A guest post by Nehemiah Kivelevitz of Solomoto

Do we need to advertise online?

The Advertising industry was doing just fine before the internet came along. Advertising agencies would use tools such as billboards, radio advertisements, and television spots to promote products. While we still have the option to use these advertising methods, they have simply proven to be outdated and less effective than online advertising.

When it comes to online advertising you have many options: Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, the list goes on and on. There are many reasons why businesses and companies are opting to use online advertising. Read on to find out how online advertising can help your business.

1. Cost effective

Intuitively, one can imagine that online advertising will be cheaper than offline advertising. Why? It’s simple. Online advertising has a lower production cost with various platforms to advertise on.

Think about the process of advertising on a billboard. If you want to run an advertising campaign for your business you’ll need to hire a designer to create the billboard. You will need to pay a company to place your advertisement on their billboard. The company will need to charge you to cover their cost of upkeep, rental space, and physical labor of putting up the advertisement.

The more resources an advertising agency will have to use to get your ad running, the more it will cost you to run the ad.

Now compare this to running an advertisement on Facebook. Facebook gives you complete control over running your ad, this gets rid of the need to pay for an expensive agency. The advertisement is displayed on their website, this doesn’t cost Facebook a dime, so they can afford to charge you a much lower rate than the cost of advertising on a billboard.  

2. Wider Audience

The size of your Audience is going to depend on the medium you decide to use for your advertisement. If you have enough money to create a television ad for the Superbowl (around $5 million) then you will have a huge audience to advertise to. However, in most cases your marketing budget will be a little bit smaller than this.

Studies have shown that younger viewers spend more than twice the amount of time watching internet videos over television. Local television spots can cost you anywhere between $200 – $1,500 for a 30 second advertisement. Compare this cost to YouTube where an ad can cost between $0.10 – $0.30.

If you’re interested in reaching a younger audience, you’d have a much better chance of them seeing your ad online over offline. Picking the offline option in this case will give your advertisements higher visibility and at a lower cost.

3. Measurable Results

While it is possible to measure the effectiveness of traditional advertising, it is extremely difficult to do so. Imagine you have a 30 second advertisement on a popular radio station. The radio station can probably tell you how many people were tuned in at the time of the advertisement. However, they can’t tell you how your radio advertisement affected sales. You can try and make an educated guess based on how many sales you made in that month compared to months where you didn’t run an ad, but this isn’t very accurate and the numbers can be misleading.

If you were to run your ad campaign on Google instead, Google can provide you with exactly how many people saw your ad, and how many people decided to click on your ad. You can look into your analytics and see how many viewers were converted into customers with much higher precision than offline advertising.

Knowing how well your ads are running in real-time allows you to appropriately adjust your campaigns and budget to give you the best return on your investment.

4. Quick and Simple

Consider the billboard scenario that I mentioned earlier. If you wanted to make a billboard advertisement, how long do you think this would take you? Well, first you need to find a billboard with open space or hire an agency to do so for you. You need to hire a designer to make the advertisement, get approval on the advertisement, have the advertisement actually printed out. With all the middlemen and moving parts going on here, the process can be long and drawn out.

When running ads on Google and Facebook, your ad can be approved almost instantly and you don’t need to deal with all the middle-men and outsourcing that come along with offline advertising. Once you have an idea in your head, you can get your campaign off the ground in a fraction of the time.

5. Targeted Audience

Previously I mentioned one of the advantages of online advertising is your ability to reach a wide audience, which is great, but even more powerful than a large audience is a targeted audience. Using online advertising you can target the audience you’re looking for. On Facebook you can define what your target audience looks like, down to the last detail. On Google you can handpick words that your audience is searching for and are relevant to your business.

Unlike passing out fliers to anyone that passes by your store, you can find the people who are actually interested in your products or services. Being able to target a specific audience means you aren’t wasting your money on people who will never become customers. Instead you invest your resources in the people who are most likely to be interested in what your business has to offer.
With the world going digital, the method we choose to reach our audience needs to go digital as well. If you want your consumer to find you, you need to be in the places where they are looking.

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