Online advertising offers greater ease, more control and huge opportunities for SMEs. So, want to make the most of your online advertising? Read on for Google’s online advertising tips.
It’s no coincidence that when the modern plane was first commercialised, some of the world’s most ambitious pilots emerged from Australia: Charles Kingsford Smith, Patricia Graham, Bert Hinkler. Australians have never been strangers to distance, nor what it means to overcome the challenges of the small and vast spaces between.
These pilots are all examples of Australian pioneers who helped everyone to understand and believe in greater possibilities for speed and connection with one another.
Today, Australian businesses are taking a similar pioneering step, as they take wing to the internet to connect with customers more quickly, broadly and efficiently than ever before.
The internet is helping to close gaps between businesses and consumers that before seemed insurmountable. In this new era of online business anyone, from a small mum-and-dad store in Melbourne, to a growing enterprise in Adelaide, to a large company that spans from Sydney to Perth, can connect with customers and increase sales of goods and services by shifting their advertising online.
Online Business Opportunities
Online advertising represents an unprecedented opportunity for Australian small and medium businesses to reach potential customers. Whether through massive TV advertising campaigns, or through expensive advertising blitzes on highways or in newspapers, consumers nowadays less likely to be engaged when being told what to buy. Instead, more and more people everyday are turning online to proactively search for and research the items they need and want.
This active marketplace is a ripe and profitable arena for Australian enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Whereas before the voices of small business were prone to be drowned out by the bigger advertising budgets of larger national and multinational competitors, advertising online allows small businesses to maintain effective, targeted ad campaigns with virtually no start-up costs. In particular, small and medium businesses benefit from the opportunity to directly connect with people who are actively engaged in looking for particular products in particular places.
The internet has truly leveled the playing field, not only by cutting the costs of logistics, distribution and service, but also by opening up national and international markets to local Australian players. Worldwide, there are now over a billion people who access the internet. Recent research by Monash’s Australian Centre for Retail Studies revealed that 50 percent of Australian shoppers research their purchases online before going to the “bricks and mortar” store to buy. According to Nielsen NetRatings, there are 11.4 million people online in Australia alone, all connecting, creating, sharing and communicating. Nielsen NetRatings also reports that people in Australia are now spending an average of 13.7 hours of their leisure time per week online. That means more time shopping, more time exploring, more time buying products—all at the click of a mouse.
By being ‘found’ online, small businesses can quickly win new customers outside of their traditional markets. Think about how quickly eBay emerged and rewrote the rules for auction houses, or how companies like Wotif revolutionised the ‘established’ travel business.
New Online Business Types
The best part about the revolution? It’s open to anyone, both businesses that are conducted entirely online, as well as traditional offline businesses that are looking to advertise more effectively and expand their customer base. The internet enables businesses and practices that were once unviable to prosper, as shop owners are no longer limited by the sizes of a store window. In some cases, a store isn’t needed at all. Instead, there are limitless opportunities to share products virtually within a browser window, as items that would have been too large or too niche to keep in a shop now can be displayed and sold online.
Take Our Wishing Well for example. It’s an online gift registry service, started in 2005, that allows people to create gift wish-lists online for events, from weddings to birthdays. The site made it easy and fun for people to share their wishes with guests and friends. After struggling to publicise the site through traditional forms of marketing, Our Wishing Well turned to online advertising, and overnight saw traffic to its site increase by several hundred percent. Today, online advertising continues to be a critical factor for the success of its business. And it’s all done online.
Businesses that make up the ‘long tail’: the two-thirds of the internet that account for the latter 50 percent of traffic and which cater to a niche audience, are thriving online thanks to search marketing and online advertising, because they are connecting consumers with specific products they are deeply interested in, and which they otherwise might have trouble finding.
Search Marketing Revolution
The online ads we see today are now an integral and useful part of our everyday experience searching online. In particular, search marketing is a great example of the online advertising revolution in action. The premise is simple: when you type a word or phrase into a search engine, a group of ‘sponsored links’ or ads are displayed alongside search results. Business owners bid for the right to have their ads associated with these search words or phrases. For example, a shop selling parts and/or restoration services for old cars might pay to have its ads appear whenever a person types “broken steering wheel” or “secondhand gearbox” into a search engine. The shop only pays when someone clicks on the ad and not when the ad is simply displayed online.
To help ensure that only the most useful ads appear, both the amount of an advertiser’s bid and the quality of its website are taken into account. This rewards the most pertinent and useful sites with more ad views and site visits, and ensures that users come away with the highest quality search experience.
The clear advantage of this type of advertising is that you reach an audience with a self-expressed interest in the category of goods or services you are selling. A search ad campaign’s effectiveness depends largely on how you plan, create, and maintain it. Best of all, you are in control of your advertising budget. Through search advertising, there are no minimum spending requirements and you set your own daily maximum limit. For instance you can set a daily budget of ten dollars and a maximum cost of ten cents per click.
A great example of a business successfully using search marketing is Equipmed, an innovative Australian company founded in 1984. Today it’s grown into one of the world’s leading independent distributors and suppliers of innovative cosmetic and dermatological equipment, thanks to its adoption of online advertising. Research showed the company’s decision makers that a large portion of their target market of physicians and medical practitioners searched for new medical technologies online. By advertising online, Equipmed was able to reach beyond its local customer base into untapped markets, and connect with the customers that had been searching for them all along.
Online Transparency and Accountability
While the internet is enabling new business models and helping companies of all sizes acquire new customers, it also affords them unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. Advertisers can bid to appear only against specific users’ search queries, so they are sure to be targeting a relevant and interested audience. Most importantly, with search marketing, an advertisers only pay when a user clicks their ad, meaning the model is fully accountable. Even the smallest company, operating out of a lounge room, and with a marketing budget of a few dollars a week, can tap into these new opportunities. All they need is a good product or service and a web connection.
Plus, with various easy-to-use bidding tools, an advertiser can name a specific desired cost for how much traffic, and how many conversions or sales, he or she wants, and only buy ads accordingly. An advertiser literally knows that if he or she spends X dollars on a campaign, he or she sells Y widgets. It can be counted, analysed and measured to within an inch of its life. A search marketing campaign is therefore like a faucet to customers. That’s why it’s experiencing such strong growth in Australia.
Tomorrow’s Online Leaders
The internet has given any small or medium Australian enterprise with a great product, service or location, the chance to be discovered, to win new customers, to grow, and to unseat the ‘established’ player. If you want to learn who might be tomorrow’s leaders in your industry, unseating today’s established players, Google your product or service and see who shows up!
—Deepak Ramanathan is business marketing manager for Google Australia and New Zealand (www.google.com.au).
Online Presence, the Heart of Online Advertising
An intuitive, well-designed website can make a huge difference in terms of getting new customers and sales.
Make sure that your website is relevant to your business and provides important information such as location, phone numbers, opening hours and other contact details.
Put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer and check whether your website is useful, professional, attractive, easy to find and well-organised. Can you find information about the products and services you are looking for? Can you order them online or find answers to your questions?
8 Tips for SMEs to get the most from Google
1. Make pages for users, not for search engines. Create a useful, information-rich site that others will link to, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
2. Avoid ‘tricks’ intended to improve search engine rankings. A useful test is to ask: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
3. Keep the content on your site fresh and updated, to encourage repeat visitors and higher web visibility.
4. Use Google’s free Analytics tool to monitor how people are using your site and where they come from: www.google.com/analytics
5. Check out Google’s Webmaster Console which provides you with a free way to diagnose problems and make your site more Google-friendly: www.google.com/webmasters/tools
6. Make sure you have a free listing in Google Maps via the Local Business Centre. This helps users locate your business, phone number and other information about your business: maps.google.com.au
7. Explore Google AdWords. It’s easy and measurable advertising. Many Australian small businesses are using our advertising program as a sort of matchmaking service for new customers they might otherwise not reach: adwords.google.com
8. Think about signing up for Google AdSense, which enables you to place “Ads by Google” on your site and earn online advertising revenue: www.google.com/adsense
Tips for Search Marketing Success
Search marketing allows you to deliver your marketing messages to the people who are actively searching for your products or services at the exact time that they are doing so. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and it’s completely transparent. It’s easy to set up an account, set a budget and get started. But there are a few things to keep in mind to be successful:
1. Always keep your target audience in mind. What are they searching Google for? Do they know about your product or brand? Where do they live? This will help you target your campaign more effectively.
2. Choose the right keywords. Select a list of words and phrases (also known as keywords) that you think your potential customers would type into Google to search for your products or services. Make the words highly relevant to your business. This helps ensure that the ads associated with those keywords appear in front of the right audience and customers are more likely to click on them and visit your website.
3. Write ads that encourage people to visit your website. With a “Sponsored Link” alongside the search results, you have three lines with which to grab that potential customer’s attention. Here are a few tips for getting it right:
-Get to the point quickly – what do you have to offer and why should people buy from you?
-Include your keywords in your headline.
-Include a call to action: what do you want people to do when they click on this ad and are taken to your website?
4. Measure your success online and offline. Advertising is only effective if it generates measurable results for you. Be sure to track and analyse which keywords and ads actually turn visitors into customers. Track sales that happen offline as well. The best way is with a coupon or an order form, or simply by asking customers how they found you.
5. Test, test, test. Never be complacent. Be prepared to review and change your approach over time to ensure you get the most from your advertising. You may need to revisit your ads, keywords and budget and tweak where necessary, to maximise your profits.
Seeking to promote your business? Create your free Australian business listing with Dynamic Search business directory – Sister site of Dynamic Business.
