5 Online Advertising Mistakes That T&T Businesses Make

As an observer of all things online marketing for some time, I’ve been seeing how Trinidad & Tobago businesses advertise online. Advertising space can be bought on Facebook and Google with a credit card and our businesses are taking advantage of cheap ads to reach a growing internet audience. But it’s rare to see an ad that seems to be done right. Here are some of the errors I see happening.

No clear offer

Advertising without a clear offer is money wasted. Most ads – from businesses of all sizes – give general descriptions of the business. They try to detail all their products and services in the hope that someone needing one of their services will contact them. This type of advertising gets ignored quite easily as the viewer is not presented with an eye-catching reason to click on the ad to view what’s on the other side.

A clear offer such as “Get 10% off when you buy two aloo pies with channa” is a much more compelling ad than “We sell aloo pies, doubles, saheenas, kachories and pholourie”.

No call to action

Humans are strange creatures and need to be told what to do. In advertising, these instructions are called calls to action. They are generally accepted as an important element of any ad to get viewers to undertake a desired action. Calls to action can be as simple as “click here” or “buy now” or “call now to order”.

These simple instructions usually are missing from the online ads of businesses in Trinidad & Tobago but can make an impact on ad clicks when done right.

No landing pages

Most internet advertising seem to take the visitor to the advertiser’s home pages. This type of advertising provides no value to the advertiser. Instead, a landing page should be used.

A landing page is a specific page on a website which visitors arrive on after clicking on an ad. The landing page contains copy and elements that are specific to an ad offer. For example, clicking on the ad with the offer for 10% off 2 aloo pies with channa should take you to a landing page detailing the offer with a call to action to “buy now” or “call to order”.

Using broad match keywords with no negative keywords

This error – specific to Google Adwords advertising – results in lots of wasted clicks and money being paid to Google. If you run a small, inexpensive Tobago hotel and want people to find you using Google, then you’d probably advertise with the broad match key phrase “cheap tobago hotel”. The problem with using the broad match is that your ad will probably also be shown when searching for “tobago villas”, which is not what you’d want and is something I’ve observed happening.

I’ve experienced such waste myself but it can be countered with the use of negative keywords. These are words which basically should not be used to display your ads. So you can set the word “villa” as a negative keyword and your ad will not be shown when people search for “tobago villa”. You can trust me on this: negative keywords save a lot of money! Learn to use them.

Not collecting contact information

This is a particular peeve of mine with websites in general: not having a way to collect visitor information so you can continue to market to them after you get them to visit your site (with their permission). If you’re spending money on an ad campaign and expect 1 in 100 visitors to actually contact you, then what happens to the other 99? How do you reach them again? With another similarly expensive campaign? You don’t have to.

If you give visitors who don’t buy immediately a reason to give you their contact information, for example with a free report, then you can continue marketing to them using cheaper and more direct tools such as through email marketing. These are people who have given you their permission to market to them!

Online advertising is still a growing medium in Trinidad & Tobago and while business owners get experience with these tools and platforms, they’ll hopefully learn how to use their online ad budgets more effectively.

*image courtesy Mr. Fix It