the best advertising strategies for VSEs/SMEs

With the advent of digital, large companies, SMEs and VSEs allocate a significant part of their advertising budget to digital marketing. They turn first to the Google advertising network. The latter allows advertisers to design targeted advertisements on the search engine, the display network, YouTube, Shopping, Maps and Play, in order to attract Internet users who would be potentially interested in their offer.

Google ads (formerly Adwords) work on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. Marketers must determine how much they are willing to pay for the targeted keyword. Based on the defined CPC and that of the competitors, Google determines the placement of the ad.

For VSEs and SMEs, Google ads can be powerful levers to make themselves known quickly. Before you start using the tools offered by Google, however, you should be well prepared. Back on the different steps to create an effective Google Ads advertising campaign when you are a small business.

Focus on the best Google Ads advertising strategies for VSEs/SMEs

Visibility, traffic, conversion rate… Google ads can help meet the various challenges faced by VSEs and SMEs, provided you keep certain strategies in mind.

Goals definition

As with Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads, you must first define the goals of your campaign. This is an essential step to know what targeting to carry out, what message to deliver and what indicators to observe. By selecting the right objective, you make sure you have an optimal setting for your platform and not miss your core target.

Google ads offers several depending on the advertising location chosen:

• the research network, to meet sales, prospecting and website traffic objectives;
• the display network, to achieve sales, prospecting, website traffic, audience and brand awareness objectives;
• the Shopping tab, to increase sales, attract prospects and increase traffic to your website;
• YouTube, to meet the objectives of sales, prospecting, traffic to the website, interest in the company and products, audience and brand awareness;
• the Play tab, to promote an application.

By downloading our Google ads guide, you can learn more about the specifics of each format and the rules to follow for your ads to be eligible.

Carrying out research

It is essential to take an overview of the elements related to your business. It is necessary for example to be interested in the requests made when the Net surfers make research on its subject. This is an important step, because Google ads requires entering the keywords on which a company wishes to position itself on the search engine. You also need to target the geographic locations where your business works best and look at other areas, such as customer demographics.

It is also necessary to be interested in their buying experience by researching if they evaluate the products online, what they seem to want the most from their company, what they appreciate about them… It is recommended to have this type of information to determine where your target customers are and choose the ideal advertising location.

At the same time, you also have to research your competitors. The objective is to know what works and what does not and to succeed in exploiting in turn the most effective elements. To do this, you have to observe how they present themselves online (website, social networks) and what keywords they use.

Establishing its structure

When you start using the tool, it is not always easy to know how to go about it. It sometimes happens to rush on features and create poorly optimized campaigns. However, the first step before creating any advertisement is to organize your account.

Concretely, Google ads is organized into four levels, like a pyramid:

• the account, each parameter of which must be properly set and all the main information filled in;
• campaigns, for which it is possible to choose the geographical location, the target language, the medium (smartphone, computer, etc.);
• ad groups, which are part of campaigns. They allow you to manage ads, keywords, landing pages, etc.
• the ads, which must be written according to its keywords.

Properly structuring your ads allows you to better position them compared to those of your competitors. It is also essential to improve its Quality Score, that is to say the Google indicator which analyzes the quality of ads, keywords and destination pages. It allows the search engine to ensure that the user’s request corresponds to the ad and the proposed page. This minimizes the bounce rate and increases conversion rates.

Budget definition

When launching your first campaign, you need to define the average daily budget allocated. Concretely, this is the sum that we wish to invest each month in it. This can be changed at any time. For VSEs and SMEs, this is a real advantage: they can start with a small budget and gradually increase it over the campaigns.

To define your average daily budget, Google ads provides two tools:

• the performance planner, which helps to optimize the budgets of its existing campaigns;
• the CPC, in order to define the maximum amount that you wish to invest per ad.

Choice of relevant keywords

To be visible online, it is important to choose the most relevant keywords. You must first make a list of words related to its activity, its offer and its products. To do this, you have to imagine what the Internet user types when he carries out a search related to his company. You have to choose two types of keywords:

• generic, allowing it to be distributed to a wide audience. However, the risk remains of having your advertisement broadcast on unqualified keywords;
• specific, who are qualified and precise. As the search volume is less, it is possible not to generate enough clicks.

Then you have to test their relevance using the Google Ads Keyword Planner. It offers the possibility to find expressions and related terms easily, but also to obtain the potential of each keyword and to predict its traffic during a campaign. The average number of monthly searches and an evaluation of the competition on this keyword allow you to get an idea.

In order to correspond as precisely as possible to the search intention of an Internet user, the keywords of the same theme should then be grouped together in a single ad group.

Writing a strong message

For your ad to work, you have to write your ads with a strong message that will make it stand out from your competitors. It must correspond to the targeted keywords and the chosen landing page. It is essential to include a call-to-action, such as “Discover our offers” or “Contact us” to succeed in transforming Internet users into visitors, then into customers.

It is essential to take these elements into account when developing your Google ads campaigns. Gradually, you will become familiar with the different functionalities and you will be able to effectively use the advertising management levers, which are fundamental to any web marketing strategy.

If you would like to know more about our areas of expertise within the Siècle Digital agency, do not hesitate to contact us through the form from our website shinemedia.fr