Advertising for your business: where to start?

You do not want to wait for Google to pick you up on its own. Understandable: a new website needs months before it competes in the search results. Advertising buys you that time. This article explains where to start, what it costs and where it usually goes wrong.

Why advertise alongside ordinary visibility

Working on your visibility brings in visits that keep arriving for free, even two years from now. It just takes a long time to get going. Advertising works the other way round: it is on tomorrow and stops the day you turn off the tap.

The two do not compete. Most businesses we see go about it sensibly: advertise in the first year to bring customers in, and quietly build visibility in the background so the advertising is needed less later on.

Two kinds of advertising, two kinds of people

Google Ads: people who are already searching

You appear at the top when someone types in what you sell. That person already has a problem at that moment and is looking for a solution. That is why the chance of a customer coming out of it is highest here.

This works well when people actively search for your service: a roofer, a driving school, an accountant, a webshop with a clear product.

Social media: people who were not looking for you yet

On Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok you interrupt someone who was doing something else. You can choose very precisely who sees your ad, for example everyone within fifteen kilometres in a certain age group.

This works well if you offer something people did not know they wanted, and for anything you can show: an interior, a dish, a before and after.

What you need in place before you start

Advertising sends visitors to your site. If something is wrong there, you are paying for people who click straight back out. So sort this first:

• A page that matches the ad. If you advertise bridal nails, send people to the page about bridal nails, not to your home page.
• An obvious next step. A phone number, a form, a button to book. Visible without scrolling.
• A site that is fast on a phone. Most of your ad clicks come from mobile.
• Knowing what a customer is worth to you. If a customer brings in 400 euros on average, an enquiry may well cost 40 euros. Without that number you cannot judge whether it is working.

What does it cost?

You pay per click, and what a click costs depends on how many competitors bid on the same word. You generally see between 30 cents and 4 euros per click, with higher outliers in sectors like insurance and law.

For a first test this usually works well:

• Start with 10 to 20 euros a day. Lower produces too little data to learn anything from.
• Give it at least four weeks. For the first two weeks the system is still settling in.
• Look at enquiries, not clicks. A thousand clicks without a single phone call costs more than a hundred clicks with five appointments.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Aiming too broadly. Advertising on "nails" costs a fortune and brings visitors from the whole country while you work in one city. Set your radius to what you actually serve.
• Sending everything to the home page. Visitors then have to work out where to go themselves, and they do not.
• Stopping after a week because it is not producing anything. That is precisely the week in which it could not produce anything yet.
• Not measuring. If you do not track which ad led to an enquiry, you will be guessing again next time.
• Carrying on with what does not work. Simply switch off words and ads that produced nothing after a month. That money can go to what does work.

What is realistic

Do not expect the phone to ring off the hook on day one. Reckon on a month of testing to find out which words and which wording land, and after that an ad that brings you a predictable number of enquiries every month. That predictability is the real win: you know what goes in and what comes out.

In the meantime it remains sensible to work on your ordinary visibility, so that a year from now you are not entirely dependent on your advertising budget. You can read how that works in my website is live, what now?

Rather not work it out yourself?

We are happy to think along about which channel suits you and what a sensible budget is to start with. Send us a message telling us what you do and in which region, and we will take a look.