Nowadays, more and more types of businesses are moving from offline to online. Or at least they are beginning to use the internet as one of their sales channels. The first thing a company does is contact developers, and as a result it gets a website – a representation of its company on the Internet.

Nevertheless, the site itself will not bring sales. No one simply does not know about it. How to make people begin to go to your site? What channel is better to start – contextual advertising or SEO-promotion? Is it worth using targeted advertising and for what purposes?

These questions will be especially acute for you if you are a young brand, and the Internet is the main platform for promotion. In this article, we have outlined a rough strategy to follow if you already have a website and you don’t know where to start promoting it.

Preparatory stage

Of course, you would like to get sales from the first days of promotion. But if users are not yet familiar with your brand, then even getting a lot of traffic, you may not get enough sales. People don’t have trust in your brand yet. Therefore, it will be better if the user hears about you even before they need your products or services.

The first thing to do is to create social media pages for your project (if it hasn’t been done already), design them and fill them with some number of publications. Then – so that your brand starts to be recognized – we recommend using advertising campaigns in YouTube and Facebook, focused on maximum reach. As promotional content, we recommend using a few small videos that show how to use your products and what their benefits are.

Video ads and outreach campaigns are good because the cost per view and interaction in them is minimal. But this type of advertising won’t directly bring in a lot of leads and sales. It is a convenient tool to familiarize users with the fundamentally new features of your product and to arouse users’ interest in your brand. Scheme of the strategy for promoting an online store from scratch

Stage 1 – Targeted Advertising

Connect Facebook targeting ads with the campaign type “Lead Attraction”.

Different types of Facebook campaigns use different display algorithms. The price per click in lead-attracting campaigns will be higher than in outreach campaigns. This is because Facebook will tend to show ads to those who are more likely to order the product/service. In order for lead attraction advertising to work effectively, not only does it need clear targeting and audience testing, but also correctly set up analytics.

It will be necessary to install the facebook pixel on the website, as well as send all possible micro and macro targeted actions to the Facebook Ads account. We recommend: make phone numbers and emails clickable, attach links to your Instagram and Facebook accounts to the site (and it is desirable that the accounts open in a separate window).

Stage 2 – SEO Optimization

We advise you to start with Facebook Ads rather than Google Ads, for the reason that Facebook is less sensitive to the quality of the landing page.

For Google Ads, it is highly desirable that the site is well optimized. Internal optimization involves fixing technical errors, prescribing meta tags (tags that help Google “understand” what the site is about), and placing relevant content on the pages. We recommend that you do at least minimal SEO optimization before you start advertising. The quality of the landing page is one of the factors that is taken into account when calculating the price per click, and affects even the very likelihood of your site showing up for a particular keyword.

A well-indexed site will allow you to connect additional tools Google Ads. For example, dynamic search advertising, which is especially effective if your target queries are low-frequency. How SEO-promotion works, when will be the first results and the cost of such promotion read more on our commercial page SEO

Stage 3 – Connecting Google Ads

Search advertising

After the internal optimization works are finished, you can connect Google Ads advertising. Google Ads search advertising works with the most “warm” audience, – those who already want to use services similar to yours, and request information about these services on the network. This will potentially be one of your main channels for attracting customers. However, in order for this tool to work effectively, you’ll need to spend some time optimizing your advertising.

Remarketing

Users rarely make a decision to order products right away. Many need some time to think about it. After thinking about it, such users may go back to the site using the organic search channel. However, they may get distracted by other companies in their search. Or, they may not be able to correctly formulate a search query to get back to your site. In order to bring those who have already visited your site but did not leave a bid back to it, we recommend using both Google Ads and Facebook Ads remarketing. By utilizing both remarketing platforms, we increase the chances that a visitor will still see our ads at the right time and return to the site to place a request. In order for remarketing to work, you need correctly configured analytics in both Google Analytics and Facebook, and also, in the very first stages of the advertising launch should be enabled to collect remarketing audiences.

Similar Audience Lists

When the number of tracked completed orders in your project reaches a few hundred, you can expand your audience by using lists of “look-alike audiences”. Such lists are available in both Facebook and Google Ads. In addition, Google has more types of tools like Smart campaigns, which are very effective in attracting new leads in well-trained accounts. Such advertising is effective because it is maximally focused on your target audience, and relies on statistical data rather than assumptions.