When done correctly, advertising can attract new customers, build sales to boost your bottom line and enhance your reputation. This is why more than $180 billion were spent in advertising in the United States in 2015. With so many digital tools available, it can be hard to know where to start. As you work to drive additional traffic to your website, take a look at these ways you can market your small business.
How to Advertise Your Business
Display Advertising
Businesses use display ads to highlight their products on websites in a variety of formats such as video, text, audio and images. Display ads share a common goal: to expand your online visibility and sell more products online. Two forms of display ads that drive results and get a positive response from Web surfers are pay-per-click ads and banner ads.
PPC advertising works really well with small budgets, yet business owners often ask themselves, “What is PPC and why should I use it?” Essentially, pay-per-click allows you to pay to get visitors to your site instead of earning those visits organically.
Banner ads are also a form of online advertising that entail embedding an advertisement into a web page. These ads generate a big portion of revenue for many websites. Usually the advertisement consists of an image in a rectangular graphic display that extends across the top or bottom of a website or down the right or left sidebar.
Social Media Advertising
One of many benefits of social media for business is that it provides a great way to cultivate more personalized relationships and better engage with potential customers. The goal of social media marketing is to coerce traffic to the product pages on your website — one of many ways to increase your small business sales.
The trick to a successful social media advertising program is to develop your online business persona. You want to humanize your small business, so post funny images or industry related links to engage your audience. You can also use social media to share and inform your readers about your products. The goal should be to speak to and connect with your audience.
Print Advertising
This form of advertising is when ads are published in printed materials and circulated to the masses. Newspapers, brochures and magazines are forms of print advertising. These methods have many advantages, such as the ability to reach large audiences of a particular demographic. When you advertise, it’s essential to figure out where your primary consumer market will have the most access to your advertisements so your print is in the right places and reaches the right audience.
Broadcast Advertising
This mass-market form of communication includes radio and television. Broadcast advertising was once the most popular way a business could reach a large number of consumers, but the rise of the internet has changed that. There has been a significant decrease in broadcast advertising due to the rise of DVRs and the creation of technology that gives us the ability to skip ads. This method is still used though, especially during times like the Super Bowl.
Many businesses put advertising on the back-burner and think of it as an expense. Instead, marketing and advertising should be considered an investment. There are countless ways to put your brand out there; you just have to figure out which methods will help your business achieve the best results.
How do you successfully market your small business?
Advertising Photo via Shutterstock
I wouldn’t lump PPC (I define this as bidding on keywords and having your ads appear on search engine results) in with display advertising necessarily, though you can do both through AdWords. They behave quite differently and should be handled as such.
Hi Megan,
Whatever medium you choose to use you need to have an effective way of measuring the success of that marketing campaign.
As Robert suggests above, different approaches through PPC will yield different results, ie, banner advertising generally performs worse than adwords itself (however the CPC for banner advertising is usually significantly less).
Different mediums will also work better for different industries and as a marketer you need to test out a range of them to determine which ones are best for your specific area.
Aira Bongco
There are hundreds of ways to promote a business. It is about finding that way that works well for your business and audience.
It’s fascinating you elaborated on how display ads expand your online visibility and production. My best friend has been looking for other ideas for advertising his business. I’ll recommend him calling a commercial video production to post his videos online.