Now that you have built and tested your website, I would like you to market it. Let’s say that your budget is NOK 10 000 (or 1800 $ US). Please do the following:
- Do some research on what advertising costs. You could for instance contact your local newspaper, print shop and other websites.
- Make a detailed list of how you would market your website. Remember to keep your budget in mind.
- What if you had double the budget? Come up with a second marketing strategy, this time with NOK 20 000 at your disposal. (3600 $ US)
Market your website
For this LT I needed to market my website about Hawaii, my local newspaper doesn’t write about traveling much, So I wanted to think a little bit outside the box.
I asked myself the question “Where would I reach the people that actually want to go to Hawaii, and not all the others?”.
I have read about advertising online before, so I googled a bit and found that the best way to do this was either with the use of Facebook ads or Google ads and also influencer marketing – but since most influencers take more than 10 000 NOK for a post, I let that one go…this time.
I then continued to read that I could basically reach anyone, and exactly the people I wanted, by advertising online. Let’s say people who buy tickets to Hawaii, people looking up Hawaii online, people who browse Hawaii hashtags on Instagram, etc., so my ads actually hit the people who want to travel there. I continued to read about Facebook ads online, and different sites displaying their best tips and tricks.
I learned about the different types of ads, and how to choose the right campaign type – to get the results that I wanted.
Marketing list
- Having my research fresh in mind, I want to market my website with the use of Facebook ads. This will display ads for my website on Facebook, and on Instagram (owned by Facebook)
This is how I would do it: - Create a Facebook page and Instagram page to accompany my website. (These are the pages that will display the ads, and also where I could interact/respond to my new followers.)
- Create a Facebook ads account to run the ads from.
- Create a new “Engagement Campaign” – to get people interested, and click through to my site.
- Budget: 1800 USD
- Audience: People who live in Norway
- Ages: 18-65
- Interests:
- Go Visit Hawaii
- Hawaii
- Hawaii – gohawaii.com (competitive site)
- Hawaii (island)
- Hawaiian Airlines
- Run the ad, and display on Facebook and instagram.
This is how my mock-up looked like, including Facebook’s estimates:
Double Budget
If I had double the budget I would probably just run the ad again, but this time focus on “conversions”, rather than “engagement”. Then the list would then be the same as above.
But, since that is not really an alternative way of marketing – for this task I chose to go with something else, influencer marketing.
Influence marketing is the type of marketing where you buy placements from a person of influence.
For my specific site, that could be a traveling magazine, a blogger who travels around the globe, etc. I would reach out to a few of the largest (maybe 10-20), and ask them how much they charge for a single post. According to my sources online, this could be anywhere from 5000 NOK to 50 000NOK in Norway – depending on how many followers they have.
According to Catalina Nielsen in collaboration with TapInfluence, their research showed that influencer marketing is actually 11 times as effective as conventional display ads.
An example of influencer marketing is a post where Lene Orvik (Norwegian fashion influencer) advertises Bik Bok’s new clothing collection to her 100.000 followers.