Advertising online can help grow your business. Digital platforms, including social media and search engines can connect your business with your target customers.
What is Advertising Online?
Advertising online is the use of digital platforms, including social media and search engines, to promote a product or service.
The internet has fundamentally changed the way that businesses advertise their products and services. This change is largely due to its ability to provide a platform that reaches a large number of people. Advertising on the internet can be done through social media sites, search engines, banner ads and more.
Social media sites can be a great place to advertise products and services. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have created a platform where people can now create posts and make videos about their lives. This is a great way to get people interested in your product or service.
How to Choose the Best Marketing Strategy for Your Business
Advertising is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers. The first step in creating effective advertising is to create a marketing strategy. Marketing strategies are the plans that marketers use to implement marketing tactics.
Part of creating the right marketing strategy for your business is to identify the type of sale your business is making. Beyond the Niche takes you step by step through this process.
I’ve rarely seen someone trying to implement a bad marketing strategy. Instead, what I often see is a lack of marketing strategy. Using marketing tactics without a marketing strategy will most certainly be costly and ineffective.
It’s also important to remember that online and offline marketing are both marketing tactics, not marketing strategies.
A marketing strategy is the goal you set. Marketing tactics are they way you’ll achieve that goal.
Is Online Advertising the Best Option
The “Ben Franklin” method of decision making includes listing the negatives of a decision on one side and the positives on the other side. Whichever column had more entries, according to Franklin, was the “right” decision.
In deciding whether or not to advertise your business online, the pro list would definitely include:
- able to tightly target your message delivery,
- effectively reach members of the target audience that can’t be efficiently reached using other media,
- the ability to CREATIVELY reach members of your target audience,
- You can quickly and easily launch an online advertising campaign,
- It’s easy to split test your online advertising campaign
- It’s possible (in most cases) to make changes to online advertising even after its published.
Notice, I didn’t include that online advertising is “inexpensive.” That’s because online advertising can be the most expensive advertising ever.
Cheap vs Expensive Advertising
Let’s talk about cheap vs expensive advertising. Advertising is an investment. Let’s compare it to another type of investment, stocks.
Let’s say you have $5000 to invest in the stock market. Company A’s stock is selling at $10 per share. Company B’s stock is selling at $1000 per share. Which stock do you choose?
I hope your answer is, “I don’t have enough information to make this decision.”
There’s a lot of information you need to decide which stock to buy. That information will tell you whether that the $10 stock is the more expensive of the two.
The same is true of advertising. We ran several online advertising campaigns to promote our business. Each online advertising campaign cost between $50 and $100. Over the course of 4 months, we ended up spending about $2000. The ROI for those combined campaigns weren’t bad. We might have been happy with it if we hadn’t tried postcard advertising. We spent $200 mailing a single postcard that brought in $10,000 worth of business the first month.
Even though the online advertising was “cheaper” than the postcard campaign, it was a much better investment. Even though the postcard was more expensive for a single mailing vs each online campaign, it generated much better results. We were able to tightly target our market via our mailing list for the postcard. When we were advertising online, we had to rely upon Google and Facebook to target our ads for us. Sure we set the parameters, but we weren’t able to target our audience as precisely as we did with direct marketing.
Offline vs Online Advertising
One the surface, online advertising campaigns sounds cheap. After all, if you use PPC advertising, you’ll pay as little as $1 per click. If that sounds inexpensive, think again. Many website visitors stay for less than 30 seconds. If you purchase air time on TV or radio, you’re guaranteed at least 30 seconds of air time. This is just one reason online advertising can be MUCH more expensive than traditional media.
Traditional media is priced based upon audience size. Prices are expressed with the term “Cost per Thousand” or CPM. In other words, the cost per thousand of a pay per click campaign that charges $1 per click would be $1000.
That $1000 budget could be used to reach more people using traditional media such as newspaper, television and radio advertising.
Niche Marketing’s Role in Online Advertising
This is why it’s important to recognize the type of sale your business is making and who your target audience is. Online advertising is ideal when your potential customers are sparsely distributed geographically. If your customers live within a 10 mile radius, you’ll use other marketing tactics to reach your potential customers.
Advertising Campaigns Online
Advertising campaigns are a way to promote your products or services. Even in the digital age, you shouldn’t limit your advertising campaigns to online. It’s smart business to support online advertising with traditional print media, television, radio, billboards and direct mail.
Be sure to set measurable goals and objectives for your advertising campaign.
Below are some tips on how to create successful advertising campaigns:
– Create a clear, measurable goal for your campaign
– Know who your target audience is
– Don’t limit yourself to just one form of advertising. Try different methods of advertising
The Importance of Advertising Online in Today’s Digital World
In today’s digital world, traditional forms of advertising are still effective. This is especially true when your marketing campaigns are based on your marketing strategy.
Beyond the Niche covers what you need to do to create effective advertising messages. Once you have a sound marketing strategy in place, the online and offline marketing are just tactics. Online advertising is your touch point where you reach customers where they are.
Want to learn more? Pick up your digital copy of Beyond the Niche for only $9.99 by clicking the button below.
PPC is well worth the investment if you have a product that is available for purchase online. If you have an offline business with products only in a store then paying for SEO maybe the better choice.