No matter if you’re a new or established business, a small local shop, or a big company, advertising is an essential part of your day-to-day. For small businesses, advertising is what enables you to create buzz and exposure for their product or service among people who haven’t yet heard of them. For already established businesses, advertising is what helps you get noticed among the endless sea of competition, maintain their relevance, and a steady influx of customers.
In both cases, advertising isn’t an easy or cheap endeavor, often requiring the expertise of advertising professionals and access to a decently sized budget. Depending on how much money your business has on disposal, an advertising plan could take up a large portion of it. Always, but especially when your budget is a bit tight, you need to be very picky when deciding on what advertising strategies you will spend your money on, which, to be honest, isn’t the easiest thing to do.
The effectiveness of a certain advertising technique can largely depend on the type of product/service you offer and the current trends in your niche and the advertising industry. The best thing would be if you could hire a professional to do all the necessary market and consumer research and then devise the most optimal advertising strategy for your business and budget. Unfortunately, not every business has the funds or the time to do so. That is why sticking with the tried and true types of advertisements, the ones that will work across industries and with most types of customers is often the best decision.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “do those even exist?”. Yes, they do, and in this article, we will give you a rundown of the most effective ones you might want to consider making a part of your advertising plan.
Search engine ads (pay per click ads)
Search engine advertisements, if you couldn’t guess by now, are the ads that appear on the top of search results each time you search for a specific keyword. These types of advertisements are very popular largely because they position your site above even the most known and SEO optimized ones, meaning that a person doing the search has to at least glance over your ad before getting to the rest of the results. Purchasing this type of ad works a bit differently. To get a spot among search engine ads, you bid on how much you are willing to pay for a click, and this varies greatly depending on the keyword you want your ad appearing for.
You only pay if a user clicks on your ad, which is why this technique is also called pay per click advertising. You can limit the number of clicks the ad will display for and even choose negative keywords (keywords for which your ad shouldn’t be displayed). Search engine ads are categorized as one of the most efficient types of adverts because they are proven to give the best return on investment and create high rates of traffic and conversion for the advertised site.
Ads in blog content
Ads in blog content can be either in the classic review format or integrated into some informative/educational/storytelling content in which the ad isn’t the main focus but is highly related to the topic. For example, the ad can be a suggestion for a product/service that could be of assistance in completing a task described in the blog post.
Blog content is widely seen as a reputable source of information by most people and is often the go-to place when looking for opinions, suggestions, and reviews, which in turn makes it a great place to do advertising as well.
Social media ads
No conversation about advertising can go without mentioning social media ads. On social media, you can create highly targeted and relevant ads for a very low cost. All major social media platforms have the tools for ad creation already integrated within them and have made the process as simple and straightforward as it can be. If you want to learn more about process management, check this amazing article on monday.com.
Besides making it extremely easy to create the perfect ad, social media also enables you to display that ad in front of the perfect audience by allowing you to segment the audience based on their age, geographical location, expressed interests, and so much more. Taking that into consideration and how much time the average person spends on social media on a daily basis, if made well, every social media ad you put out there is bound to get a significant amount of exposure and engagement.
Remarketing
Remarketing is essentially showing personalized ads to people who have previously visited your site but without ever completing a purchase. The fact that the person has already visited your site and maybe even showed an interest in one of your products/services allows you to create an even more compelling ad that is specifically tailored to them. Remarketing is very effective, but if used too-aggressively, it can overwhelm customers, causing them to not want to do business with you at all. So if you do decide to use it as one of your advertising techniques, just make sure you use it reasonably.
Billboards
Billboards are a known classic among advertising practices, actively used since 1800, and for a good reason. They are eye-catching, displayed in front of a large ever-changing audience, and will work for a business of any size or industry. If you want to play it safe with your advertising, then billboards are the way to go. Just keep in mind that since they are so widely and heavily used, putting your ad on a billboard might also come at a hefty price.
If you’re a fan of outdoor advertisements but would like to use something besides billboards, transit advertisements are an option that is just as effective and easy to implement. Transit advertisements are set up in places for public transportation like metros, buses, trains as well as stations for those transportation mediums.
These places have people flowing in and out constantly, with a large portion of those people having to spend a significant amount of time there in order to get to their desired destination. Meaning, whether they want it or not, they will have your advertisement sitting right there in front of them the entire time. This will surely make some of them look up your business right away or at least have it stuck in the back of their head until they remember it out of nowhere.
Word of mouth advertisements
Last but certainly not least, we’ll talk about the cheapest and maybe the most effective type of advertising, and that is the word of mouth advertising. Let’s be honest all of us trust a friend more than we trust an ad of any type and will probably ask a friend for a suggestion or recommendation before we run off to ask the internet. The suggestion or recommendation a friend gives you is in marketing terms called a word of mouth advertisement.
Getting word of mouth advertisements for your business won’t require any financial investments but will solely depend on the quality of your products/services and whether they are something that the market has a strong need for. So if you focus on having a unique and/or excellent product/service, there is a big chance that you’ll be getting customers even without using any other advertising techniques or investing large amounts of money.
Conclusion
Hopefully, in this article, you saw at least one of the mentioned types of advertisements as something that could fit your business and pique the interest of your target audience. If not, then we hope you can use the article for inspiration when coming up with an advertising technique of your own. Who knows, maybe one day, in an article just like this one, we’ll be reading about your one-of-a-kind advertising technique.