Course Conclusion

Final week of class!  What a journey it has been...  I can honestly say that the hands-on applications that were required for this class were more helpful, to me personally, than the traditional course formats of classes I've had thus far in my MBA program.  I found the readings had real-world applications.  Guerrilla Marketing gave insightful knowledge into marketing and what small budget companies or individuals can do to market/advertise as effectively as a big budget firm.  Strategies were laid out clearly, concisely, and with examples which helped me to understand how the concepts could actually be applied to marketing campaigns.  Surfing the Tsunami was very helpful for understanding possible future states of technology and AI.  It served as an inspiration to become more knowledgeable and involved with AI so that I can be better prepared for the inevitable advancements and abrupt changes coming to the job market.

We were also expected to experiment with some AI applications, first-hand.  I have found ChatGPT to be extremely helpful in both school and work.  I have and will continue to use ChatGPT and it's future versions to find insightful answers, generate messages and ideas, and even help me as I learn about computer coding.  Although ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm recently, I may have never realized it's full potential without having to interface with the program during this class and use it to generate content for me.  I also had fun using DALL-E to create images from simple text.  I found the application to be easy to use and highly creative.  No more wishing I could find a picture or graphic that I'm imaging in my head!  Simply type what you want and in what style, wait a few seconds, and voila!  An AI created image that comes custom to you from your own ideas.  Both programs were created by OpenAI and I'm excited to see who they partner with in the future and what further offerings they come up with.

We were also tasked with creating our own blog, website, and running a real ad-campaign!  Blogger was an intuitive platform that was easy to use and came with many options for the style and background to make my blog unique and professional.  I created a website for a fake company that I made up.  ConsultingRx, a consulting company that offers personalized improvements for healthcare clinics, hospitals, and organizations.  I chose this since I work in healthcare and wanted to create a website that had the realistic appeal of my own start-up company that can offer services to the Chicago-land area.  First, I purchased a real domain on Google Domains so that I had a real site address (SchoellConsulting.com).  I created a my website using Google Sites and used Looka to create my own logo and branding.  The final result was a functioning website with a real domain address and catchy logo which represented what my consulting firm would hypothetically offer.  I was thrilled!  

 

Lastly, I used Google Ads to run a real campaign directed at increasing traffic to my website in hopes of attracting hypothetical clients for my consulting services.  Google Ads was an excellent platform to use and I imagine this specific tool as being the most valuable experience of the entire course.  My campaign was more successful than I anticipated (88 views to my site in 10 days!) and I am already looking for ways that I can use my experience with Google Ads to leverage some potential side hustle income. 

 

All of this was a new experience for me.  I would have never experimented with any of these platforms and now I can say that not only am I familiar with them, but I've actually applied them and created useful content from them!  I will be sharing my progress on LinkedIn to showcase the work that I've done and I have this class to thank for that.  I can see the value of having these skills and hope to become more efficient with each of them and more!

 Until next time,

 

 

 

Top Skills

What are the top skills that employers look for?  This is a very valuable question to answer and can help you to research and possibly obtain new skills to make you a more sought after prospect to a searching employer.  Luckily, LinkedIn provides some information from their site to identify and compile a list of top skills and top hard skills that employers value. 

 

 

LinkedIn analyzed data from employers, recruiters, and job postings from April 2022 - October 2022.  Comparing the demand of skills from employers with the skills that were possessed by LinkedIn members who were hired, produced LinkedIn's most in-demand skills overall and the most in-demand hard skills. 

 

         (Southern, 2023)

Having management skills and demonstrating the ability to successfully oversee diverse teams, projects, and operations is becoming increasingly important to employers.  Likewise, communication is key to promoting teamwork and collaboration across diverse teams that are communicating and interacting remotely at an increasing rate.  Customer service rounds off the top three skills, which demonstrates the value companies place on the ability to increase and promote brand loyalty and long-term growth (Southern, 2023). 

 

(Southern, 2023)

Hard skills refer to a worker's expertise in carrying out job-specific tasks.  Typically, these are comprised of technical skills or specialized capabilities required to complete specific work or tasks.  As you can see from the list, computer skills are at the forefront of today's hard skills.  Software development, cloud computing, data analysis, and several coding programs nearly comprise the entire list (Southern, 2023).

The data provided by LinkedIn's analysis suggests that the current job market places high value and emphasis on soft skills (management, communication, customer service, leadership, etc.) and technical skills (data analysis, software development, cloud computing, programming/coding, etc.)(Southern, 2023).

 I fully expect that we will see this type of blended value of hard and soft skills required or preferred for high-level jobs in the short-term.  Long-term, I imagine the proverbial pendulum will increasingly swing towards hard (technical) skills being of higher value.  While the soft skills will still be of some value, employers will likely be implementing more automation, AI, and machine learning models for forecasting from big data, identifying trends and projections, increasing efficiency, etc.  Having the familiarity, experience, and technical skills required to implement, interface, service, and manage these systems will only increase your value as a prospective employee.  Hopefully this list was as helpful for you as it was for me!  This analysis from LinkedIn was informative and motivational for me personally to explore classes and tutorials to help me acquire more of the top skills that employers are looking for.

Until next time, 

Cited Sources: 

1.    Southern, M. G. (2023, February 16). LinkedIn: Top 10 In-Demand Skills In 2023. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/linkedin-top-10-in-demand-skills-in-2023/479879/#close

Is AI Taking My Job?!

As AI continues to advance, become more prevalent in our daily lives, and integrate into business operations, it seems the question on everyone's mind is, Will my job be replaced by AI?  As I've ventured into learning about AI and interfacing with some of the popular applications, I've begun to wonder the same thing.  So I decided to take to the internet to do some investigating and find out what jobs are high-risk and low-risk of being replaced by AI.

A team at Princeton University compared the capabilities of AI powered applications to 52 different human abilities in different job functions to see which jobs might be at the highest risk of replacement by AI or machine learning in the near future.  Here's the top 20 list of high-risk automation according to this study:

(Liberatore, 2023) 

Bad news for telemarketers and teachers, right?  Maybe.  But I think that this is truly only scratching the surface of what jobs are at risk and I imagine that this list will shift dramatically with further advancements in AI/Machine Learning models. Before we dive into that further, let's take a look at the lowest risk jobs of replacement from AI:

(The 65 Jobs With the Lowest Risk of Automation by Artificial Intelligence and Robots  | U.S. Career Institute - USCI, n.d.)

According to this study, all of these jobs have relatively a 0% chance of being replaced by AI or automation in the near future...  0% chance of pretty much anything seems like a foolish assumption to me, especially when it comes to rapidly developing, complex automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.  As you can see, this list is comprised of healthcare, arts, engineering, and other jobs that have high degrees of variability, hands on work, and knowledge in the field.  It makes sense that these types of jobs would be less susceptible to initial advancements in AI but I still feel that any/all jobs could be impacted by AI eventually.

ChatGPT has made the biggest leap as of late and because of that, we now see the power of advanced language models that can be taught and refined through Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).  The program has had huge success and can provide advanced language in the form of a conversation.  Since there's been a breakthrough in language modeling, it makes sense that the current high-risk list is comprised of careers that are heavily reliant on language.  But there are other AI technologies all around us that don't involve language.  I'm betting you've heard of and used most of the following:

SIRI - Apple's personal assistant.  Voice activated helper of everything from finding information, providing directions, adding events/reminders to personal calendars, sending messages, placing calls, etc.  Siri uses machine learning to get smarter and better predict and understand our requests.

ALEXA - Similar to Siri, Alexa is Amazon's personal assistant.  Armed with similar functionality to Siri, Alexa is a voice activated personal assistant with the added ability to control some smart-home features (more on this later).

TESLA - Tesla itself is not necessarily an AI technology on it's own, but it certainly incorporates them into it's functionality and driving experience.  Machine learning allows features such as self-driving and predictive response to make traveling safer, smarter, and more comfortable.

COGITO - Fusion of machine learning and behavioral science aimed at improving interaction with customer service representatives over the phone.  A powerful example of behavioral adaptation to improve representatives' emotional intelligence and improve the customer experience.

BOXEVER - Machine learning intended to improve customer experiences in the travel industry.  Delivers 'micro-moments' or experiences that delight customers and enhance their travel experiences and help representatives better guide their clients on their travel experience.

AMAZON - Transactional AI that refines predictive advertisement of goods online.  Amazon has become so good, they often know what you want before you do! In fact, they intend to begin the shipping process before purchases are even made! 

(Adams, 2017)

The list goes on...  So although language models have made the biggest leap recently, what will be next?  The possibilities are endless but one thing is for sure, supercomputers, processers, machine learning, and AI will continue to advance in speed, capabilities, and complexity.  All the more reason to become more familiar with AI and consider picking up some knowledge in how it works along the way!

Until next time,

Cited Sources: 

1.    Adams, R. (2017, January 10). 10 Powerful Examples Of Artificial Intelligence In Use Today. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertadams/2017/01/10/10-powerful-examples-of-artificial-intelligence-in-use-today/?sh=4e28dc9f420d

2.     Liberatore, S. (2023, March 7). The 20 jobs most at risk as the AI boom continues: Is YOUR occupation on the list? Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11828001/The-20-jobs-risk-AI-boom-continues-occupation-list.html

3.     The 65 Jobs With the Lowest Risk of Automation by Artificial Intelligence and Robots  | U.S. Career Institute - USCI. (n.d.). U.S. Career Institute. https://www.uscareerinstitute.edu/blog/65-jobs-with-the-lowest-risk-of-automation-by-ai-and-robots

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Ad

Let's talk about how to ad!  No, I'm not talking about 'adding' as in mathematics, I'm talking about how to advertise!  This class enabled me to gain real-life experience running a legitimate ad campaign with the help of Google Ads.  As you may have seen in my previous posts, Google Ads comes equipped with a user-friendly platform, packed full of helpful suggestions and analytics to help you run a successful campaign.  So I wondered, what else is out there and how can I get some familiarity with other practical platforms for running and managing ad campaigns?

The answer is all around us!  I didn't really consider how available ad campaigns can be but if you think about it, it really does make sense.  Where do you see ads in your day to day interactions?  The answer is, Social Media!  Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter...  all generate massive amounts of revenue from advertisements.  Further yet, the picture/video platforms offer marketing and advertising opportunity as well.  Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram...  the full arsenal of social media platforms that can help you advertise better than ever before.

 So I wondered, Which platform is the best? and How does one determine which platforms to utilize?  Here's what I found:

One study, comprised of surveys from nearly 1,500 marketers gave some strong insight into which platforms are considered the best.  The below graphic is a two-fold depiction.  The dark blue bar represents the percentage of surveyed marketers that use each platform for marketing/advertisement.  The light blue bar represents Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS). 

 

(Muhammad, 2022)

More than half of those surveyed use LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Google, and Facebook.  More importantly, Facebook and Google were the juggernauts of ROAS, providing 25% and 44% ROAS, respectively.  This indicates that these two platforms are where your best performance outcomes are and Google is far and above everyone, even the second place Facebook.  So there you have it, all you need to do is run your ad campaign on Google, right?  Well, we've learned from this class that this would not be the most successful strategy.  It's valuable to understand your target audience, your reach, and where you can have the most success using multiple modes of marketing and advertising platforms together.  

I found a blog post with a descriptive and helpful explanation of what to consider when advertising on these platforms.  Overall, it gave me a much better understanding of what types of platforms to consider for ads and why.  Here's a high-level summary of the benefits for running ads on social media sites vs Google Ads:

Key Advantages to Running Social Media Ads:

1.    Improving your brand recognition and building awareness  

- Even though users are not ready or interested in buying your product, you allow them to become familiar with your brand and can showcase your company/product.

2.     Getting insights about your target audience

- Learn more about your intended audience.  Use the data/analytics to optimize your campaign's performance. 

3.     Growing engagement rate

- Increases your reach and audience engagement.  Relevant and interesting content can funnel potential customers to your brand.

4.    Increasing inbound traffic

- Social media can increase traffic to your site or brand.  Clicking on your ads can help customers find out more about your company, products, services, etc and allows the opportunity for them to volunteer contact info or subscribe to alerts or newsletters.

5.    Generating and improving brand loyalty

 - Grow awareness and develop nurturing relationships with potential and existing customers/viewers.

6.     Building a brand community

- Create a community around your brand to increase word-of-mouth referrals and promote company growth. 

Key Advantages to Running Google Ads: 

1.    Google Ads are a fast way to gain leads

- Reduce the time to build up your SEO and allow Google to target warm leads and funnel traffic to your site/brand.

2.    Transparency and competition

- Google displays what competitors in your industry are paying and bidding for similar ads.  Use that data to gain a competitive advantage on the optimization of your ads.

3.    Reach more potential customers

- Google is the world's largest search engine.  Google Ads can vastly improve your immediate reach by channeling your ads through YouTube, Gmail, and Display Networks.

4.    Understand your target audience better

 - Review helpful data points such as most-used keywords, demographics, locations, and age of users who viewed your ad or clicked your ad to narrow the focus of your ad or adjust the content to hone in on your target audience.

 (Nexoya, 2022)

Hoping you find this as helpful as I did.  I know I will be using this knowledge to try to leverage my digital marketing/ad skills to even more successful campaigns in the future and I hope you do too!

Until next time,

Source Citation: 

1.    Muhammad, F. (2022, November 3). The Best Digital Advertising Platforms. Instapage. https://instapage.com/blog/best-advertising-platforms

2.    Nexoya. (2022, April 11). Social media vs Google Ads: Which is better for your strategy? Nexoya. https://www.nexoya.com/blog/social-media-google-ads-which-is-better-for-your-strategy/ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ultra-Combo

For this week, I wanted to incorporate a little bit of everything and hence, the ultra-combo blog post!  In chapter 6, Surfing the Tsunami discusses the third stage in progression; becoming adept in AI.  This involves getting directly involved with AI; using it, be involved with developing it, learning code, working with data, and even obtaining certifications.  While this post will not necessarily demonstrate becoming adept in AI, I will utilize ChatGPT to write the main context of this post and DALL-E to create the graphics. 

 

 

To round out the ultra combo, I'm asking ChatGPT to write a summary of this week's chapter of Guerrilla Marketing.  Let's see what ChatGPT can provide! 

  

Chapter 6 of "Guerrilla Marketing" by Jay Conrad Levinson is titled "Selecting the Most Lethal Marketing Methods." The chapter focuses on the importance of understanding your target audience and creating a message that resonates with them. The author emphasizes that guerrilla marketing is about making a connection with the customer and creating a relationship, not just selling a product. 

The chapter begins by discussing the importance of research in understanding your target audience. Levinson suggests that marketers should research their customers' needs, wants, and values, as well as their age, gender, income, and lifestyle. He also recommends using focus groups, surveys, and other research methods to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. 

Levinson then goes on to discuss the importance of creating a message that speaks directly to your target audience. He advises marketers to use language that their customers can relate to, avoiding technical jargon or language that is too simplistic. The author suggests that using a personal tone, including humor or emotion, can help create a more powerful and memorable message. He also emphasizes the importance of providing value to your customers, whether through entertainment, education, or information, in order to establish a relationship of trust and loyalty. 

Finally, the chapter highlights the role of repetition in guerrilla marketing. Levinson argues that people need to see a message multiple times in order for it to sink in and create an impression. He suggests using a variety of channels to reach your target audience, such as social media, email marketing, and traditional advertising, and emphasizes the importance of consistency in messaging across all channels. 

In conclusion, chapter 6 of "Guerrilla Marketing" provides valuable insights into selecting marketing methods that can effectively connect with your target audience. The chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding your audience, creating a message that resonates with them, and using repetition to establish a powerful connection and build a loyal customer base.

Pretty impressive, right?  ChatGPT provides a high level overview of the chapter's contents and provides enough detail for you to discern the chapter specific principles and concepts from the overarching theme of the book.  My DALL-E generated photo is a representation of how I feel each time I interface with ChatGPT - Mind Blown! 

While this post incorporates both books, ChatGPT, and DALL-E, it isn't exactly becoming adept with AI.  But it does serve as reinforcement and demonstration to the power, usefulness, and capabilities that new AI software provides, which is intriguing.  Intriguing enough to motivate me to dive in further and explore ways that I truly can become adept at AI.  I hope it might do the same for you!

Until next time, 

Ad Campaign Completed

The ad campaign I created was completed this week!  I was very skeptical after the first couple days but I think overall, the campaign was quite successful.  I was pleasantly surprised by the final results of the analytics that Google Ads provides and feel that the campaign far exceeded my expectations.  Here is what my ad looked like, in live action on the web! 

 

At first, my campaign was off to a bad start.  But one thing I've learned from this class, marketing takes time and you must be patient and committed; resisting the urge to pull the plug too soon on advertisement campaigns.  Below you will see a picture of the campaign's success after two days of running online. 

 

 

$0 spent, 6 impressions, 0 clicks, and 0 conversions...   Not exactly encouraging data.  I quickly started to reflect on why this was happening.  Did I completely botch the concept?  Did I use the right phrases, keywords, and descriptions?  Do my ads scream 'clickbait' to anyone who sees them?  Is this a reflection of where the ad points; my website of a theoretical company that isn't real?  Should I scrap the whole thing and start this over from scratch?  The initial feelings/impressions that I had were quite negative.  After all, I have never done this before.  My website was created a few weeks ago; also something I've never done before.  The website is for a company and services that are made up, and even though this felt like something I could potentially explore in the future, I don't actually offer expert healthcare consulting services to clients.  I reviewed the analytics and my ad.  Google gave a couple key suggestions for improving the ad's success, which I did.  I even tried to see if I could make major adjustments to what I originally created.  But then I remembered the stories from Guerrilla Marketing about how companies had slow progress for ads, pulled the plug early, and missed out on a potentially successful campaign.  I decided to push through, trust the sophistication of Google's process and keep an eye on the progress so that I could learn from this ad, to be able to make more effective ads in the future.  So how did that turn out?  Let's take a look! 

 

 

Much better, right?  Nearly 8k impressions and 88 clicks!  Quite the turnaround for only a few more days of running the ads!  Now, having 0 conversions might catch your eye as a red flag, but I was accepting of that statistic.  When I created my ad, I had Google focus on generating leads and chose the benchmark for a conversion to be defined as collecting customer information through a form on my website, requesting additional information on my consulting services.  So it seemed very reasonable that people wouldn't fill out the form requesting more information from a company that doesn't truly exist or offer services for healthcare consulting. 

 

Given the billions of people online, 8k impressions and 88 clicks might not seem like a lot but my ad was also only presented to users within a 25 mile radius of Glen Ellyn, IL.  So actually 8k impressions is pretty good in my book!  Above is a screenshot of location analytics which showed where my clicks were coming from.  This gives a great information that indicates where ads were successful and where they weren't.  This would be instrumental data for refining the ad and targeting the locations that seem to generate more interest in the service.  Also worth mentioning, I was only paying a max of $4/day which Google projected would lead to 20-50 clicks per month.  88 in ten days is quite a bit more than that and in a shorter time!  Sounds like a small success to me.

More to come on the final product and lessons learned from this experience.  I look forward to sharing the full details of the campaign, lessons learned, and how I plan to use the knowledge I obtained through this project for future use.

Until next time, 

 

 

Creative Marketing for Guerrillas

Chapter 5 of Guerrilla Marketing covers creativity in marketing.  Levinson explains that in marketing, creativity is directly tied to generating profits.  A campaign is only creative if it's successful.  If your ad or campaign is generating large profits, you can conclude that it inherently contains creativity and vice versa.    

 

 

 

First, Levinson lays out a guide for determining your creative strategy.  Begin by writing a three sentence strategy.  Make sure that the strategy includes the purpose of your message, the benefits of your product/service, and the personality of your brand.  Once you've written your creative marketing program, Levinson recommends that you practice by writing creative strategies for current advertisers.  He suggests that it is beneficial to choose at least one from each form of media including newspaper ad, TV ad, website ad, and direct-mail ad.  From this practice, you can gain some experience, apply it to your own campaign, and have a better understanding of your competitors which will help you to avoid a similar or imitating version of their ads.

Once you've developed your strategy, Levinson gives you a seven step program to assure you're on track for success with your campaign.

 

 

1.  Find the inherent drama within your offering.

Everyone loves a little drama.  Your product/service needs to have some aspect of interest so you can grab people's attention, otherwise you may not sell anything.

2.  Translate that inherent drama into a meaningful benefit.

People buy benefits, not features.  Make sure your audience can see that they're not simply buying your product, they're buying an outcome, an image, a status, etc.  Make sure you tie this back to your dramatic feature.

3.  State your benefits in as believable a way as possible.

Discover the relationship between and the difference in honesty and believability.  Be honest but make sure that you can convey a message that is believable to your audience.  Marketing/advertising has the reputation for being deceitful or exaggerative so be thoughtful in your messaging and make your statements easily believable. 

4.  Get people's attention.

People don't care about advertising.  They care about what is interesting to them.  Don't be guilty of creating advertising that's more interesting than your actual product/service.  Get it right by making sure that what you sell is interesting in its own way. 

5.  Motivate your audience to get involved.

Engaging your audience's involvement will help you be successful.  Use tactics to encourage their participation through visiting your store, calling you, keeping a coupon, subscribing to receive more information, visit your website, or take advantage of a free demonstration/trial.  Give them a reason to be actively engaged in your product so they will be inherently more invested in it. 

6.  Be sure you are communicating clearly.

Realize that at best, you're only going to capture about half of people's attention when you present your ad.  The main point must be clearly articulated, communicated, and understood.  Zero ambiguity in your message is the goal; make sure it is clearly understood by all. 

7.  Measure your finished advertisement, commercial, letter, website, and/or brochure against your creative strategy.

Use the strategy as your guide.  If your campaign isn't successful, start over and create it using the outlined process above.  If you find that the ad is consistent with your strategy and it's still unsuccessful, carefully evaluate the other aspects of your product, image, message, etc. to discover where the shortcomings are.

In marketing, being creative isn't the same as we stereotypically think.  It doesn't mean you're necessarily artistic, an excellent drawer, painter, writer, etc.  It means that you're in touch with your product and identify where you may be able to think and act outside the box to ensure the success of your ad, campaign, product, and company.  It is the ideas that are classified as creative and it's only creative if it ends up generating profit.  Be thorough, thoughtful, direct, clear, and relentless and you may find yourself generating more creativity than you thought possible.

Until next time, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ad Campaign Creation

This week we embark on the journey to create a real ad-campaign!  I decided to use Google Ads to run a legitimate ad campaign with the goal of pointing potential customers to my website, with the ultimate objective of generating leads.  The website was created to simulate a healthcare consulting company that I made up (ConsultingRx) as a simulation of something that interests me, is pertinent to my current career, combined with the marketing skill learned from this class.  While this company is not legitimate in the sense that I am currently able to evaluate and consult for large healthcare entities, the project is being completed as an experiment in hopes to understand these concepts and tools better, so that I may be able to indeed offer legitimate services in the future.

Let me walk you through my process so you can have a better understanding of just how accessible and practical this service really is!  Let's go through the step by step process for creating your own active ad campaign on the internet so you can leverage Google's targeted ad capabilities for your own business. 

 

1.  Determine your business name:

Simply enter your business name and we're on to the next step!  Google is going to use that in the published ads it creates so make sure that you're entering the name as you want it to appear on the web 

2.  Where does the ad take you viewers?:

The next two steps involve pointing your ad to your intended destination.  Determine where you want the ad to point your potential customers.  This can be your business website, blog, etc.  Once you've entered the destination's site address, a picture is provided to confirm that your link is the accurate destination for your intended audiences.

3.  Determine your marketing goals:

At this point you get to determine what your main goals are for your campaign so Google can align its strategies with your objectives and provide better analytics to help you successfully measure the effectiveness of your campaign.  Choose what your main goal is and then further guide Google to target increased 'Sales' or 'Leads'.  You can then further refine your respective goal with more detailed objectives.  Here, you can see that I chose receiving customer information through form completions on my site as the detailed goal of my campaign.

4.  Write your ad:

Now the fun begins!  Write your own ad, be creative, and employ all those marketing tactics you're learning!  Headlines are limited to only 30 characters max, including spaces, so be thoughtful and intentional with your efforts to grab customers' attention.  Add in your descriptions that appear below the headlines.  These have 90 character max to allow you to provide some greater detail but again, be thoughtful and deliberate with your advertising.

5.  Add keywords:

Google makes great suggestions and even has drop down selections that appear as you begin to type keywords that you want associated with your ad.  Choose wisely!  There are many options and you want to capture a wide range of audiences without losing credibility for being too wide.  Don't set yourself up to be another 'Click Bait' ad!

 6.  Select the location and range:

Continue by setting the location you're targeting for your advertisement.  You can expand or contract the range that you would like to cover so that your marketing is only targeting clients in your preferred area.  Do your research on your competition and opportunities to enter a market.  I chose a central location that was the highest density of outpatient healthcare clinics in the Chicagoland area.  Furthermore, I expanded my range to be both reasonable and encompassing the highest density of distributions of healthcare within the Chicago area suburbs and communities.

7.  Choose your budget:

Google offers the ability of small business, low budget, Guerrilla marketers to advertise on a budget!  You can choose your budget limitations, both small and large.  Google also provides a reference range of what competition in your industry is spending on Google Ads so that you have insight as to how much you can/should afford towards your marketing/advertising budget. 

8. Review your selections: 

        

Review a summary of your options and finalize your custom ad campaign.  If all looks good, continue to publish your newly created, customized ad!

As you can see, Google has the capabilities to make advertising smart, customized, and affordable.  This service is extremely user-friendly and simple to understand, create, and monitor with valuable analytics and graphics (more to come on that).  I hope that this has made you consider how Google Ads can help you achieve your own success and I truly hope that you are encouraged and motivated to give it a try for yourself.  Take a look at the video below for more tips on how to create an effective campaign using Google Ads.

Good luck on your quest to becoming a savvy marketer with the assistance of Google Ads!

Until next time,