Developing a Digital Advertising Plan Distinctively for Your Online Business

Digital advertising plan is the secret to driving traffic to your website – as traffic is one major challenge to most online marketers. Getting people’s attention is a serious business, as it drives them to your websites and convert them to your email list and becoming a loyal customer.

And understanding the steps to creating a good digital advertising plan, it will absolutely give you a platform to fully control the flow of your traffic and how much you can sell to them.

In this guide, I’ll be walking you through the process of digital ads planning, setting up, and how to optimize your ads, as well as the primary metrics you must keep your eyes on, the message you should make use of as a media buyer, and the persons in your business who should be in charge for online advertising.

Let get started…

What Is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising is the promotional method where one makes use of digital mediums – Google and Bing Ads network to create business, product and service awareness to the general public or targeted audience through ads.

This is the best economical tactic for digital marketers to stretch their reach to a target audience and increase their ROI.

You can carry out storytelling in an innovative approach, enrich personalization to take full advantage of customer experience, and pass on a strong brand in your audience’s mind.

The differences between traditional advertising and online advertising is that digital advertising can boost relations and engagement in a creative way. As it boosts interaction, it makes it stress-free for you to cling to your target audience busy and drawing them closer to take the productive actions that you have designed.

As you can see, developing a digital advertising plan helps you to get an adequate amount of information about your audience to influence their minds and emotions. As a result, improving your customer experience.

Learn more on what is digital advertising – this is a comprehensive guide for anyone who chose to get started.

But before we move ahead, let’s get a clear understanding about why paid traffic is a wiser deal than organic.

What’s The Difference Between a Paid and Organic Traffic?

We all know that free traffic is most times the desire of every website owner or digital marketer, right? This is the more reason most businesses target organic traffic at the beginning.

Altogether, getting a steady flow of organic traffic, help you pocket the savings. But then as with the whole lot in life, you get what you pay for.

A more relaxed way to I can explain this, is with this simple comparison: the water hose vs. the rain.

Paid traffic is like a water hose. You are in charge of the direction it’s pointing to, the volume of water driving from it, and to what time you let the water flow. You can put it on and off at any time you feel like.

Now get this, if you’re receiving more traffic than what you want, with paid traffic, you can reduce the flow. So with a digital advertising plan, you have power over where it’s going, how fast, and what time.

Learn more about paid traffic in search engine marketing, display advertising.

Organic traffic: in contrast, is can be liken as a rain. You aren’t certain what time or if it will come, how steady it will the traffic be, and how long it will last. Even if you pay attention to the weather forecast all you want. You aren’t in control of the rain.

So…

1. With organic traffic, you can lose traffic if Google changes their algorithm.
2. If a competitor has a huge launch, you could lose traffic to them.
3. You also have no control over where the traffic goes. Just as simple things like changing the URL of your landing page can mess things up.
4. You can love all the control of paid traffic without it actually costing you anything. You do that by developing funnels that give you money back on ad spend.

1. Hence in real meaning, you can get customers for free, and then as soon as your advertising costs have been pay back, use simple tactics to develop loyalty and optimize your customers’ lifecycle importance.

1. The better your paid traffic is, the better your organic traffic will be as well, because good advertising drives traffic—and the pages that get lots of traffic tend to rank higher in search engines. This helps you to creates an upward spiral of traffic acquisition. A win-win, if you will.

But then again it’s very key to be genuine. Don’t expect to run one traffic advertising and assume it to mysteriously accumulate a million-dollars in your bank account.

If you’ll be looking for a continuous drift of leads and customers for your business – website, you must look at a digital advertising plan.

Digital Advertising Plan – Top 3 Sources for Paid Traffic

Platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter are some of the best channels for paid traffic.

On the other hand, to identify which one best fit your business, you must know where your customers are coming from and which of these ad platforms are appropriate for the type of marketing you do.

Generally, you’ll in all probability start with Facebook and Google. Though according to Business Insider, these two traffic sites drive 80% of referral traffic, and this is in addition than all the extra platforms combined.

Facebook and Google are your best supplier of paid trafficbut again, it be influenced by what you’re trying to do and achieve.

1.  Google – The Yellow Pages

For the reason that Google is a search engine, individuals start here as soon as they’re searching for information. As a result, it’s a lot like the Yellow Pages.

For you to drive traffic through Google, you’ll need to bid on keywords that will allow people discover you, your business – product and services – that’ll definitely lead to a perfect sales conversation.

Learn how bid auction works and to win a bid in this paid search ads guide.

2.     Facebook – The Billboard

Scrolling from end to end your Facebook newsfeed, you’ll see it is a bit like driving down the main road. As you scroll, you’ll see ads, sponsored posts, along with random comments.

Also, if you, as one who owns a business, wish to pay, your message – content will as well emerge in the newsfeed of your target audience.

Using Facebook marketing, you can spend as little dollar according to the capacity of your pocket and yet grow your reach.

For the fact that it’s a social networking channel, and for the reason that it collects data on our behavior daily, they understand us more. All these data collections, makes them the greatest and potent ad platform existing on the internet.

If you target your ads specifically enough, and you’re definite to getting the accurate attention of your audience on your message.

Learn more how you can drive paid traffic through Facebook Marketing to your business.

3.     YouTube – The Television

Do you know that YouTube’s best metric is the number of minutes watched? Their target is to keep anyone on their site consuming videos, so they work very much identical to conventional television, running ads in the videos, intruding people’s viewing.

Upsetting, yes, that’s what I meant, but then again with YouTube, your ads are at all times related and appropriate.

This is because you can target your ads according to the YouTube channels your audience enjoys, the categories of videos they consume, and what they’re searching for.

Therefore, you now know the top 3 paid traffic sources? So you should know what best place to start with your paid traffic campaigns now.

Facebook, Google, and YouTube: All these three platforms will offer you quality traffic from people who are really interested in you and your business.

Okay, that gives you a good background for the strategy you’ll employ in your digital advertising plan that we’re about to discuss.

Let’s dive into the approaches you’ll use to carry out a captivating ad strategy.

Strategies of a Well-Executed Online Advertising for a Business

How to Create digital Ads

Now that we’ve recognized that paid ads is your best and most cost effective online approach to drive traffic to businesses. Here and now, let’s have a discussion around how to create ads that captivatingly attract your best online customers.

NOTE: for the sake of this guide we’ll pay attention mainly on Facebook advertising, but whatever process we’ll discuss here is applicable to whatever platform you’re using.

Two Concepts for Evaluating Your Target Audience

How let’s first deal with the type of ads you ought to be running and how to exactly target those ads?

The best ways to target ads definitely move toward two foundational concepts:

• Your customer journey.
• Traffic temperature.

Concept One: Your Customer Journey

What is Customer Journey?

The Customer Value Journey is the means through which people follow to build relationship with your business, right from their first click on your website to final conversation of sale.

The three primary stages of this Journey are:

1.        Awareness.

This is the top of the marketing funnel; this is the place where new prospects first find out that your brand – business exists and hopes that you have all it takes to help them solve their problems.

2.        Evaluation.

This is the center of the marketing funnel; this is also the area where prospects are earnestly anticipating to make a purchase. Their major problem is whether you’re the best source for the purchase.

3.        Conversion.

This is the bottom of the marketing funnel; this is where people that are interested in your business – product and service take action and buy something from you. 

The 3 stages of the Customer Journey

Concept 2: Traffic Temperature

At each phase of the Customer Journey, your audience has an uncommon relationship with you and your brand. But at the top of the funnel, they are just about knowing you and could not even know what you offer.

But as they move from the top passing through the different stages of the funnel, they start learning more about you and become more loyal and dedicated.

Well, it might come to your mind that they are warming up to you. Which is why we most times refer to this intensifying relationship as traffic temperature.                     

Traffic comes in 3 distinct “temperatures,” and each aligns with a different stage of the Customer Journey.

1.        Cold Traffic.

In general, cold traffic refers to new traffic from individuals who are in the Awareness stage. These persons are good prospects for your brand but then again have not for once heard of you or your business.

Now your goal with cold traffic is tutoring. You’ll want to make known your business to your new audiences and get them acquainted to your business and also coming back for more.

2.        Warm Traffic.

Warm traffic arises from individuals who now recognize who you are and what your business is about but are yet to make any purchase. It falls into the Evaluation stage.

So in this stage, your goal with warm traffic is acquisition, this is the process of conversion a website visitor into a lead.

3.        Hot Traffic.

Now the last, hot traffic originates from those who are at the Conversion stage. These are the point where your buyers, audience who are interested and ready to make a purchase or have previously bought a product or a service from you.

At this stage, your goal with hot traffic is monetization, this is to sell a high-valued product to your best customers.

In the end, your goal should be to encourage your people from cold to hot, converting new leads into loyal customers, and are eager to buy from you over and over again.

You can only achieve this feat by matching your message – content to a prospect’s temperature.

Now with cold traffic, you need not to offer them sale. Just spend your time on building business-to-customer relationship. While with hot traffic, your relationship with your customer is secure. You tell more as a friend, and you create offers according to the topics you know they’re attracted to.

The fact is, these two concepts alone will tremendously boost your capacity to create effective and successful ad campaigns that will drive huge traffic to your business.

Simply connecting to people that’s focused on their temperature, you’ll definitely build trust and engagement.

Right away, let’s shift to the five features that make up a winning ad campaign.

5 Components of a High Effective Ad Campaign

Every single advertising campaign consists of five key elements:

1. The offer itself.
2. Creative – The ad’s copy and design.
3. The ad scent – the cohesive look and feel of your overall campaign.
4. The targeting, or who you pitch your offer to.

1. Your Offer

Let me emphasis here that your offer is actually not the same thing as the product or service you’re offering. Though your business is built round a product and your ad campaign is built around an offer.

Get it?

So…

What is an offer?

An offer is a unique blend of your product or service with additional bonuses or add-ons, that includes all the details of your promotion:

• The deliverables
• The price
• The schedule
• How it’s being delivered and more

So it’s possible you have one product, and on the other hand you can put it for sale in a multiple of ways – creating hundreds of different offers.

For example, this is an offers with a coupon for big a big discount on any first visit:

Coupons make great offers based on saving money.

Now take a look at this one, from Survival Life, offers a loved product for just a penny:

Another appealing offer: a valuable product at a huge cost savings.

Put this in mind that your offer is as well the starting point for your ad campaign. And if you get it right, and whole lot of other things will as a rule fall into place.

But the reverse is definitely just true: put together an inferior offer, and surely your ad won’t convert.

2. Your Copy

Your ad copy talk about to the kind of content you use in your ad campaign. You’ll want to make sure your message is clear and compelling, so the paybacks stand out—equally the advantage of engaging with the ad and of taking relevant action you compel them to do.

Good copy should have a strong emotional hook. It should be captivating and persuasive without depending on advertisement.

Normally, you’ll want to start your ad by communicating to a point of issue your targeted audience are dealing with. Then and there, your offer has to be bring about the solution.

Look at this instance below, a Hired promotion leads with the problem: “counting down the hours until you get to leave the office.” If someone run hot with this kind of problem, they’ll definitely want to see the solution.

Or another one from WINC:

Now, if going to the store is the pain point for any of their audience, this will definitely hook their interest in the very first line.

Learn how to copywrite and attract massive traffic to your site.

3. The Creative

Creative talks about the graphic features of your ad – the image, video, or carousel images.

Let me also emphasis here as I did with offer, the term “creative” doesn’t have to be excessively imaginative. Suitable creative connects your message or copy visually in just a second or two.

So it promotes and improves your copy.

Now Digital Marketer has a good ad creative, and let use that as an example. At any time, possible, they visually display their offer, so people get to understand what’s about at a glance what the deliverable is.

The article they’re promoting about an offer in is on the left, and the resultant ad is on the right.

Your creative should communicate your message visually in 1-2 seconds.

Or this one where they promoted their 60-Second Blog Plan:

“Correct” creative connects clearly.

You can see from the above cases, the creative is literal, depicting—as closely as possible—the download we’re offering.

4. Ad Scent

Here, Ad scent talks about consistency, or “uniformity,” throughout your ad campaign.

Why is Ad scent important?

For the reason that trust and dependence is an enormous conversion factor. People should feel comfortable about your offer and that it is also valid. If you ever create doubt or fear, definitely they’ll go away without taking action.

Here’s how ad scent works…

Ad scent

You must always let your visitors feel like they’re on the right path.

You make them feel this way by creating a flow—visually, in your copy, and in the presentation of your offer—starting with your ad to your landing page, and every other part of your campaign.

To build congruency, pay attention to these three elements:

• Design: Use related images and colors on each piece of your ad campaign.
• Copy: Use similar catchphrases and benefits.
• Offer: Your offer should be the same throughout.

Let me put it straight here that Ad scent is low-hanging fruit in digital advertising. If you get it right, and you’ll increase your conversion rate and minimize costs.

Let’s take a good example of how Whole Foods does its ad:

Whole Foods maintains good scent.

It is stated in the ad FREE Instacart delivery, and whenever people click, they’re taken to a page with similar wording in the headline: “Free Delivery Credit.”

But should the the landing page talked on keeping your fruit fresh or any other topic outside free delivery, it will definitely confuse people, and they’d zoom off without taking action.

This is the more reason you should create a strong scent that’ll connect the elements of your campaign.

5. Targeting

Our final element we’ll be looking at for a high-performing ad campaign is targeting, and this is important for the fact that even a great offer won’t convert if you place it in front of the wrong audience.

There are two rules to follow when developing your targeting.

1. Be specific about Your Target Audience.

Being specific about your target audience has to do with research. So while planning your targeting, study as much as possible regarding your target audience.

You should know your target audience so well that you can figure out particular interests that the group has but no one else would have.

2. Match Your message with Your Target Temperature.

Traffic temperature, as we’ve discussed earlier, should match with your message to the class of relationship you have with your target audience.

Tips to Getting the Right Traffic Temperature.

At this juncture, are some guiding principle for getting the right traffic temperature.

Cold Traffic.

With cold traffic, all you got to do is just acquaint yourself with your new audiences.

So, there are 3 goals (none of them being to sell) you ought to fulfill:

• Indoctrination: Plan to build trust and create trustworthiness by distributing valuable content free of charge.
• Pixelling: As soon as they reach your content, pixel them so you run more ads to them and warm them up.
• Segmentation: If any of them clicks on a blog post about email marketing, we know they’re concerned about the topic, so you can make them a more relevant offer later.

What Category of Offers Do You Make To Cold Traffic?

• Blog posts
• Social media updates
• Content videos
• Podcasts
• Lead magnets
• Quizzes
• White papers
• YouTube ads to content
• Twitter ads to pillar content
• Infographics

While paying for cold traffic, you should pixel those of your audience that have engaged with your ad or click through to free content. Provide them value so they begin to enjoy your brand. So concentrate on entertaining, inspiring, and educating everyone who clicks through.

Warm Traffic.

Assume warm traffic as friends who have indicated interest in coming back. Note, this is not a developed relationship yet, but then, there is now a connection.

So to target a warm traffic, let your ads focus on:

• Leads that has opted in to your email list – You’ll upload that list to a traffic platform.)

People who have visited your website and been pixelled.

• Your followership on Facebook, Twitter, and your YouTube channel subscribers, etc.

Your targets for warm traffic should be to:

• Generate leads
• Drive low-dollar sales

What class of offers should you make to warm traffic?

• Lead magnets
• Quizzes or surveys
• Free or paid webinars
• Flash sales/low-dollar offers
• Product demos
• Branding videos
• Books (free or paid)
• Free trials

Hot Traffic.

Hot traffic are your buyers. These are people that’ve opted in and has indicated interest to buying from you. They might put up with some products to the shopping cart but by no means purchased. They may have purchased something from you in the past but haven’t responded to latest offers.

Your goals in running ads to this group are:

• Activation: If it’s been long they made any purchased, ring a bell to them that you’re still readily available.
• High-dollar sales: Upsell buyers of lower-priced products.

The kind of offers for hot traffic are:

• Events
• Paid webinars
• High-dollar offers
• Done-for-you services

Now be it either Cold, warm, or hot traffic, understanding the appropriate temperature lets you present your ads campaign to the right audience. And the more accurately you can target your ads, the more effective they’ll perform.

Final take on developing a digital advertising plan.

Without digital advertising, you can’t really profit and develop your business. Besides, and not identifying with the steps to building a good advertising plan, will without question give you no platform to completely regulate the movement of your traffic and how significantly you can sell to them.

But making use of platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter for paid traffic will definitely boost the awareness of your brand.

Ensure to evaluate your target audience accurately and follow up with your traffic according to their temperature so you get the most out of your audience.

Drop us your comment on other ways one can develop advertising plan online for business.