You’ve decided to invest money in banner ads, but you’re not sure how much to invest and where? The following guidelines will help you figure out a banner ad strategy that brings in business while cutting advertising costs: Before you place banner ads anywhere, you’ll want to identify your sales base. Consider race, age, gender, income bracket, and interest field as you create this list. If you don’t have the statistical information to figure this out on your own, you may want to make use of sales analytics software or a marketing expert. This information will help you choose sites for your banner ads. For example, if you’re selling sexy boots, you’ll want to target young women. But if your product is a pair of modest leather pumps, you should place ads on sites frequented by professional women.
You might also want to consider remarketing (also called retargeting). Retargeting removes the guesswork, allowing you to focus marketing efforts on people who have shown interest in your site already. A retargeting service will track the guests who visit your site and then post your banner ads on pages (off your site) that your guest visits. Your banner ads will be presented to people who visited your site, meaning you may either entice a customer to become a repeat customer, or you may get a customer whose time on your site was somehow interrupted to return and make a purchase. You’ll save money by paying for the one account with the retargeting service instead of paying many different sites to place ads on their sites, and you’ll get multiple chances to win over people who had already demonstrated interest in your products or services. Build affiliate partnerships. You can build a network of affiliate partners who will all build websites, post your banner ads, and point traffic to your sites. By offering monetary rewards in exchange for click-throughs (to your site), registrations (giving you valuable contact information), or purchases (of your product or service, naturally). This is a great strategy because you don’t have to pay money out before you see results coming in. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to using banner ads, but hopefully it’s gotten you going in the right direction.