You want to advertise your business online.

But you´re not sure about which platforms suit you best.

Or maybe, you´ve been advertising online for a while now but your results haven´t been very promising.

Either way, I´ve got you covered!
In this post, you´ll discover three fundamental principles that will help you advertise your business online successfully.

I´ll show you what pitfalls to avoid and guide you towards better and more profitable online ads.

So, let´s get started!

3 Simple Questions To Avoid Wasting Money With Online Ads

As you´ve probably guessed, avoiding these pitfalls will come down to answering the following three questions.

They´re not revolutionary in any way but it´s critical that you answer them.

Once you have an answer to all of the questions, you´ll be in a better position to make your online ads profitable.
These are as fundamental as they can get!

For that very same reason, many entrepreneurs don´t give it enough attention.

#1 – Who´s In Your Market?

Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of creating products that nobody will ever buy.

This happens because they´re trying to find buyers for their products instead of creating products for buyers.
It´s that simple!

Before launching any advertising campaign, assuming you´re already selling something people want to buy, is to identify your buyer personas.

Identifying Your Buyer Personas

A business might have more than one buyer persona. For instance, they can have the busy single mom and the corporate executive woman.

Regardless of how many your business has, you have to know them all and then go a bit deeper into your research.

This could be done by:

• interviewing existing customers
• surveying your existing customers
• look at who other businesses in your industry are selling to
• researching on the web

It´s critical that you understand your prospects better than they do themselves.

These are some of the things you need to know about them:

• what are their problems and frustrations
• what they desire the most and who it impacts
• how they make purchasing decisions
• where they hang out online

Once you´ve gathered all this data, you´re ready to ask yourself and your team the next question.

#2 – What Exactly Makes Your Product Unique?

These days, the marketplace is very noisy, especially online!
It takes tremendous energy just to get noticed.

Without a strong unique selling proposition, it will be much harder to get attention and new customers.

You have to come up with a unique advantage in the marketplace.
It could be price, features, or looking at an existing product and advertise it in a different, more compelling way.

Standing Out Online

By now, you´ve probably realized why this is step 2.
Before advertising your product successfully, you need to understand your prospects very well.

To stand out online, you´ll have to add a few elements to your customer acquisition strategy. These are:

• your product´s big idea followed by the big claim
• the deep desires and unsolved problems of your market
• the product´s benefits advertised differently and better than your competitors

Remember that different products might have distinct unique selling propositions.
Sit down with your team and brainstorm some USPs.

Once you come up with the ideas, apply them as fast as you can.

#3 – Where Are You Going To Promote Your Product?

The final question is related to the platform you´ll use to advertise your business online.

There are so many choices, it can get overwhelming!
So, let me break things down for you.

Choosing The Right Ad Platform

There´s always going to be a specific platform(s) where your prospects hang out the most. These are some different ones and which markets they best apply to:

• Google: the best option for most businesses to capture prospects that already have purchasing intent, making the path to the sale shorter than all of the ad mediums.

• Facebook/Instagram: here you´ll find mainly business to consumer opportunities. A big percentage of people visit Facebook and Instagram every day, as opposed to other platforms.

• YouTube: this one is best for products that require a bit more demonstration, such as certain types of physical products. It also works well for service-based businesses, when done properly.

• Linkedin: a professional social platform geared more towards business to business marketing. It´s also the most expensive to advertise on, of all the listed here.

These are what we call the “big four”.
You can certainly test advertising your business in other less popular mediums, such as Twitter and Pinterest.

However, if you´re starting out, just pick one and roll with it until you have the budget and margin to scale to other ad networks.

Advertise Your Business Online The Right Way

Maybe you´ve heard some variations of these tips I shared, somewhere. They´re not revolutionary, by any means!

However, they are fundamental and that makes a big difference.

If you skip the fundamentals, you´ll have a really hard time advertising your business online.
It´s almost like building a house from the roof down.

Ask yourself these three questions and I promise you´ll be on your way to more profitable advertising.

Let us know in the comments, what insights did you get from this article?