Orji-Oko UzorTable of contents
- Introduction
- What is an online advertising company?
- The major types of advertising used by online advertising companies
- Different types of online advertising used by online advertising companies
- How do I advertise my business on the Internet?
- What form of advertising is most effective?
- How can I advertise on Google for free?
- 5 promotional strategies used by online advertising companies
Introduction
Can online advertising companies handle my ads? Do you advertise your business online?
Well, there is a large audience of potential customers on the Internet, your business should be utilizing online advertising. Whether you’re currently advertising online, or you’re just considering it, there are many things you should know.
The business environment has changed significantly over the past decade. One of the biggest changes has been a shift in the advertising strategies needed by businesses both large and small. One of the major reasons for the shift is the popularity and use of the Internet. On a daily basis, the average American makes use of the Internet well over 2 hours and some days up to 10 hours for a wide range of tasks and activities.
What is an online advertising company?
In simple terms, an online advertising company is a company that handles advertisements that appear on websites and other platforms on the internet.
Online advertising companies never existed before the advent of the internet. But currently, they are the ones that help businesses both small and big, to advertise their products and services online.
The benefits of working with an online advertising company include the following;
- Low cost
- Geo-targeting
- Global reach
- Interactivity
- Ability to measure effectiveness
- Fast delivery
The major types of advertising used by online advertising companies
Display ads
Display ads include digital and newspaper advertising. The updated version of newspaper advertising is digital marketing, the same concept but 21st-century form.
This means to buy an ad space on sites that are of interest to your target demographic. You will create text ads, which look just like traditional print media ads, the floating banner above the site’s contact that may probably show your product or service on the site background.
The major difference between display ads and the ads in newspapers is the use of search engine optimization methods. That helps you reach your target customers more effectively when they search for you.
Social media ads
Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and other social media sites offer low cost advertising. Social media ads are the type of advertisement that centers on reaching your target customers with how much you pay adjusted to how many that will see and engage with it. Organic social media ads are the type of advertisement that produces lots of discussions.
Newspapers and magazines
These types of advertisements are traditional yet still effective. Combining this kind of advertisement between local, and national print media is a great marketing strategy. Many people still read newspaper or love to relax with a copy of a magazine. Equally, most print media now has a digital presence and do combine these kinds of advertisements with its online version.
Outdoor advertising
Nowadays, billboards have gone online, it’s a big method to make an effective statement. Transit ads are another type of advertisement that are under the outdoors umbrella. They help to feature your product or service on buses, taxis and bike messenger services. Using this method, helps to promote give your business excellent recognition as these kinds of advertisements are seen everywhere daily. They equally make your offering hard to forget.
Radio and podcasts
Verbal promotion is a kind of advertisement that will be repeated often as a component a of radio or podcast show. Bring down the kinds of podcasts your target customers subscribes to. You should equally know the station they listen to for creating the kind of advertisement they like and remember.
Direct mail and personal sales
Direct mail, or the art of sending a compelling sales letter to your target customers. The starting point is identifying your target market, then send an enticing offer to all your prospects. By measuring the responses helps you to know the customers who are responding to your mail. This helps you to know how to be precise when targeting your next mail.
Video ads
Video ads are advertisement that engages your target customers on a digital level. So, create a short video and post it on your social media or pay to have it run on sites like YouTube, Hulu and blogs. A video ad can equally be created by experts from any online marketing companies. It can equally be done by your in-house team even if the team is comprised of you alone.
Product placement
This type of advertisement is seen always. You can decide to pay a podcast host to mention your product. Or even pay a TV show to feature someone talking about or your service, that is Product Placement!
Email marketing
This type of advertisement focuses on your existing customers. This involves them to sign up for promotional sales or newsletters focused on your business. Email marketing is just an updated customer loyalty promotion and this works very well when you are treating customers as insiders with VIP knowledge.
Different types of online advertising used by online advertising companies
Search engine marketing & optimization (SEM) & (SEO)
SEM and SEO are two types of online ad used by online marketing companies, to promote content and increase visibility through online searches.
SEM: Rather than paying for the ad itself, you pay each time users click on the ad to your website. Your business will benefit by gaining specific information about your target market.
SEO: To get more rank in search engine results, online marketing companies use various SEO strategies. This include linking, targeting keywords and meta descriptions and creating content that other sites will link to. However, SEM is a paid strategy, while SEO is organic, making it a sought kind of online advertising.
Social Media
There’s no doubt that this type of advertising keeps growing each year. Consider these figures: There are more than 1.65 billion active mobile social accounts globally with more than 1 million new active mobile social users added every day. Research has shown from social media ad statistics, social media ad budgets have doubled, worldwide, from $16 billion to $31 billion in the past 2 years alone.
There are two types of social media online ad; organic, an online word-of-mouth method, and the paid type. Placing paid ads, promoted posts or sponsored stories are a popular way to reach more of the demographic of your business, without paying a bundle.
Native advertising
Have you noticed those sponsored ads at the tail end of a blog or FB posts? They are usually the “other recommended readings” or “other people liked” with suggested instances for users to click on. That is called native advertising.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
From the name, the concept is explained. These are ads paid for when a user clicks on them, this contributes to the power of PPC as a tool. Probably the ad was seen by 1000 people and only 100 persons clicked the ad, the cost of the ad revolves solely around the 100 who clicked. PPC ads are usually text, with a little image if need be. Know that 64.6% of people, click on Google ads when they are looking to purchase an item online.
Remarketing
Remarketing (or retargeting) is a kind of online advertising used by online advertising companies, to do exactly what the name connotes. This is cookie-based technology, that literally follows a user around the web, in order to remarket him/her again. Statistics has shown that only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit, meaning 98% of users leave without converting immediately. These same users are targeted once they leave the website, by seeing subtle hints (ads). This reminds them about their previous interest.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting a company’s product while earning a commission from each sale. It’s relatively a 3-party advertising agreement between the advertiser, publisher and consumer. It’s largely used by bloggers who have large numbers of followers and are looking to earn passive income.
Video ads
From all indication, video ads are growing in popularity, especially with the younger generation of customers. BI Intelligence has it that digital video will reach $5 billion in ad revenue and with the highest average click-through rate, 1.84%, of any digital format. And this stats don’t lie. 55% of customers view videos in their entirety while 43% just want to see more video content from markets.
YouTube is the number one platform for videos. Currently, they have implemented video ad methods for their users. Using the PPC strategy, businesses only pay when someone engages with an ad.
How do I advertise my business on the Internet?
Research by “Open from American Express” has shown that more than 47% of small businesses use the Internet for marketing and advertising purposes. With online advertising, small and relatively unknown organizations has reached a bigger market in a short period of time. There are also offline benefits, as people hear about a product online, they may decide to buy it later at a physical shop. There are a number of options for you advertise your business on the Internet; some will cost money while others only need your time and a little hard work.
Sign up
This means you will sign up with Google AdWords to open an advertising account. This is known as pay-per-click service. It allows you to submit short text or image ads that will appear beside a search engine results and on individual websites. With this paid advertising option, you are allowed to manage your online ad budget since you can set a daily budget. And equally test ads to know which ones lead to the most clicks and sales conversions.
Contact small websites and blogs
Reach out to those sites and blogs that serve your target market and pay them to advertise for you. But working with any online marketing companies will save you from any trouble. However, you’ll likely have to pay a fee for a certain number of clicks that comes to your website. Equally place banner ads on the sites to advertise your business.
Set up a profile
Your busineses needs a profile on all major social media websites. So, set up a profile for it! This includes Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Create a company description and details about your most popular products or services. Also add friends and discuss with others on things related to your industry instead of just promoting your goods. This is equally a way to advertise your business because, if the audience find your information useful. They may visit your website and look for more information about your business.
Create an account
This has to do with creating an account with industry related websites that has forums where people discuss on various topics. Remember to add your company link and a short information in your posting signature or profile. Be sure to contribute valuable information to each forum to get attention to your business. And always check the forum’s rules about advertising before posting.
What form of advertising is most effective?
To get the necessary results with your marketing campaign, you must not throw all your attention and effort into one strategy. You need an online marketing company to mix and match different advertising mediums to optimize your campaigns.
Nowadays, we are increasingly becoming a multidimensional society. Meaning you cannot afford to handle each age demographic as its own individual advertising crusade.
Let’s look at the effective form of advertising.
Social media
More than 70% of Americans have a profile with a social networking service.
Undoubtedly, social media is one of the platform that maximize brand recognition. And spend small money as possible. Social media is no longer the Millennials’ domain. With this, a grandparent can create an account with any of the social media to bridge the tournament at his retirement home.
Print media
Though many businesses have shifted their advertising budgets entirely towards the internet. But never count out print media as an advertising platform. Even though, questions has been raised whether print advertising is still worth spending your money or not. It is still an extremely important option.
Television
Internet advertising has been getting all the attention, but television remains an important platform to advertise. Whether be it national or local broadcasting, television advertising has the potential to reach a bigger number of people. While local newspapers and radio are known to be associated with smaller audiences.
In 2010, a study was conducted that showed Americans on average spend 4.5 hours per day watching television, while only spend 96 minutes to listen to radio and 30 minutes a day reading newspapers.Direct Mail
Though digital advertising is basking in the limelight for some time now. It’s not possible to target all your target customers via cyberspace. In a heated war between email and direct mail advertisin methods, Marketscan said that there are only registered email addresses for 20% of postal addresses, meaning 80% of the market is still at large.
Direct mail advertising is highly amied and personalized. Businesses buy mailing lists only to reach smaller market segments based on demographic analytics.
In addition, online marketing companies can easily differentiate a direct mail from other generic offers by adding a customer’s name to the greeting. For instance, the message can start this way; “Hi, Peterson”.
One can easily measure the success rate of direct mail – by receiving a response or not. Together with the mail is included a special offer with an expiration date for your product or service. It’s ease to keep tabs on the profitability of your direct mail advertising campaign.
Advertising via email is that it’s very easy to monitor the progress of your campaign. You can directly check whether your email was received and opened as well as whether the audience would like to unsubscribe to your emails or not.
Very similar to direct mail, you can equally personalize your email advertisements with names and buying history. Also you can individualize your email marketing campaigns through segmenting your customer base into different demographics.
What type of advertising is most effective for your business? Then, call on any online marketing companies to handle it.
How can I advertise on Google for free?
Create your Google account
The first step is to set up an account with Google My Business. Without it, you can’t use the services.
Visit https://www.google.com/business. Click the “START NOW” to create the account.
It’s crucial to know that your Google My Business account will be connected to your personal Google account. So, you’re to log into the account from there you will to manage your advertising options and create your page.
Before you add a new business, do a search to know if your business already exists as a listing. It’s very possible that someone else may already created a page for your business. When that’s the situation, just edit the existing page, all you need to do is to find out the Google account used to make the listing. And then request editing privileges from the owner.
Provide your business’ location information
It’s very useless to have a Google My Business listing without any relevant information on it. So, provide your business’ location information. Completing this section will add the needed information that customers will use and find your business.
Confirm your business and agree to terms of service
This step is pretty simple. All you need to do is to confirm to Google that you agree to their terms of service. And that the information you entered is accurate. The terms of service are straightforward, and you will easily trust that you’re not involving yourself in any shady business.
Verify your business
This step takes a little time. Sometimes, it’s frustrating to wait when you all want is the free online advertising now, but know that allowing Google to verify your business is an relevant step. During this process Google will verify if your business is legitimate. This verification process allows Google to avoid posting listings of fake businesses.
It’s crucial to the search engine that the information will be shown to customers is usable and relevant, so extra time is taken to make sure everything is in order. Although, in one to two weeks, Google will equally mail you a postcard with instructions for additional verification steps.
Complete gour business’ listing information
Google will use information from your business’ Google+ Page to prove important search results to customers. So, the next step is to work on your company’s Google+ page by editing it. Just click the edit button, and get to work.
Fill out all necy fields with all of your business important details. Also you’ll see that a lot of the information for your business has already been done due to details you in Step 2 you provided. The important information you will add include your website, a profile photo, hours of operation, and an introduction of your business.
For the introduction is an opportunity to give a quick and catchy description of your services. Make sure to include relevant keywords in your introduction, this increases the chance that your Google My Business page will rank favorably in the search results.
Optimize your business’ Google+ page
Now that the basic steps are completed. It’s time for a process that when completed pretty good will set your listing out from the rest: optimizing your business’ Google+ Page. Do a good job by fleshing out your profile and making it attractive to customers will lead to big rewards in increased business.
5 promotional strategies used by online advertising companies
No one will be confident enough to buy a product or service they haven’t heard of. Nor will they buy it when they don’t know what your company offers. This is where a great promotion strategy comes in, to grow your business. Some businesses use more than one strategy, while others might use different strategies for different marketing purposes. No matter the product or service your business offers, a set of promotional strategies will help position your company better.
At this very point, online advertising companies start to implement promotional strategies to help your business.
Contests as a promotional strategy
Contests are frequently used promotional strategy. Many contests don’t even require people to buy anything. The idea is just for your brand to be promoted. And this will put your logo and name in front of the public instead of making money through a hard-sell campaign. People love to win prizes. Also sponsoring contests will bring attention to your product without business overtness.
Social media promotion
Social media websites like as Facebook and Google+ offer businesses a way to promote their products and services in a more relaxed environment. This is called direct marketing at its best. Social networks will connect your business with a world of potential customers that will view your company from a different perspective.
Product giveaways and samples
A strategy companies use to introduce new products and services. Many companies sponsor in-store promotions, giving away product samples to entice the buying public into trying new products.
Point-of-sale promotion and end-cap marketing
Point-of-sale and end-cap marketing are ways through which you sell your product and promote items in stores. The brain behind this promotional strategy is impulse and convenience. The end cap, which stays at the tail end of aisles in grocery shops, features products a shop wants to promote or move quickly. This product is positioned in a way it will be easily accessible to the customer.
Customer referral incentive program
The customer referral incentive program is a method your business can use to encourage your current customers to refer new customers to your shop. This include free products, big discounts and cash rewards are some of the incentives you can use. It’s a promotional strategy that leverages your customer base as a sales force.
Contact Urbizboost for your online advertising. With us, you’re covered!