5 tips to improve your advertising strategy for your small business

There is no denying that small businesses are booming right now.

However, the industry growth brought on by COVID-19 also created more intense competition. This means that to dominate your niche and convert new customers, upgrading your advertising strategy has never been more important.

When it comes to improving your advertising strategy, 2021 is all about relevance, personalization, and automation.

And it is simpler than you think.

In this post, I will give you the top five tips on how to consciously improve your advertising strategy so that you can stay competitive in your market and consistently grow your business long-term.

1. Redefine your advertising goals

Before you adopt any advertising strategy, you need to reassess your overall advertising goals. Your advertising should be:

• Relevant to your overall business growth strategy.
• Attainable.
• Specific to your market and KPI objects.
• Realistic.
• Within budget.
• Measurable.

Ultimately, you want to regularly reassess your optimum conversion rate goals (you can use this conversion rate formula to kick you off), and assess the best and most feasible way to get there with the budget you have.

2. Dive deeper into your customer data

In order to tap into personalization and make your advertising strategy more relevant to your core target audience, you need to dig deeper into your customer data and metrics.

To do this, you should be looking beyond demographics to create detailed behavior-based customer profiles. A detailed customer profile should include the following types of information:

1. Geographic: neighborhood, city, country, region.
2. Demographic: age, sex, income, job title.
3. Behavioral: engagement, purchase history, product/service usage, loyalty.
4. Psychographic: interests, lifestyle, habits, values, goals.

The idea is to gather as much data as you can so you can better target different segments with more personalized advertising campaigns.

3. Invest in brand identity

There is no argument: Establishing a strong brand identity will help you dominate your niche. In a competitive market where competitors’ products, services, or pricing are similar, brand equity is a substantial conversion-driving force.

It is also something that’s often overlooked by small businesses. Here are four steps you can take to create a strong brand identity:

1. Define your brand vision and voice.
2. Use copy that speaks your target audience’s language.
3. Invest in brand awareness digital campaigns.
4. Prioritize quality customer service.

Ultimately, your business identity plays a vital role in not just making that initial sale, but ensuring your advertising strategy is bringing you a high customer retention rate. In other words, it’s a crucial part of building a loyal customer base, which is vital for long-term business success and growth.

4. Harness the power of per-per-click automation

As your business marketing needs grow, you will need to increase the per-per-click (PPC) campaigns and channels you use to improve your overall advertising strategy.

This can very quickly get out of control without automation, especially for smaller businesses where owners are wearing multiple hats. Instead, you should be taking advantage of tools such as Google’s Smart Bidding or Facebook’s dynamic campaigns.

Alternatively, it is definitely worth investing in PPC management WordStream alternatives such as Traffic Booster that will automate and manage your whole PPC strategy for you. Automating as much of your PPC optimization as possible doesn’t just mean freeing up time to work on other marketing channels; it will also ensure your campaigns are running at peak performance, guaranteeing good return on ad spend, or ROAS.

5. Tap into content marketing streams

Content marketing is a hugely powerful advertising tool for small businesses. Regular content establishes you as an authority in your niche. improves your SEO ranking, and gives you high-value content that you can repurpose for social media.

Additionally, by putting effort into your content marketing (and using social media calendars to ensure you are posting high-value content on a regular basis) you can do the following:

• Improve your brand authority.
• Build long term business/brand/service loyalty.
• Improve conversion chances from social media advertising campaigns.
• Push engaged users up your sales funnels.

Continuously review, adjust, and optimize

When it comes to a winning advertising strategy, there is no magic formula or blueprint. Your strategy should not only be designed, tested, and optimized for your specific business, market, and customer, but also regularly reviewed.

Why? Because markets are constantly changing and adjusting. You only have to look back to the beginning of 2020 to see just how quickly this can happen.

An optimal advertising strategy is one that is consciously improved. This means you should be reviewing and tweaking the following on a quarterly basis:

• Your advertising goals.
• Customer metrics and behavior.
• Business brand identity and awareness.
• PPC management and optimization.
• Content marketing strategies.

This will help you consciously improve your advertising strategy long term and stay one step ahead of the competition so you can dominate your niche market. You can check out this list of 10 top budget-friendly digital marketing tools for small businesses to help streamline this process.