Business Advertising BlogBusiness Advertising Blog

·                Online advertising is enormous: According to Netcraft Ltd May 2009 survey there is an extra 4.3 million sites since last month. With the internet constantly expanding it is slowly taking over the world. If your business is not on the internet then you are missing out on the internet’s advertising potential. We now spend a large proportion of our day on the internet, due to using it at work, for research, buying products, chatting and playing games.

·                Online advertising is targeted: Online advertising targets its desired audience. With the help of tools such as Google AdWords which advertises your business to your potential customers who have typed one of your selected key words into Google. Your advertisement will appear in the sponsored links on the right-hand side or at the top of the page and you only pay when someone clicks on the link to your website. Another form of online advertising is Search Engine Optimisation; your website is optimised and appears in the natural listings on the left-hand side of the page. You have to pay a monthly fee which ensures you hold your top position in Google and other search engines. Traditional forms of advertising such as television and radio only target a small proportion of your audience and can be extremely expensive.

·                Online advertising is easy to track: Traditional forms of advertising is extremely hard to track and keep a record of, however online advertising with the help of statcounter.com enables us to see who has visited our sites providing us with details to help us form a monthly progress report.

·                Online advertising is more accessible: Having a limited budget means you can’t advertise using the traditional forms of advertising such as television, radio and newspaper advertising, but you are able to advertise with ease online, either through pay per click, banners or SEO methods.

·                Online advertising targets a vast audience; even the world: It is easy and inexpensive to advertise you business or product online, as it is a global network. However, traditional forms such as radio, television and newspapers are extremely hard to do unless you visit each and every country, have access to a translator and of course lots of money!

Marketing should never be an expense; it should be an investment at all times. There should be a 75% expectation at least, that the marketing will produce and reach more in sales than it will cost to advertise. If you do not have that belief then you should not go ahead with the advertising. When logic and emotion clash, emotion will always be triumphant. Even though the different Medias may not be accessible to you nearby, your potential clients are still getting these messages from all kinds of rival services and products.

Online advertising costs are now sky high if you choose to pay per click instead of getting your site optimised for the ‘free’ listings on the search engines. Newspaper ads are on the decline, but depending on what product or service you are advertising, newspaper ads can be better or worse suited to you. For instance, if you owned a window cleaning company, there would be no need to advertise anywhere apart from your local area, whereas online advertising is on a global scale and now has become (on certain sites) some of the most expensive advertising in the world to buy. It is debatable whether advertising in a national news paper would have a better impact than internet advertising because again this would depend on the product or service that you are promoting and as the target audience of your product or service. Search engine marketing is now one of the most effective forms of marketing as you are putting your website i.e. your ‘ad’ in front of thousands of potential customers actively  searching for your services or products.