How to Do Online Marketing for Your Student-Run Business

If you’re just launching your business as a student, chances are you don’t have too much money to spend. Luckily, running digital marketing for your company allows you to get impressive results while spending as little or as much as you want. Here are some of the best platforms and methods for successfully running online marketing for your student-run business.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads is one of the most popular places to run ads online, especially if you’re selling a product. Since it has so much data on each of its users, the platform allows you to target people based on hundreds of different options, such as age, gender, location, relationship status, employment status, interests, online behaviors, and more. It’s relatively easy to learn but can also be incredibly elaborate and complex, which is everyone from beginners to massive corporations uses it. And perhaps the most appealing feature of Facebook Ads is that the more you use it, the smarter it gets. Facebook can track exactly what kinds of people are going to your site and buying your product and then target more of those kinds of people, meaning your money will get you better results.

Payment for Facebook Ads is also straightforward. You set a daily budget for each of your campaigns or ad sets, and that’s how much is spent. There are people who are successful spending $5 per day on Facebook and there are companies that are successful spending $500,000 per day. With almost no entry requirement but near-infinite room to scale, Facebook ads is a great tool. Further, since Instagram is a part of Facebook, you can easily run ads on both platforms from the same ads manager. The convenience and versatility of the platform makes it a great advertising solution.

If you’re a student who wants to use Facebook Ads to do online marketing for your business, we’d recommend checking out this guide by Oberlo.

Influencer Ads

Influencer ads is a style of digital marketing in which you reach out to someone with a significant social following (most often on Instagram) and pay them to advertise something to their audience. Facebook and influencer ads are two of the most common ways to market a product online, although there are important differences. Firstly, the amount of money you’ll need to start running influencer ads is typically higher than for Facebook Ads. Accounts with lots of followers can expect upwards of 50, 75, or even hundreds of dollars for a single post.

However, your first influencer ads have a better chance of having a high ROAS (return on ad spend, or the amount of money you make divided by the amount you spend on the ad) than a slow and steady Facebook Ads campaign. The viral and social nature of having influencers post your product allows for some truly insane (albeit short term) results. One thing to note, however, is that you may eventually run out of influencers to advertise with. Therefore, you always have to be thinking ahead and finding new accounts to work with if you choose this method.

Influencer ads are great for marketing your business online and building awareness with the potential to go viral. If you want to incorporate it into your student business, we’d recommend checking out this influencer marketing strategy guide by BigCommerce.

Google Ads

Google Ads is another popular method for online advertising. When you search something on Google, have you ever noticed that the top few results say “sponsored” next to them? That’s what Google Ads is. It allows you to pay so that for specific Google searches, your link shows up at the top. This is incredibly powerful, as it means you can get your website in front of people who are already trying to find something specific. You can use this to sell a product, add people to an email list, or just get quality visitors to your site.

There are a couple of important things to know when getting into Google Ads. Firstly, your creative (the design of the ad) is much more limited than for Facebook or influencer ads. You can only include a title, description, and link, whereas the other platforms let you do images or videos. Second, Google Ads traffic tends to cost more than other methods. You’ll generally find you pay more per visitor on Google than on a platform like Facebook. However, as mentioned before, Google traffic is already motivated to find something specific online and therefore can convert at a very high rate if you know how to use it.

If you want to learn more about how to use Google Ads, we’d recommend checking out this guide from Hubspot.

YouTube Ads

YouTube Ads is a strong option if the ads you want to run are primarily in video format. The platform is great for creating brand awareness and getting leads for your site. Similar to Google Ads, YouTube lets you target your ads to people who have searched something specific. Setting your ads to play for certain searches or videos means that you can bring specific, high-quality traffic to your site.

YouTube allows you to choose where your ad will present itself on the platform, and one of the most common places you’ll likely choose is before visitors watch a video. If the ad is short, viewers will have to watch the whole thing; if it’s longer, they’ll have to watch it for at least 5 seconds before a skip button appears. This guaranteed watch time differentiates YouTube Ads from other platforms, as most other platforms allow users to skip right over ads. Therefore the quality of your video ad, especially the first 5 or so seconds, is incredibly important. Also, similar to Google Ads, traffic will likely cost you more than other platforms, although the traffic you get will be specific and valuable.

If you’re a student who wants to learn more about how to use YouTube Ads to do online marketing for your business, we’d recommend checking out this guide from Hootsuite.

Other Ways to Do Online Marketing for Your Student Business

Those are four of the most common platforms to market your business on, although there are many more options out there. Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and many more platforms are all viable options that can be great for running advertisements. If you want to learn more about any of these other solutions, leave a comment below or reach out to us on social media and we might just make a post on it.

Now that you know how to do online marketing for your business as a student, check out more of our blog posts to learn how to tackle the other aspects of your company, or visit our resources page to find guides to help you in your business and academic journeys. If you’re not already a part of Venzur, make sure to join now so you can bring your business ideas to life.