Paid online advertising is frequently passed over by new business owners because of budgetary concerns, time, and a lack of understanding of how the digital advertising world works. There’s so much information out there on Google and Facebook ads alone— it can really seem overwhelming to start. However, there’s no reason event rental pros need to start with a massive, expensive marketing campaign; in fact, starting with small, inexpensive campaigns are perfect for testing your marketing strategies and learning how to use ad platforms.

Online ads are essential for reaching your target audience and expanding your reach. Not only are you meeting your potential clients where they are (like Facebook and Instagram), but you can reach specific parts of your audience in different ways through retargeting. “Retargeting” is when you target ads towards people you’ve already reached, whether it’s through email campaigns, people who have visited your website, or another way. Because these viewers are already somewhat familiar with your business, the best ads for them should be different from the ads targeting an audience that is unfamiliar with your brand.

Wondering just how ads will benefit your business? Let’s break it down!

Exposure

Ads allow you to get your brand to more clients than you’d normally be able to reach, faster. SEO and creating an organic social media following takes time— adding ads to the mix will get your brand to your target audience much faster. The reason being, ad platforms like Google and Facebook have expertly crafted algorithms that help you to target specific audience groups that posting and keywords alone may not reach.

Targeting

These algorithms allow you to target different audiences based on area, demographics, interests, search results, and other parameters. The ability to target and track these different groups will help you further refine your audience and cater to them directly.

We’ve already talked some about retargeting; it is vital to your marketing strategy. It allows you to target specific groups that have already shown an interest in topics relating to your business. For example, you can retarget your ads to focus on people who open your emails or viewed your social media profile or website. The ability to reach different facets of your audience in different ways is an absolute game-changer— the more times someone sees your marketing materials, the more likely they are to become a paying customer.

Results

Running Facebook and Google ads will get you results much faster than SEO (search engine optimization) and organic search results, which take longer to cultivate. With ads, you’ll get a better idea of which keywords hit and which fall flat, sooner. This will allow you to further refine your SEO and social media results as they’re naturally developing. You’ll still want to develop your SEO and your social media following, but running ads will supercharge a process that normally takes months.

Development

Constant development and refinement of your ad strategies will not only help you appeal directly to your ideal audience, it will also help you improve your other marketing strategies as well. The more information you gain from your advertising campaigns, the better your email marketing, social media, website, and SEO results will become. Knowing what does, and perhaps more importantly, doesn’t work for your potential clients is powerful for your future marketing campaigns.

If you’ve been putting off running online ads because you didn’t think they’d be that important to your business, or you thought physical ads were more important, think again. While physical ads may work to a degree, you’re not likely to reach your target audience when they’re actually thinking about events, which is typically after their workday and often when they’re at home. Our Goodshuffle Pro clients rave about our Website Integration, which allows their clients to pick out event inventory at any time of day— which is usually after the kids are in bed for the evening. If that’s when your audience will actually plan and shop for their events, that’s when you should also advertise to them— and physical ads just aren’t going to do that. It’s time to go digital!