Digital technology has provide businesses and companies in the world the ability to conduct their operations more efficiently. It’s easier to sell items, maintain client lists, communicate with partners, suppliers and customers, and even provide valuable service. It also has elevated and improved marketing and advertising efforts.

Despite its popularity, there’s still quite a number of businesses today that have yet to explore the many advantages online advertising offers. Most business get stuck in a rut or a familiar habit, so you might have a few apprehensions about changing your strategies and processes. To help you discover new opportunities here are some of the benefits of free and paid local advertising and how they can start with it immediately.

 

The Advantages of Local Online Advertising

 

Online advertising is significantly different from its real world counterpart. Some benefits to exploring the online advertising space:

Efficient and Seamless Targeting:

Traditional targeting can be erratic and sometimes unpredictable. Even if you put your ad in a good billboard location and the proper magazine, it’s quite difficult to tell if it is indeed being consumed by your specific target audience. That’s no longer a concern with online advertising. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google allows people to target their specific audience. They can input the preferred age, gender, location, and even their various interests. This means that your advertisement will be seen by the people that matter the most to your business.

Be Aware of Picking a Demographic, it may not be who you think your customers actually are. Read about consumer intent

Flexible Scheduling:

Most of the traditional advertising methods are also bound by the platform they are in. Television ads only worked in certain times of the day, newspaper ads only work on certain days of the week, and billboards only worked when the streets are busy. Those restrictions are nowhere to be found in the digital world. Advertisers and businesses can choose the schedules they want. If they want to run their ads for 24 hours straight, 7 days a week, it’s possible. At the same time, they can even use the information they have to target specific time frames, ensuring that their ads are seen at the best possible time.

Most paid online advertising platforms will provide details on times of day Ads were clicked. Over time you can fine tune these and budgets.

Wider Reach:

Another restriction of traditional advertisement is that it sometimes only penetrates a specific area. This means that no matter what happens, one’s advertisement will only have a limited amount of reach. With online and digital advertising, the options for locations are limitless. With keywords and the press of a button, you can map out where you want your ads to be seen in the entire UK. Whether it’s your city or town, the entire United Kingdom, or even the world, they can choose any area anytime they want.

Wider reach may be something you think will be a game changer, but please focus on local targeting before going global. Understand your users and market, especially for local business. Read improve your business by being local

It’s Cheap and Affordable:

Perhaps one of the biggest and most significant advantage of modern online advertising are its costs. Billboards, television spots, radio space and even newspapers cost a lot of money. They usually cost thousands. A yearlong campaign can even run into the millions. That expense is usually cut by more than half when it comes to digital platforms. There are even free ones. Through services available online, local businesses can reach hundreds and thousands of people at a fraction of the cost or even without spending. At the same time, there are even certain digital ads services than only charges an individual a couple of cents every time they reach a person, ensuring that every investment goes to something that will grow their business.

Data Gathering and Insight Generation:

Online campaign allows the business to gather tons of data and information about their target audience. They can see traffic, bounce rate, the average time they spend looking at the ad, their next steps, and even their age, gender, industry they belong to, their interests and the time and date they interacted with the business. This information can then be repurposed to inform future ads, other marketing efforts and even search engine optimization campaigns.

Take the time to understand the data, without it you may be losing out on valuable marketing information and understanding of your customers.

 

Online Advertising Platforms

 

The great thing about online advertisement is there are several options available that can be used. The key thing with any platform is to use it long enough to gauge its effectiveness, say 30 days. Target specific and then test against other platforms.

Facebook:

Facebook has a business manager system that enables businesses around the world to create specific ads that either gather new likes, generate engagement, drive people to a website or motivate conversions. All of these ads can be designed with their personal assets and text copy, and can be targeted with specific audiences and varying interests. Moreover, each individual engaged costs only a couple of cents each, meaning it’s absolutely affordable and you only spend for those that you actually reach with your asset.

Instagram:

Instagram also has a business manager that’s integrated with Facebook’s. Given they use the same platform, most of the features and qualities are also the same. What’s particularly interesting about Instagram’s is that it’s mostly image based. The better the visual asset is, the more impact it will have. With the proper photo, one can drive hundreds of people to their site and increase revenue streams.

Google AdWords:

Google also has an advertising platform that allows businesses to advertise in search engine results pages, other websites, YouTube and in mobile applications. Through Google AdWords, businesses can create ads using keywords relevant to the target audience, create text copy, develop a call to action and deploy it for the local area to see. Target specific keywords, manage negative keywords, use your Google business page in local extensions.

Email Newsletters:

More and more, email newsletters have proven that they can be effective ways to bring traffic to a local business and increase sales and revenue. What’s great is that it’s free. Create a newsletter with appealing visual assets, offers and a compelling narrative and sending it to a highly targeted database will definitely make people of your presence and make them consider your products or services.

Guest Blogging and Influencer Marketing:

Find influence’rs, journalists, bloggers that have used or written about similar products or industry. You could either go down the paid endorsement route or a longer approach of free exposure by making connections socially and engaging with them online.

 

Before You Dive Headlong into Online Advertising

 

Of course, before you try local online advertising, there are several things one has to keep in mind:

• Do a comprehensive and thorough research on your target audience. Find out where they are online. Are they on social media? Do they respond to emails? Do they read blogs? Do they do their product searches on Google? Finding out information about this will help one craft a better online ad.
• Make sure all of your digital platforms are in order. Before trying out online advertising, the website should be fully functional and ready to receive website visits. That goes the same for all of your social media accounts, whether it be on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Most online users check out all of these sources, so best to be prepared and keep all of the information there fresh and relevant.
• Choose the online advertising platform that suits your needs. There are chances that some of these platforms may not exactly echo your company or may not have your specific target audience. Make sure you choose the advertising strategy that would mean the most to your business and its objectives.
• Collect data and use it to refine your strategies. Deploying an advertising initiative produces results. Use the information, such as peak times, audience insights and even effectivity. These data sets can be used to deploy better advertising campaigns in the near future.
• Constantly update yourself with new information. Facebook, Instagram and Google releases several algorithm updates every year, and these may affect their advertising platforms. The sooner you know about this, the better prepared you will be.

Free and paid online advertising is very easy to understand, efficient to use and produces results while providing several key benefits. If businesses want to make an impact in their local area, if they want to expand their operations, acquire new customers, nurture more leads, increase sales and grow their revenue streams, they should consider online advertising.

 
 

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