Saturday, August 24, 2013

How Can Online Advertising Help Your Business?

A decade ago it would have been impossible to predict the ways businesses use advertising today. Things changed rapidly and we now rely heavily on technology to promote our businesses. This is both a blessing and a curse. Internet is as ubiquitous as electricity and many business tasks are now performed on the Internet. Online advertising is used by nearly every company, from local farms to high-tech startups as a convenient and efficient way to reach more customers. New approaches are being invented and experimented on a daily basis. Social marketing and mobile marketing that were new and unheard of only several years ago is now becoming more popular and more important. Therefore, managing all online advertising channels requires a lot of effort that is often more suitable for a team of experts. You either learn the latest advertising techniques, or hire someone to do the work for you. Luckily, there are many online advertising and marketing companies that want your business. Below are a few areas that online advertising can help your business:

Reach out to more customers
Online advertising has done an astounding job of making our world much smaller than it used to be. Instead of picking up a paper and reading about local businesses, people can now log onto their tablets or their smartphones and read about products made in far-away countries. Thanks to video chat and instant messaging, people can now get product support and customer service no matter where they happen to be. In addition to that, you even get online discounts for your specific city or neighborhood with geo-targeting capability from the ad server. There are so many websites to place your ads and get your product information to potential customers.



 React quickly to a changing market
Unlike classifieds or ads on a newspaper or magazine, you can adjust your online advertising strategies quickly with the provided ad management tools. For example, you can replace a non-performing ad with a new version. You can perform A/B split testing before running a large ad campaign. This flexibility allows you to experiment and only use the best ads by measuring their performance metrics.

Support business operations
Advertising is not just an isolated business area. It is often coordinated closely with your daily business operations. With online advertising, you can increase advertising exposure with just a click of a button and results can be seen within minutes. You can boost direct advertising to bring more online traffic to your website or foot traffic to your store to balance the burden of fixed costs like rent or payroll. For example, if you run a restaurant, you can send out tweets or offer a Facebook discount at convenient times of the day like lunch and dinner time to drive locals to your establishment.

Build relationship with your customers
Direct and personalized communication between businesses and customers is becoming more popular and more important. The right message at the right time can bring in new clients. The right response to an online comment or inquiry can also improve the image of your business. Customers can become fans and help you promote your business for free. On the other hand, when communication breaks down, negative word-of-mouth is going to damage your reputation more than just losing one client. In these instances, damage control and crisis management is critical to limit the risk. Therefore, the need for social media advertising has never been greater. Currently, the major platforms for social marketing include Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest. Each platform has its unique demographic characteristics and thus each requires a different strategy and method to connect to its members.

Stay in contact with your customers
Direct business communication also comes from email marketing. It is critical for your business to maintain a contact list of existing clients and potential clients. With this opt-in and permission-based list, you can send updates, announcements, new product offers, or promotions to remain relevant in a competitive market and keep your company name fresh in the client's mind.