Online Advertising

As a Marketing Manager for the service industry, I have biased towards online advertising and it’s easy to know why:

• Online advertisement is almost immediately done especially through PPC: any type of print advertising has to be set up and scheduled; flyers and newspapers may take several weeks and an ad in your local media may not come out until many months down the road.

• Online advertising is more responsive: you’ve decided to offer your customers a special discount: you can immediately add a coupon and adjust what you need to right on your website rather than having to wait for someone at the print shop or newspaper to get around to it.

• Online advertising is not just cost effective…only if you know which online advertising solutions to go for: you get more “bang for your buck” online. Rather than having to pay higher prices for print work, media and distribution costs, you can use the money you save on advertising to add to your merchandise. (An added bonus is that you’ll also help environmentally because you’re using little, if any, natural resources to promote your business! )

• Online advertising can be interactive: Instead of just seeing a flat, two dimensional image, you can catch your customer’s eye with all sorts of “bells and whistles”! Audio and visual enhancements invite your customers to involve themselves to a much greater extent than just looking at a newspaper ad or flyer. There is an added benefit to advertising online and that is you can also include additional information as part of your customer testimonials and Frequently Asked Questions ( or FAQs ).

• Online advertising can be easily tracked: If you do any sort of print advertising, the only tangible means of tracking how effective your campaign is, or at least part of it, is to use coupons that the customers have to redeem. Even then, it’s difficult to know exactly who is responding to any of your advertising. Online advertising can easily be measured and broken down into very specific results. Aside from tracking individual sales, there are ways of tracking which web pages have been seen. Tracking can help you refine your advertising and be much more responsive to your customers.

• Online advertising works: If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be enticing national advertisers to continue to increase their online advertising budgets by twenty-five percent each year(I know mine just did)!

Obviously, not all online advertising solutions are good, unless your online advertising consultant or your online advertising agency has a tracking mechanism to track the effectiveness of each campaigns, you might just be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

If you need help on how to advertise online and the best & effective online advertising, talk to me first you talk to any agency.