Advertising nowadays isn’t quite what it used to be. It has come on leaps and bounds thanks to improvements in technology, the increased availability of devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and the consequent rise in E-commerce. While tangible advertising is still alive and thriving, you now have to take online advertising into account too. After all, when the majority of the nation have their heads buried in their devices and are spending increasing amounts of time staring at screens rather than the physical world around them, you need to take advantage of the situation and ensure that your brand and products are still making appearances in their day to day lives. So, where should you get started when it comes to online advertising? Well, it would be impossible to show you all of the options out there in just one article, so let’s take a moment to look at some of the most effective and profitable methods to start with.
Sponsored Ads
Most online platforms nowadays have recognised how profitable a market advertising is and have attempted to incorporate it into their framework. Nowadays, you can advertise with most apps and websites, from Google to blogs, news websites, and social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. When you contact the manager or advertising department of the site and have paid for your adverts they may be displayed in various different ways. Here are just a few potential options.
Banner Advertising
Banner advertising is most common on blogs and news sites. Your advert with a link to your website will appear as a banner at the top, bottom, or side of the page. This means that people can still read the blog posts or articles, but your adverts are in frame, encouraging consumers to take a look and click the ad in order to head to your site.
Intermittent Posts
When you pay for adverts directly through a social media service provider, your ads will appear like any other posts in people’s timelines and feeds. As they scroll through them, your ads will appear intermittently. This helps your adverts to slip into your potential customers’ feeds naturally, rather than them sticking out like a sore thumb.
Social Influencers
An alternative sponsored advertising option that many small businesses are trying out nowadays is advertising through social media influencers. Social media has allowed various individuals to flourish, gaining thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers. They directly influence the people following their feed, inspiring others to live their lives in a similar way that they do. If you can get one of these people to feature one of your products on their feed, you guarantee exposure to all of their followers’ feeds and people will start to take notice of your product. If their favourite influencer is endorsing a brand, they’re likely to buy into it.
To engage with sponsored ads successfully, you need to understand your target audience. Conduct market research to understand what types of websites your target demographic visit. Are they reading a particular blog? Do they spend a lot of time posting and commenting on Instagram?
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SEO
Let’s start off with an area of online advertising that is taking the world by storm. It seems to be on the tip of every small business owner’s tongue at the moment – SEO. Now, when you consider advertising, you tend to think of customers being shown a product that you offer. You think of posters that are located in convenient places, catching the consumer market’s eye. We think of TV advertisements that showcase our products in their best light. We even think of radio ads that conjure up images of our products and what they can do for our customers in the listener’s mind. But nowadays, the market has changed. While these types of advertisements are still effective, you also need to consider some more indirect ways of encouraging people to purchase what you have to offer. SEO is one of these more subtle methods. So, what actually is it? Well, in short, SEO stands for “search engine optimisation” and its role is to get your website listed as high on search engine results pages as possible. This may sound odd, but let’s think about it. If you are looking to purchase something online, what do you do? You don’t necessarily know particular brands or companies who supply what you need. Chances are that you most certainly don’t know specific website URLs to input. No – you put some keywords into a search engine instead. The search engine will then scour the web for what you want and pose some results. We generally consider that the top results are the most highly recommended results – they are the ones that the search engine has prioritised, so they’re likely to also be the ones that will give us exactly what we want. When’s the last time you went past the second or third page of results? Probably a long time ago, if ever, right? The majority of users will generally opt to use one of the first links that comes up. So, you want to be that link. Here are a few different ways that you can achieve a top place ranking!
Outsourcing
Now, there are few areas of business ownership and management where people would suggest that your best bet at success is outsourcing. After all, if you can do something yourself, you can generally save a lot of money by doing just that. However, when it comes to SEO, the field is such a complex and knowledge-specific area that you will generally save yourself a whole lot of time and money by simply handing the work over to the professionals rather than attempting to get to grips with all of the ins and outs of your own accord. Opt for a company that is completely open about what they are doing. They may offer you a Mobile SEO Guide, or be happy to discuss their process and techniques in a brief consultation. This means that they let you know exactly what you should expect from your SEO campaign, allowing you to feel confident that they are doing their job correctly.
Which Search Engine Should You Focus On?
Each search engine out there will have its own process of filtering search results and allocating different rankings to different sites. So, it’s generally best to focus on Google. This is because Google is the giant within the search engine market. With around 1.7 billion users, you can guarantee that topping Google’s search rankings will expose your website to as many people as possible. Once you’ve raised your placed in Google’s rankings, you can start to focus on other search service providers such as Yahoo and Bing.
Keyword Optimisation
You should request that the individual or agency dealing with your company’s SEO make the most of keyword optimisation. This involves incorporating commonly used search terms into various areas of your website. To work out which keywords you should be employing, you simply need to use a little logic. If you’re selling reusable water bottles for example, you’re catering to a market who are searching for eco-friendly alternatives to disposable bottles. While they may search for reusable bottle, they may also input more vague terms, such as “eco-friendly lifestyle”, “environmentally friendly homeware”, or “green alternatives to disposable products”. So you should incorporate these kinds of terms into your product titles, product descriptions, blog posts, page names, category names, and wherever else you might be able to fit them. Search engines will notice that your page caters to these individuals and bring your website up the listings!
These are just a few different types of online advertising that you should seriously consider trying out. They’re some of the most effective methods out there and you can rack up impressive profits through them.
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