The more information you have about your consumers, the easier to offer them products meeting their needs.
Many websites and mobile applications require a registration. If your business requires a registration in one form or another, the best option is to do it through social networks. You can easily allow consumers to register for your project through their already existing profiles on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. From consumers’ point of view, this is an easy and pleasant option because they make the registration in just a couple of clicks without the need to remember new usernames, passwords, and other data required by conventional registration methods.
In the meantime, it is advisable to collect the entire possible information about the consumer and to save it in your database – birthdate, workplace, friends, hometown, state, gender, family status, relatives, etc. All this information may be used for the correct advertising targeting to the specific consumer and/or to sell it one day to different advertising networks. If you remember the pieces of advice about how to use email marketing most efficiently – this option can be a very good start.
Traffic from (paid) advertising
When we started establishing the Bulgarian internet in 1996-1997, there was no money in it. Back then, we used to do one thing or another but always for free. Nowadays, major companies are enforcing the opinion that everything is money and that it is impossible to break into the internet without serious investments in advertising. This is a very good marketing trick and many people swallow the bait and direct their entire resource to paid advertising. If you rely entirely on paid advertising, you will have a big problem when the budget is depleted. Usually, in this case, the traffic to your website registers a serious drop because instead of working on all possible channels that lead to the consumers, you have used the fastest and the most expensive. However, when the money is spent, you may find yourself unable to develop any other channel or it may be already too late and thus you will put your business at risk.
This is the reason that made me stress on all the other channels you can use to reach your consumers before advertising. If you have done your homework and you already use all possible channels, you can freely experiment with paid advertising, too, and make it a small piece of your entire mixture of communication channels with consumers.
Facebook and Google (AdWords) again
The two IT giants allow you to personally manage your advertisements that are strictly targeted and appear before exactly the consumers you want. Websites like Bing and Yahoo offer such services, too, but their market share is insignificantly small and investing there at this stage would be a waste of money.
Google AdWords
This Google service provides the opportunity to create a brief text (or graphic) advertisement resembling the search results. You can set the price you are ready to pay per click on your own, as well as to outline a daily budget that you can spend, whether the ad to appear before consumers of concrete nationality or before all, and what is most important – under what keywords to appear. This way, if someone is searching for an umbrella, while you are offering car tires, you will not enter the results page. However, if someone is searching for tires, your advertisement will pop up above the search results or to the right of the screen, right next to them.
AdWords is not a new service but it is becoming more and more popular, especially among companies with small budgets, which want to convert the traffic to their website into real revenues. Good targeting is one of the factors that make this type of advertising more attractive than display advertising. If you purchase 100,000 impressions in some of the Top 10 news websites in Bulgaria, you will pay about $1,000 and more. However, the best case scenario here is your CTRs to reach 0.5%, which makes 500 clicks or 500 potential consumers on your website. If you estimate the price per click, you will find out that each of these 500 consumers has cost you $3.
Even if you are ready to pay such a price per click, it is important to bear in mind that every website attracts different visitors in terms of gender, and professional and personal interests, looking for information about one topic or another. The news websites enjoy an audience starting from 15-year-old teenagers to 65-year-old businessmen or pensioners. If you advertise your tires there, it will turn out that most of the people, who have seen your advertisement, do not have a car, others are women and they will rather let their men deal with this, others have bought new tires just recently and they are not interested in what you offer, and there will be also people, who live in the other part of the country or the world, where you do not have a store or respectively you cannot deliver your goods to them.
Even if you redirect your advertising towards car websites, there is no guarantee that you are advertising before the right consumers because, in order to make a decision the consumer should click on the banner and buy the product you offer – i.e., they should already need something that your advertisement can provide. That is why AdWords advertising is highly efficient. It appears before people, who are interested in exactly the type of product you offer and this way the number of the accidental visits on your website (made out of curiosity or by mistake) is cut drastically, while the chances to realize a sale or win consumers with the product or service you offer increases.
But that is not all. Lately, I have had to search for, test, and analyze business management systems. Thanks to the high number of searches I made on the issue, Google has created a profile of me with information about what I have been interested in recently. This way, even if I visit real estate, construction, or sports websites, which use Google’s advertisements as a source of financing, I am shown advertisements of software systems, as the biggest search engine knows that I am interested in this.
AdWords is an advertising instrument that allows you to reach exactly those internet consumers you need. For example, if you make a hospice advertising or hospital for rehabilitation, you can target the users. This way you receive the best possible traffic that you can convert into sales, registrations, or whatever your website is aiming at.
