Understanding SMB Digital Advertising Agency Services
Many small and medium-sized businesses know that digital marketing is an established way for them to grow their sales online. But, there are some important things to know before pursuing SMB advertising.
Knowing what small-and-medium-sized-business advertising (or SMB advertising) means is the first step, and that means knowing the different sub-types of marketing it involves. Understanding the goals and options available for your business will also help you discover an SMB advertising agency that can help you build toward success.
First, let’s go over what it is.
SMB advertising hinges on paid ad strategies that are designed to help businesses of a certain size, particularly businesses that are large enough to leverage a massive ad budget or to push out competitors with a well-known brand. Not all companies are able to set aside a substantial advertising budget when they are still trying to gain a solid foothold within their industry or when they are unable to set aside the resources for a heavily involved ad campaign. SMB advertising strategies that are budget friendly, customizable, and that require very little set-up or infrastructure are most appealing to these sorts of businesses. Fortunately some styles of digital marketing check all of these boxes.
What does SMB advertising offer, and what exactly are your options when it comes to using SMB ads online? A few of the most popular options include pay-per-click search ads (PPC) as well as paid social-media ads. These two options represent the two most popular forms of paid online marketing strategies, in fact PPC ads are now the single largest form of push marketing in the online world.
These days 90% of consumers claim that ads influence their purchase decisions, and 3 out of 4 people claim that search ads in particular make it easier for them to find information. In fact nearly half of all clicks go to search engine ads in the top 3 spots of Google or Bing, and clicks on search ads are statistically more likely to convert.
What’s more the world of SMB advertising as plunged into social media as well. This relatively new channel has exploded, and from 2014 to 2016 social media advertising budgets nearly doubled worldwide to roughly $31 billion; by 2021 it could be close to $50 billion. It seems then, that marketing strategies like social media and search PPC have become fundamental to SMB advertising.
Let’s go over the different types of SMB ads available and what sort of options your SMB advertising agency should offer.
Paid search ads for SMB advertising
Search ads from platforms like Google and Bing have grown to become the single largest form of paid digital advertising. Google alone still claims about 92% of the search market share, and its dominance means that it still claims 37% of all digital ad spending.
And no wonder too, Google’s data claims that marketers are able to garner $2 in revenue for every $1 spent (of course this return is dependent on how well run your ads campaign is, and is why many business opt to turn to a professional SMB advertising agency).
So what are search ads, and how do they work?
Search ads are snippets that appear for specific search queries (chosen by the ad creator) on search engines like Google or Bing. They work on a cost-per-click model where advertisers “bid” a relatively low amount of money for the opportunity to appear in searches, next to the regular organic results. The more you bid, the more likely you are to show for certain keywords, and the more likely you are to get clicks.
For the purpose of SMB advertising, marketers can get set up using the Google Ads platform where they can set up a campaign (or multiple campaigns), set a total campaign budget, set bid-amounts for certain keywords, and monitor the results.
Using PPC for SMB ads has the advantage of getting businesses nearly instantaneous results. This is big part of why PPC is so popular, because results appear almost immediately as soon as your campaign begins and sales are generated very quickly – traditional organic marketing might take weeks or months.
Setting up a professionally optimized paid marketing strategy with an SMB advertising agency allows businesses to:
- Generate site traffic in general or to subsidize a multi-channel marketing strategy
- Market a new business or new website that doesn’t have much reputation
- Bring in fast results in short timeframes like holidays or during seasonal events
- Promote sales and special events
- Promote a brand for better industry recognition or to compete against a dominant competitor
- Advertise new products to generate sales quickly
Pay-per-click style SMB advertising also includes “display” ads which feature graphic/banner style display ads that can appear on the same search engine ad networks. But unlike search ads that appear in Google or Bing search results, these ads can appear all across the web on ad-affiliate 3rd party websites.
Both these types of ads are attractive because they can help small and medium-sized businesses generate sales quickly to bring in cash fast. Because Google and Bing both offer tools and resources for ad management, businesses can fine-tune exactly which audiences, search-terms, regions, and time-periods that they want their ads to appear for.
With search ads, you also have the option of remarketing.
Remarketing is a feature on Google Ads that lets businesses customize their ad campaigns to target people who have already previously visited their website.
By using dynamic remarketing, you can utilize Google’s remarketing list for search ads (RLSA) to modify your ad strategy in order to focus on people who are already interested in your products. This is good SMB advertising strategy that can help businesses gain sales from their existing traffic.
For small and mid-sized companies these techniques can help a business grow online and generate more sales by using their budget to focus on previously interested site visitors.
Google Shopping for eCommerce SMB advertising
Google PPC ads also give small-and-medium sized eCommerce companies a way to market their products off-site, directly within Google search results. Google Shopping is a way of creating product-listings within the Google search engine so that customers can see pricing, ratings, photos, and product information; and so that they can purchase your products without having to go to your site.
Paid product ads for Google Shopping appear at the top and bottom of the results page on the “Shopping” tab, and they can also appear on the main search results page as a carousel of products. Because their ads run on the Google Ads platform they still function as pay-per-click ads, which means that your business will pay a small fee for every ad-click. But for self-owned and smaller businesses, the ability to customize ad campaigns means that they can define their own budget and still get good results.
For SMB advertising campaigns Google’s Shopping option gives business the chance to focus on eCommerce product sales and it allows them expand their brands visibility within Google, as well as “Surfaces across Google.”
Hundreds of millions of people do shopping related searches on Google each day. Placing your SMB ads on surfaces across Google means placing product ads on Google’s huge range of products including shopping, search, images, Google Maps, and Google Lens.
Set up your Google Shopping account using your Google Merchant Center account or hire an SMB advertising agency to help manage your ads.
Social Media SMB Ads
With the way that social media platforms have grown in popularity, they have been able to leverage their user-base to provide businesses an additional way to pay for advertisements. In practical terms social media ads function the same way as PPC display ads (kind of).
Social media is the one platform that threatens the dominance of search engines in terms of business opportunity. As platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more continue to develop their ad networks, businesses moved in to take advantage.
These days more than 40% of digital consumers use social media to research new brands or products. Facebook by itself is the second largest ad platform on the planet – and it’s ad network also extends across to Instagram which means SMB advertising access to more than 2 billion total users!
Just like search advertising, social media advertising is ideal for generating quick revenue and sales. It’s also a great way of expanding brand visibility and directing social media traffic to your site. By using social media paid ads you can target your primary audience and bring them to your site where they are more likely to make a purchase or a conversion.
Plus social-media ads allows your advertising team, or your SMB advertising agency to exploit in-depth user data that lets you target incredibly specific, custom audiences. Biographical data, location data, user age, gender, interests, career information and more can help create an SMB advertising campaign that is designed to target the right audience.
Getting started with social media like this means you only have to spend ad budget on an audience that you know is more likely to be interested in your business.
Plus, most social media sites offer a bunch of different SMB advertising options including ad styles like:
- Photo/video ads that can appear in user feeds (common on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn etc.)
- Stories ads that are usually vertical video styles ads (available on Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
- Messenger/mail ads that for individual users
- Album/carousel style ads which feature a grouping of products for eCommerce businesses
These types of ads let you set up campaigns with specific goals in mind including generating: brand awareness, site traffic, post engagement, form-completions, app installs, and of course sales! Working with an SMB advertising agency or hiring an expert will allow you to set up a campaign best suited to reach these goals.
Learn More About Our SMB Digital Marketing Agency
Radd’s SMB advertising services means you get agency services that can help your business grow. Contact us to learn more about our PPC ads services, search engine management resources, and SMB digital marketing.