FAQs: How to leverage your 'Australian-ness' online

Dale Hellyer, Senior Client Strategy Manager for Convincely, joins us to answer your questions on digital marketing.

You can watch our Australian Made webinar with Dale Hellyer here.

Why use digital advertising over other marketing channels?

Digital advertising can present some advantages over traditional marketing channels. I’ll go through each of these with a sentence or two:

• More targeted - Digital allows you to chase particular demographics around gender, age, past visits to your website, so you can reach a higher calibre audience that is likely to be more interested in your offer.
  
  
• Measurable - traditional advertising has a really hard time being able to attribute its impact. With digital marketing, each website visit is tracked from the advertising platform, so you can see the impact the platform has on website visits, purchases, enquiries and you can work out your cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) if you’re running an e-commerce site.
  
  
• Actionable - by actionable I mean that all (or most) digital advertising contains a call to action, to jolt the user to take action. This can be a ‘shop now’ button or ‘get a quote’, ‘enquire now’ or any number of other CTA’s. Traditional advertising has these as well, but they aren’t nearly as effective. If you think about radio or TV, the call to action is for you to visit their website, by remembering their URL for when you next happen to have a phone, laptop or iPad open. Digital marketing guarantees that prospects are on the device required to take action without having to remember a website domain name.
  
  
• Smarter – digital advertising gives you the ability to schedule advertising to your business hours or hours when you’ll convert better, in order to minimise waste. TV and radio have this too, but billboards and newspapers don’t.
  
  
• Micro Units - digital advertising allows you to purchase in micro-units. TV, radio, newspaper and billboard all have minimum purchase requirements, that obviously vary quite a lot (local paper could be $400 for the week, TV ad buy might be a $10k minimum etc). With digital, you can use any budget you’d like, pause when you have enough business, scale up on slow days etc. It can be turned on or off like a tap.

All of this is not to say that digital should replace traditional mediums completely. Digital can complement traditional marketing and advertising really well. One strategy, for example, is to run Google Ads around radio and TV advertising slots, as many users are likely to search for your brand name instead of visiting your site directly.

What’s the difference between search and display?

Search is when you’re able to show your ads on the search engine results page of a search engine (commonly Google, but Bing has a presence also). Being able to do so means that you’re able to take advantage of the searcher's user intent. They want or need a product or service to solve a problem, they’re in-market right now, and you’re able to ensure that your ad appears at this time of need whilst they are online evaluating alternatives. A really good sentence to summarise is that with keyword search advertising you’re able to service existing demand in the marketplace.

Display is the digital marketing version of traditional advertising, in that you’re rendering ads to users based on their demographics or interests in order to solicit an impulse response. For example, a user might not have any intent to book a holiday when they are browsing on Facebook, but a display ad would try and entice them to do so, on impulse.

It is a little smarter than traditional marketing because platforms like Google and Facebook have a lot more data points than a TV network, billboard company or radio station. With all of these data points, they are able to create more niche micro-segments and open them up to advertisers to use in their marketing efforts. The sentence to summarise display is that with display you are creating new demand and consideration for your product or service.

One additional difference between search and display is that the ability to scale is limited with a keyword search. The reason for this is that searches are finite. If there are only 6,000 searches a month for your product type, then advertising inventory is limited to these 6,000 searches. For display, there is a lot more potential for scale because inventory isn’t limited to product searchers; it’s literally the entire web within your chosen demographics and ad tech platform.

What are your top tips for Keyword Search on Google?

To get the most out of keyword search on Google Ads, I recommend the following:

• Choose the right match type (broad, broad match modifier, phrase and exact match) and use negative keywords to ensure that you are only showing for the most relevant searches.
  
  
• Start with low cost per click bids and campaign budgets and ramp up from there once the results start to pour in.
  
  
• Use as many structured snippets as possible with your ads to ensure you are able to take up as much real estate on the search engine results page. More real estate means there is more for users to read and click, but it also means your competitor's ads appear lower down the page, where their click-through rate will be lower.
  
  
• Always bid on your branded terms - it’s usually very cheap (cost per click) , it defends your brand from competitive bids and double’s your presence on the search engine results page (1 x paid and 1 x organic).

How can I get the most out of display advertising?

To get the most out of display advertising on Facebook, I recommend the following:

• Set up a remarketing ad set to attract previous website visitors and Facebook post engagers to come back to your site and convert.
  
  
• Find new prospects with two different ad sets:
  
  • Create a lookalike ad set off of your website converters so that Facebook can find people with similar characteristics to your highest value traffic and show ads to them. With lookalikes, you are able to select a percentage between 1% and 10%, 1% being the audience that is most similar to your website converters, whereas 10% is a looser match type and contains users less similar than the earlier percentage numbers.
  • Create an interest-based ad set where you are able to insert interests, demographics and behaviours that your ideal customer would have or belong to. For added targeting accuracy, tick the “narrow my audience further” checkbox and overlap similar interests. This will ensure that users in your audience pool must like x and y, which will mean the user satisfies at least two data points, making them a higher value prospect than someone who satisfies only one.

What type of Facebook campaign would you recommend for an e-commerce website?

For an e-commerce website, use conversion and catalogue sales campaigns and then follow the steps from the previous answer:

• Create ad sets for remarketing to previous website traffic and targeting current page engagers
  
  
• Prospect with a combination of lookalikes and interests, using the layering technique from above.

I’ve never done digital advertising before, what is a good budget to start with?

This answer varies from company to company, as it really depends on where you are at in your business journey. A business with a recognisable brand and 25 staff members should have a significantly higher budget than a sole trader who is hand-making their products.

If I had to commit to a number, I think a good minimum budget would be $500.

I would add, however, that the more budget you can work with, the better, as you’ll be able to ride out any bumps invariance. It’s like tossing a coin. If you toss it 10 times, you might get 8 heads and 2 tails. Toss it 500 times, and you’ll be pretty close to 250 heads and 250 tails. Variance can go both ways. You could see a return of 8:1 on your first $500, or you could see a return of 2:1. Long term however, the result will most likely end up somewhere in the middle.

What sort of outcome should I expect to see from that spend?

The outcome of a $500 spend can fluctuate severely depending on your website conversion rate. I’ve come across conversion rates anywhere from 0.8% - 25%. E-commerce does tend to occupy the lower end of that spectrum, as it’s a high friction conversion. Your asking for users to pull out their credit card and do away with cash they’ve worked hard to earn.

The higher conversion rates are usually associated with lead generation activities and the strategy involved is giving the user something of value for free. This is usually a free case study or an e-book or something similar. It’s low friction, doesn’t cost the user anything, and everyone likes getting something for free.

In answering the question, it’s probably okay to assume you’ll pay $1 a click. So for 500 clicks ($500), you could expect anywhere from 4 conversions (0.8% conversion rate, $125 cost per acquisition) to 125 conversions (25% conversion rate, $4 cost per acquisition). That in itself demonstrates the importance of conversion rate optimisation; having a great unique product, nice looking website and trustworthy brand etc.

Is advertising on Facebook and Google hard? Should I hire a professional?

It can be hard when you’re getting started, but there are so many online videos, articles and tutorials, so if you’re willing to commit the time to watch, learn and test, it’s absolutely something you can do yourself. I’d just warn you to limp in with lower budgets and bids in case performance takes a little while to catch up with your improving skill set.

Equally, I’m a big proponent of sticking to your core competency. If you’re amazing at design, manufacturing, customer service, stock management, or whatever else it might be and you want to continue focusing on that, then it makes sense to hire a professional.

What are your tips for finding a good digital agency?

A difficult one as I’ve always been on the other end of the equation. If you’re looking at a provider with a nice website, they are likely to have client logos on their site and testimonials on both their website and in other places online (Google My Business, Facebook, etc). I’d recommend absorbing as much of that info as you can and if possible, reach out to an existing client to ask how happy they are with the agency, their relationship and ultimately their performance.