4 Questions to Ask Before Getting Advertising Opportunities

Are you thinking of getting an advertising contract? Don’t know whether it’s a good investment or not? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

This is not a phenomenon unique to your business. Every other business owner out there must have had experiences like this where they have to choose but they are clueless on what to do.

You could be receiving a lot of offers from ad agencies that promises good returns, but how do you exactly qualify advertising opportunities with a company?

We’ve crafted this article to help you find the answers you are looking for. Here are 4 key questions to ask to help you decide whether the advertisement opportunity is worth it.

How to Get The Right Advertising Opportunities

1. What are your objectives?

What do you want to achieve with your ads?

Increase your number of followers? Increase your sales count? Increase your customer base? Get more leads?

Know what your goal or goals are, it has to be specific and must be based on realistic expectations.

For example, people hire a social media strategist but they don’t know or they don’t have a clear picture of the things that they want to achieve. They jump to the conclusion that having more followers is essentially increasing their sales count.

Another example would be, hiring a web designer to create business signs or logo when what you actually need is a graphic designer to do that. It’s funny because people always think web designers are also graphic designers at the same time.

There’s a wide gap between their skill set and this kind of wrong assumptions is the source of unnecessary failed expectations.

Converting these leads to customers are not part of the responsibilities of a social media strategist. Well, it depends on your arrangements, or say, a case to case basis, but it is important to specify your expectations and lay out your goals clearly in order to avoid unnecessary frustration.

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2. Who will be receiving your ads? Are they your target customers?

What kind of audience do these ad agencies offer?

Let’s say you are looking at an ad opportunity with a travel influencer and you are selling baby products. How do you think will you be able to relate your products to their audience with the big niche gap in between?

You can probably offer a product that babies can use during travel. Yeah, good idea no doubt. But the question is whether the receiving audience mothers or families who travel in a group.

You have to make sure that you know the exact demographic of the receiving audience because that’s key to achieving your goals.

Also, in most cases, ad proposals are only skin deep and do not really create a good, in-depth picture of their audience. You have to know the exact demographics of their audience first before you craft an advertising content plan and pick the right advertising opportunities for your business.

Learning the demographics such as the location, age, preferences, occupation, educational attainment, income, and buying behavior with previous advertisers should be at the top of your list.

Knowing other details such as their occupation could also help you in streamlining your ads to the right people. You want to be very specific, down to the minute details as much as possible.

3. What are the audience’s behavior patterns that you need to be aware of?

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Aside from having a complete picture of their audience demographics, you also need to be aware of how their audience actually interact with them. And if their previous advertisers were able to successfully achieve their goals with them.

Some brands offer good services or awesome products and are getting enough buzz online. But it doesn’t automatically mean that their audience is 100 percent engaged with them.

You need to know what percentage of their promotional emails actually gets opened and how many of that gets converted to successful sales.

Aside from that, you need to know:

how they get found online,
what channels they use,
how much time an average user stays in their website,
which pages get opened the most or are generating the most traffic for them,
and which pages get opened after that.
You need to put yourself in their high ranking pages to get more visibility.

4. Is it cost-efficient?

Now, I don’t like to do heavy math but if there’s anything that would help you decide whether an ad proposal is worth it is to calculate the LIFETIME VALUE of a new customer.

Here’s an example shared by Neil Patel.

Don’t calculate on the per lead or per sale, but calculate how long do you think a customer is going to stay with you after the ad you are getting from them.

It sounds a little complicated, but you will know if the ads are cost-efficient when the advertising opportunities are presented to you.

Some will charge an arm and a leg but can earn your customers with a potential for a long-term relationship. Or you can spend just a buck on each lead given to you, but with no assurance for conversion.

It’s important that you also look for other alternatives that can deliver bigger results but cost just as less.

Takeaway

Most business owners jump right into advertising opportunities with major brands or big league influencers without knowing exactly what they signed up for. You can’t let an outsourced agency take care of everything for you if you don’t have enough money to throw away.

Don’t make the mistake of signing up and making the wrong assumptions. Research is key.

Don’t jump ahead, but carefully examine the ad proposals you are getting. Some of them are going to make you money, most of them won’t.

About The Author

This is a guest post by Grace Rivera, a frustrated designer who directs her attention to writing instead and works as a writer for 303 Sign Company, a business sign-making company based in Colorado.