Best Advertisement Strategies To Grow Brands

Google Ads is one of the most powerful marketing strategies to generate leads and sales for any business. One of the best sources I have found for Google Ads is Andy Black who has shared a lot of powerful strategies.

NOTE: As of April 21st, 2020, Google announced results listed in the google shopping tab will now be UNPAID organic results. This is a strategy to compete with Amazon, which has grown substantially given so many businesses have closed down due to COVID-19. All while sales online have skyrocketed. I find interesting the timing on the part of Google, given today Amazon cut their affiliate commissions substantially. 

Here you can find one of his threats which will enlighten you about how to use the platform and how to unlock the true power of this method of  advertising. You can also find some of his best observations and conclusions in this threats. Many of the same core ideas also apply to Bing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

From my personal experience, up to this point Google Ads is the most powerful way to generate leads and produce sales. If we bid for a specific set of keywords, and the add shows the same set of keywords and the landing page the add leads to also focus on the same keywords then this becomes a better lead magnet which is more optimized to produce sales.

This works best for Geolocation and local type queries because it implies the user is ready to take action and buy or use the service they are looking for at that SPECIFIC TIME. Anyone who is trying to build an agency and help businesses get more leads should be taking advantage of this as so  any adds out there in Google have not been optimized in this way. To be fair producing adds and landing pages optimized for specific queries is a lot of work. At the same time, the boost in leads and sign ups and being charged lower costs due to better user experience and Google Ad Score makes it all worth it. It makes the company, service, or business running the add more competitive. This is why PPC consultants can be so valuable.

One way I have found to effectively use Google Ads when trying to grow a blog or a brand at the start is to pick as goal maximize clicks and bid on as many terms as possible. Since the goal is to maximize clicks, the clicks produced will come at the lowest cost the auction can yield. The purpose of this is to get the brand or business as many impressions as possible all throughout Google and it’s partner sites.

This will produce signals which will boost search rankings and help with your SEO strategy. It may not result in many sales, because this is a shotgun approach and the clicks and visitors you will get are of the lowest quality Google has to offer – hence so cheap. Yet, at the same time, it will help the Google algorithm do all the testing it needs, and find the right audience which will consume your content most or buy the products. The result is the pages on your websites will more quickly get ranked where they are supposed to be.

With clear data on terms you rank for, and the impressions you are getting, then you can use the data in Google Search Console in combination with keyword tools and LSI Keywords. Sprinkle more of these keywords on your blog posts articles and website pages they rank better for keywords you are getting impressions for. If done correctly, with a process of incremental improvement eventually the content will hit the number one spot and capture a lot of valuable organic traffic. This is what I will be doing for myself as more keywords start to rank. This is a test and a challenge for me!

One of the best methods Google has to offer is Google Shopping. The power of Google Shopping is it shows a picture of the item which
is for sell without leaving Google. It also shows the price for the item. Such item is only shown for the keywords you bid for. So if your bidding strategy is good, only people who are truly interested and ready to buy will click those adds. Those adds, in fact, have some of the highest conversion rates as I saw in the last ecommerce project I worked on.

The tricky part with Google Shopping is it could be more expensive overall since advertisers bid higher for visual adds like this. Often it works better to advertise more expensive items which are $400+ and also for which there are less suppliers who can sell the same product. One key to becoming  successful in business is to sell a product or service only a few other advertisers/competitors can sell.

FUN FACT: If you can build a niche site for a trending topic because of how the Google Algorithm works it will give higher relevance to this website. This means it will rank in a fraction of the time it will take another website to rank targeting a different segment or industry which is not trending. The difficult time about building this kind of niche sites as that you will likely become the “pioneer”. In other words finding good information will be harder.

If you wonder why I share so much valuable information. Is simple! The deeper I dig into this industry the more I realize there are so many vacancies and need for talent. Also, in order to get the best results for clients requires procedures, strategies and HARD WORK. Most people are lazy and are not willing to spend time and effort to do all the optimizations which are required to produce killer results. The last project I worked on there were over 4000 broken URL’s I helped fix. It has been shown that Google crawls websites less when there are many 404’s so is harder to rank the content.

Native Ads

From the point I stated above you can probably tell SEO is one of my favorite ways to grow brands. The real challenging part with SEO, is that there are 200 or so ranking factors. Many companies, big and small have learned about the advantages of content marketing to acquire organic traffic. So it has become very competitive out there to actually rank websites, especially when just starting out. As it is right now high authority websites get the biggest traffic share even if their content is not the best.

From personal experience however, this is one of the best ways to invest time and resources. Once a website is anchored and there is a good content strategy in place to build engagement and acquire backlinks this is when is easy to produce steady growth for a brand. The problem is since it has
become so competitive out there, it has become harder to get links organically unless you are part of a niche where there is very little competition. Most links these days are paid for or attained through deals.

Today as part of business practice, some of your competitors will even resort to what is called negative SEO. In other words, they will buy package of thousands of links often times from spam sites, and direct them to your domain with the aim to get your website penalized or delisted from the search engines Index Pages. Some of these packages can be found in places like fiverr for as low as $5.

The good thing is that Google spam team has been warned about this type of practice and in fact something they have done to fix this is to automatically disavow or give very little importance to links which should not help or harm a website rank. There is still risk for manual ban/penalty but if you can prove you did not buy all the links they will remove the penalty.

The hardest part is to get in touch with a Google representative who can escalate or resolve the issue. I have found that if you send Google a nice letter in one of their hidden email addresses, an account manager or representative will call you back and help you resolve the issue. One time I had to deal with a Google Shopping listing which had been disapproved. I did not know how to fix the problem and the Google feed set up had been set up by someone who was no longer with the company.

A letter to the Google reps fixed the issue. They went ahead and approved all the Google Shopping adds which met the stipulations on the Google terms.  This is why I say social skills and the ability to ask for help from the right source is so important. There will come many times you will find problems which you don’t know how to fix but someone else out there has fixed hundreds of times. Many of them will tell you what to do and not charge anything if you are nice to them and treat them with the respect they deserve.

Something I want to point out is that is really good to optimize content based on the data which appears on the Google Back End. That is using the Google Keyword tool or bulk keyword tools and the autosuggestion feature which populate more terms. Something I have learned the hard way is that the more accessible data becomes, the harder it becomes to produce positive and repeatable results using the tools that got you that data. In other words, since so many people are focusing and using Google Keyword Tool many people are competing and fighting for the same terms.

With a little imagination and tweaking of the keyword research procedure is possible to find hidden gems and rank more easily for terms that drive traffic. It’s great to optimize blog posts and website content based on Google since currently it drives the most traffic. However, as other experts like Eric Ward once noted, there are many other Search Engines out there you could optimize for and tap into a reliable source of traffic while facing less competition than Google.

One such Search Engine which is currently growing exponentially is DuckDuckGo. As of right now DuckDuckGo serves over 50 million queries per day and has been growing steadily. The reason for this is because users are more focused on privacy and they don’t want cookies to track their surfing behavior or storing their information. They don’t want adds to follow them online and would rather remain in anonymity now that there is more awareness how Google and Facebook have been tracking, storing and selling information of users browsing online.

Personally speaking, I have come to a point where I understand so much about how the algorithms work that I just use them to my advantage as much as I can. I have been using Google to tap into very valuable information which businesses spent thousands of dollars to acquire and even sell for a premium and I get it for free just because I’m willing to give out an email or participate in a free trial. I know my information is being sold and used in a thousand ways to target myself as a customer and that is ok. This is the new world we live in and with the proliferation of technology and The Internet of Things it will be hard to change it. On the other hand, more surveillance and tracking will take place as technology gets cheaper.

If you want to be drive anonymously online you can use the video below. However, the FBI and CIA are very smart. They can still track you if you give them enough motive to invest the capital. These intelligence agencies have been involved with the Arpanet project from the very start. To be truly anonymous online you will need to build your computer and all it’s components from scratch because even at the hardware level there are serial numbers and footprints that can identify a physical computer. You can try to hide but not from these agencies.

What I’m trying to say with all of this is that while privacy is super valuable if you are trying to access very valuable information FOR FREE, one way to do it is to give your information. You can also consider paying for courses and educational marketing material, but as I have found most people put out information as it becomes outdated. This would defeat the purpose anyway, because when you pay for a service the merchant has all your information. 

Normally as long as methods and strategies are working great, these are used. Then as it becomes harder to produce results, the methods and techniques are sold for a premium price and new ones are invented. While it may work still, it won’t be anywhere near as powerful as it used to be and it will keep many people from building their own strategies which would work better. In a way, marketers do this because they can make a lot of money and is also way to keep competitors constantly failing and protect their businesses.

On the good side, one thing I can tell you is that sometimes is possible to combine obsolete information from various sources and produce a new killer strategy. However, for that to work, often times deep understanding of social media and search engine algorithms need to take place. The best  methods and strategies are always changing and become less effective as more people learn and apply them.

SEO is like this. The barrier to entry has become more difficult. The time and resource investment to produce good results has grown exponentially through the years. On the upside if you are able to rank a website and gain sufficient authority it will be harder for a contender to take your spot because they will have to reverse engineer the strategy you used and invest a lot of time and resources to produce comparable results.

At the same time, killer content is winning on so many levels. If you can produce the best content for your industry sooner or later you will become number 1 no matter how much resources your competitor has.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is super powerful and it can be comparatively as cheap (in the long run) as doing SEO once you build your own list. The problem with email marketing is that for very long this medium has been blasted with Spam tactics. The result of this abuse is that Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) and email services have put in place very rigorous spam detection mechanisms.

It doesn’t matter how good you are or how authoritative you are as a marketer. Your emails can be classified as spam very easily even when you use all the right strategies to ensure the emails are delivered. Imagine spending $500 or $1000 to send an email to a fixed number of recipients. Think 1000 or 2000 people.

Assume whoever sells the leads can’t guarantee clicks. Only that they will send the email out to however many people. If the email you send out contains links and pictures which are picked up as spam. Or the text itself has a big spam record, is very likely only a few people will actually see your message. This is why if you want to try building a list I would highly recommend you to buy clicks from Udimi.

Now that I understand these concepts. I think back to the time I joined various Multi Level Marketing schemes and the so called “turnkey” programs produced by Digital Altitude and MOBE. Of course I had a boatload of money to throw down the toilet *sarcasm*. Since many of these sources give you messages and templates to use, it becomes very easy for those email messages you are sending out to be picked up as spam. Often times even using a URL which is considered spam is all it takes to see NO RESULTS WHATSOEVER from all your hard efforts. I learned originality pays dividends.

As a general rule the marketers there will charge you per click and not per email sent. Also, they have built audiences which have white listed their email address so the message you send will reach the right audience. Sometimes these marketers are just really intelligent in the way they buy email lists. They have in place all the necessary resources to ensure their emails will be delivered. Then they can charge an arbitraging fee. So if they charge you 50 cents for each people that click on the link, maybe they are charged 30 cents for that specific action from the email provider they found and tested to convert well. Out there you can find many digital newspapers and magazines with lists built across various niches and industries and target leads for relatively cheap.

As a general rule, if you want to do well with email marketing you need to become really good at using tools to detect spam score and email delivery of your letters. Building a list is probably one of the most important digital assets you can own. So keep this in mind. Don’t think any of us can escape the spam filter. Even some of the best marketers like Neil Patel has to face this problem too.

Other Forms Of Advertising

Geoconquesting:

I learned about this method from Frank Kern who has been in the advertising industry for over 20 years. This technology can be  achieved using Facebook or Google adds feature. This article has more details about how it works.

Simply put, our smartphones are broadcasting information everywhere we go all the time. This information is stored in a database and is sold to third party advertisers. Normally when a customer walks into a store to make a big purchase like a car, furniture, hire a lawyer or buy a house. They do price
shopping and make sure to find various alternatives before purchasing the product or service they need.

Geoconquesting allows to target those individuals at a critical time when they are almost ready to buy. Basically, these adds are triggered when the target customer walks into a competitors store or region in the map which indicates they are looking for a specific service. The biggest advantage is that knowing which business they are visiting is possible to create a video add or landing page which greatly makes your services much better than those of your competitors. Many times it has been concluded that THE OFFER is the most important element to get a customer to buy a products or service and this type of marketing allows just that!

Gerilla Marketing:

This type of advertising has become popular. Some companies go as far as deploying influencers in malls and big chain stores who promote products anonymously. The video below shows some strategies as example but there are thousands of other creative ways to do this.

Radio Advertising/Tv/Billboards/Yellow Pages/Newspapers Ads/Magazine Ads:

All of these are advertising methods which have become somewhat obsolete. Among the reasons for this is because the attention of users in on the web and on their smartphones. People choose to listen to Pandora instead of the Radio. Most people choose Netflix over regular Tv.

As you drive through a billboard what are the chances you will remember the information there? Unless the person that made the add was really clever and used something catchy which is easily remembered it won’t stick. Most people who once used the yellow pages to find businesses and services now resort to using the internet. The advantage in using this service is that it has become very cheap to list your add on the yellow pages and there are telemarketers and real businesses who can add value to your business who use this as a guide to call businesses.

As for newspapers and magazine adds. These are a dying breed. Most of the wealth which once was produced through physical newspapers and magazines is moving to online versions of the product or Search Engine Optimized counterparts.

Although most of the methods listed above are not anywhere as reliable as they used to be. Since the cost has gone down considerably, if you are able to track results from advertising through those mediums like providing a campaign code or something like that. You may be able to tap into an audience or pool of clients which is actually profitable. Testing is not super expensive and there is more leverage to negotiate lower prices when advertising using this mediums.

Banner Ads:

Banner Ads are no longer as effective as in the old days. In fact, many studies have found that web users browsing online have trained their mind to ignore this type of adds. The best Banner Ads apply the same concepts of native ads, and camouflage themselves within the page as if it is part of the content and not an advertisement.

In other words the color schemes for the add an the layout are the same as the website hosting it. The font is also the same. The size of the add and placement is carefully considered so users clicking on them never suspect they are clicking on adds. One easy way to start monetizing a website is using Google Adsense. A better approach if you have good quality traffic and good negotiation skills is to sell add spots on your website and place banner ads for businesses and services you want to partner with.

Different bloggers use different pricing structures depending on the number of visitors and the actual industry being promoted. Here is a blogger sharing his thoughts on how it should be priced. Personally, I would use Google keyword tool and figure out how much on average it would cost per click to get a lead from Google then based on that come up with a pricing structure. For example, lawyers pay substantial money per lead. So placing a banner add for a law service on your website should cost more than placing an add about skin products.

In the future I will be exploring more about this strategy as I will be building more websites which I will be ranking. For now I’m focusing on this one because I’m testing multiple new strategies I had been wanting to work on. I want to note that the click rate of banners ads which have not been optimized to look like native ads is around 0.01%. It could still work because banner add impressions are super cheap. There are many suppliers who can sell hundreds of thousands of impressions for less than $30.

The best advice I can give you if you want to make it work is to make banner adds placed on your site or someone else’s site as stealth as possible. Camouflage them. Make it seem like is not an add and instead is regular content on the website. The click through rate will be better and produce the best results.

FUN FACT: One of the most powerful ways to boost Click Through Rate (CTR) to your web properties from Google Search, is to have Google index the most important pages of your website as Sitelinks. Although there is no 100% guaranteed way to get Google Sitelinks, Kinsta made a good article you can utilize as a baseline. In my experience, use a dynamic and responsive themes free of bugs, write trustworthy content and generate sufficient traffic, and in time sitelinks will appear.

LinkedIn Ads:

LinkedIn is in a phase where posts produce more engagement and virality factors than previously. They are trying to become more like Facebook or Instagram. To produce this jump posts with the right engagement metrics go viral rather easily without the need to spend on advertising.

Normally when a social media company wants a bigger share of the audience this is how they do it. They make the best posts which have bigger engagement broadcast bigger through the network. In this way the platform can attract the best digital marketers and content creators so it grows at a very rapid rate.

If you are trying to scale an online business or a brand LinkedIn is one of those social platforms you should be focusing on. In fact, many of the people who come visit this website come from LinkedIn after they have seen my profile there.

Here is my friend Ryan Stewart showing some good strategies to grow organic traffic on LinkedIn. In similar fashion there are a bunch of articles and forum posts that have surfaced on the web showing techniques which have been designed to take maximum advantage of the LinkedIn algorithm in helping you reach the highest amount of users on the platform. To put it in simple terms, if you produce unique content and post it on this platform they will reward you with more visibility.