Marketing Like a Pro in 2025

The year is 2025 and the internet’s influence is everywhere. TV shows and movies are locked behind streaming subscriptions, entire store catalogues fit inside our pockets, and a world of information can be accessed at a moment’s notice. 

We live in a fast-paced world, and like most industries, advertisers have been forced to follow the tides or be left in the digital dust. At Websolutions.ca, we don’t just adapt to the changing world around us – we strive to lead the charge of online innovation at every turn. And with nearly a decade of marketing experience under our belt, our team has had plenty of time to learn the ins and outs of digital advertising in the modern world. 

So what’s our secret to success? Take a peek behind the scenes and see how we make marketing look easy!

Let’s cut to the chase: good marketing is all about understanding your target audience and gearing your ads towards their wants and needs. The first step of any campaign, then, is determining who that target audience is supposed to be – and that means asking lots of questions.

In the marketing world, your ideal audience depends mostly on what you’re trying to sell. Are you a small business owner who wants to raise awareness about your product or service, a tourism operator trying to drive traffic to your region, or a university hoping to increase student enrolment? In any case, a strong understanding of the brand and what it has to offer is key to creating a sound strategy that hits all the right markets.

Once we understand a brand’s purpose and goals, the next step is to figure out what type of person is most likely to show interest in their product or service. To do this, we distill the market down into its most basic building blocks, and then use those blocks to construct a personification of a brand’s picture-perfect audience, also known as an Audience Persona.

Here’s where the real challenge begins: to build a strong Audience Persona, we conduct thorough market research to help us determine consumer trends and online activity among certain demographics. Once we collect enough data, we then separate audiences into primary and secondary groups based on criteria like age, location, interests, employment and travel habits, just to name a few.

For example, our seasonal advertisement campaigns for Restigouche and Chaleur Tourism had us create Audience Personas who were adventurous, frequent travellers, and located outside those regions (but not too far away). With Bathurst Hatheway Ford dealership, we zeroed in on a (relatively) local audience who were less likely to travel, but were in the market for an investment into a new vehicle. These two demographics differed wildly from one another – not only geographically, but also in their values, their priorities, and their online activity.

One major lesson to take away from this process is that every campaign is unique. Some are broad and general, while others are niche and hyper-specific. Some interests carry over across demographics, while others differ between age, gender and geographical location. Parsing through these different layers to find the ideal consumer is how we turn a regular old ad into an impactful campaign with a strong and worthwhile ROI.

At Websolutions.ca, we’ve learned that shifting between selling a product and advertising a service or experience requires a healthy mix of expertise and strong, reliable data. That’s where agencies like us come in; we do the research and crunch the numbers, and our clients get to enjoy the fruits of our labour through successful marketing initiatives. That’s the real power of strategic marketing.

Part of creating ads that sell is knowing how to make every dollar count. Even the smallest budgets can pack a serious punch if they’re used strategically, and our marketing experts have cracked the code on how to squeeze the most value out of every dollar spent.

On the lower end of budgets, brands like Downtown Bathurst and MicroAge have found great success running small, focused campaigns with spends as low as $100. These usually involve single posts on Facebook or Instagram and are designed to simply raise local awareness about an event or promotion. We’ve also done smaller seasonal campaigns for brands like the Woodstock Duty Free Shop, which stretched a budget of $1,400 over a three month period. These tiny campaigns nonetheless brought in great results for our clients – especially considering the low bar of entry.

On the other end, budgets for larger brands – such as Tourism New Brunswick’s 2023 ExploreNB Summer Campaign – can reach as high as $150,000 for placements across several platforms including Meta, Google and LinkedIn, as well as Out of Home (OOH) placements like radio and physical merchandise. These heavy hitting campaigns are intended to reach upwards of millions of people from different demographics over a much wider area.

Contrary to popular belief, spending more isn’t the only way to get better results. Take the StudyNB Morocco campaign: intended to raise awareness about post-secondary education in New Brunswick, this small international campaign boasted a humble budget of $5,000 – but the result was a benchmark-breaking success, garnering over 27 million impressions in just 3 weeks.

While this sort of ROI isn’t common, it perfectly demonstrates the unpredictability of advertising and how finding the right audience is arguably just as important as throwing money into a campaign and hoping something sticks.

The numbers really do speak for themselves: in the world of marketing, sound strategy and a bit of finesse can make any campaign soar well above its weight.

If you ask us, the most critical point of any ad campaign comes after it’s all wrapped up. Post-campaign learning is integral to running successful ads, and much of our research involves dissecting the performance of previous campaigns to see what worked, what flopped, and what we can do to improve moving forward.

For data nerds like us, campaign statistics are a treasure trove of useful info. Post-campaign reports provide invaluable insight into a campaign’s performance, reach and impact, including how many people saw the ads, who interacted with them, and how many impressions were converted into actionable leads. By dissecting and comparing ad placements across different platforms, demographics and budgets, we can get an idea of how to better optimize future campaigns.

While just about all data is useful in one way or another, some results stick out and can serve as fantastic learning opportunities for our team. Did an ad have a large reach but low interaction? It likely targeted the wrong audience. Did many people click on a link only to leave the page a few seconds later? That could be an issue with a website’s landing page, or even an unclear call to action (CTA) in the ad itself.

The great thing about reporting is that there’s always something to learn. The StudyNB Morocco campaign taught us a lot about advertising in international markets – especially how inexpensive it can be. Small campaigns for brands like Big River Outdoors or local tourism show how small budgets can make a big impact when the right strategy is employed. And with large campaigns, we pull in all sorts of useful data from many different demographics thanks to their wider reach and broader scope.

Put together, these insights help us better understand the evolving ecosystem of advertising to a modern audience. By constantly evolving and building up our knowledge base after each campaign, Websolutions.ca has grown into an online marketing powerhouse with a track record we’re proud of and a slew of success stories under our belt.