Online advertising helps small businesses build their brand, reach out to their prospective customers, promote their products and services and grow their business. Online advertising is one such method where small businesses need not spend a great number of dollars to promote their business, as they have to spend on traditional advertising. With a little amount spent on online advertising, small businesses will surely be able to increase its ROI (return on investment) within a short period of time.
Small business online marketing is easy and will yield good results compared to traditional advertising. Following are the key factors that make online advertising more popular than traditional advertising.
Inexpensive
Online advertising is inexpensive when compared to traditional advertising. For example, the average cost of a super bowl 30 seconds TV advertisement is $3 million. A full page black and white advertisement in a Wall Street Journal – national edition costs $164,000, while a half page advertisement costs $96,000. The costs can only be afforded by the big players in the market. It’s not surprising if these numbers would be more than a small businesses total investment.
Whereas, to advertise a business online, a professional Internet marketing firm will do it for a very little cost, which is around $250 to $300 per month. This is comparatively much cheaper than traditional methods of advertising.
Faster
Traditional advertisement methods are time consuming processes where an organization/business should wait for quite a long time to reach its potential customers. The process is also lengthy. For example, a TV advertisement will take a few days to complete the shooting, editing, approving and convincing the channel to advertise it.
Whereas in online advertising, it hardly takes much time to get an advertisement posted and a click of a mouse will put a business on the Web and makes it visible to Internet users worldwide.
Online advertising is a fast way of promoting a business when compared to other methods of advertisements. For small businesses, faster promotion and business deals will boost the excitement and confidence in them. This is possible only with Internet advertising.
Reach target audiences quickly
Online advertising makes it easy for the target audience to find a particular product or service, by just entering the keyword in the search box. Along with reaching target audiences quickly, a business can also expect a call to action that helps convert site visitors to customers.
Online advertising effectively reaches target audiences in a faster way. Further, you can reach your potential traffic from across the world. In contrast, traditional advertising reaches the masses through newspapers, magazines or television advertisements.
Easy to interact with the customers
For the growth of a business it is very important to accept feedback sportively, even if the feedback is negative. By doing so it builds relationship between your business and customers.
In online advertising, it is easy for customers to express their thoughts about a business or a product and leave the feedback in the comment box. Further, interaction with customers becomes simple and instant. Compared with this, it is not the case with traditional advertising, there is little no feedback to advertisers.
Visitors can give their feedback in the website/blog/fanpage, etc. The interaction with customers has also become very easy with the increased popularity of social media websites as social media networking has reduced the time in getting customer feedback.
Small businesses are financially vulnerable. They need to be very sensible and careful in spending each dollar. Online advertising is simple, easy to execute and fast apart from being inexpensive. It offers a good value for small businesses money, and it’s therefore worth consideration for your business exposure and growth.
Photo Credit: Flickr/Silveira Neto
