that service and sells it to them. After they read the page, then what happens? Are you just hoping the person will decide to email you, or will you use a form to collect their email address to send them further email marketing?

Since the majority of online advertising is going to drive traffic to your website or a landing page, you need to plan out and create that system ahead of time. Ads are useless without a system built around them that works!

Don't think of advertising as something that stands alone, think of it as one part of your overall marketing strategy. A campaign doesn't consist of just ads, but everything else too. 

Hopefully, by now I've scared you enough to go back to the drawing board and truly plan out your campaign first before you even start to think about creating some ads!