Advertising
Advertising is a promotional activity which aims to influence the behaviour of targeted consumers by persuading them to buy, hire or use your products or services. For businesses, the ultimate goal of advertising is to attract more customers and increase sales.
Continue Reading Continue Reading7.05K FOLLOWERS
Send SMS ad campaigns on popular platforms like Google and Apple messaging services.
Create one-off of regular ad campaigns for search engines, social media and display ads.
Advertise in handouts, letters, flyers and other printed materials distributed door to door.
Advertise in magazines and other printed publications such as catalogues, brochures and newsletters.
Create outdoor advertising to promote your business including print and digital billboards, banners, posters and transit advertising.
Create radio campaigns and advertise on suitable radio stations to reach your target audience.
Create ads for mobile apps, videos and mobile banner ads.
Create newspaper ads and place them in national and local papers according to your target audience.
Advertise your business in online and offline directories and local listings.
Create TV ads and advertise on appropriate channels on free-to-air, digital or online TVs.
How much do small businesses usually spend on advertising costs per month?
26 views
William Siebler, CEO at The Marketing Mentor
It varies enormously. CPM is realy the wrong metric to use. The focus should be cost per lead and cost to get a client.
Hatty Bell , Community Manager at SavvySME
Thanks for the insight @William Siebler . Why should CPM not be measured?
I would like to know costs for digital channels such as display, social media, mobile, etc.
248 views
Hatty Bell, Community Manager at SavvySME
Is this related to the cost of advertising on digital channels @Pankaj Nain ?
What are the best alternatives to WordStream for paid ad campaign management?
332 views
Quentin Aisbett, Founder at OnQ Marketing
I've used two others not mentioned here already - Adzooma and Opteo. Both are much cheaper than Wordstream.
In fact, Adzooma now offers it's product for free. It does what you can expect from Wordstream but it doesn't provide the same smooth user experience. I find it a little clunky. But hey, it's free!
Opteo is another that starts at $99 per month, which is still much cheaper than Wordstream and for me a better experience than Adzooma.
Hatty Bell , Community Manager at SavvySME
Good to know @Quentin Aisbett ! Great insight into cheaper and free service's too. Have you used either of these @Jignesh Vagadiya ?
When it comes to creating paid ad and search campaigns, which program is better out of Optmyzr or WordStream?
371 views
Jignesh Vagadiya, Growth Marketer | Digital Marketing Expert at Growth Digital Marketing Agency
WordStream provides you with trends on your account performance in a single snapshot, it doesn’t provide you with a root cause analysis of why things might be going south in your campaign.
With Optmyzer’s PPC Investigator you can ask a question related to your account KPI’s and linked to a specific campaign to establish which areas you need to focus on
WordStream provides an overall snapshot of your Quality Score, but doesn’t tell you which keywords need improving, or what areas those keywords need improvement on.
With Optmyzr’s Quality Score Tracker, you get an account Quality Score snapshot as well as the keywords and their related problems that need attention.
I have used both Optmyzr and WordStream, It's all depend what you objective is, both as some great functionality.
Hatty Bell , Community Manager at SavvySME
Great insight @Jignesh Vagadiya ! Which do you find yourself using more regularly?
How much do Bing ads cost? Is it cheaper to run Big ad campaigns over Google AdWords?
212 views
Hatty Bell, Community Manager at SavvySME
In my experience, Bing is cheaper. Plus Bing is associated with Yahoo etc so you get more coverage
On average, how much do LinkedIn ads cost per month for small businesses?
400 views
Hatty Bell, Community Manager at SavvySME
The price depends on your targeting criteria and your competition. I've run CPCs from around $2 and run up to $4 or $5 per click, with the higher end typically coming into play when your click-through rates aren't fantastic.
Top 20%
Business Coach and Marketing Specialist at Straight Talk Group
Top 10%
Top 20%
Featured Offer
This is a Premium Business feature
It’s safe to say that advertising is vital for the success of every business. Some businesses rely more heavily on advertising than others, but in order to get your business out there and generate profit, your audience needs to know who you are, what services or products you provide and why they should do business with you instead of your competitors.
That’s where advertising comes in.
Advertising is a promotional activity which aims to influence the behaviour of targeted consumers by persuading them to buy, hire or use your products or services. For businesses, the ultimate goal of advertising is to attract more customers and increase sales. By creating advertisements with tailored messages, businesses can target niche or large audiences to attract new customers.
Advertising is one of the oldest and if not most ancient forms of business. As soon as the trade industry got into full swing and multiple people started selling the same thing, so did the need to stand out from the pack.
Since the birth of the Internet and consumers’ transition to the online world, advertising has been categorised into two areas:
Traditional advertising involves TV, radio and print advertisements which typically target an audience directly such as an ad in a local newspaper or a news time commercial. Traditional advertising is generally more expensive than digital advertising, but it can provide a great return on investment (ROI) and is still popular with many businesses today.
Digital advertising is any type of advertisement which is displayed online or on a digital device, such as social media ads or pay per click advertising (PPC). Digital advertising tends to be cheaper and it’s much easier to measure the performance of ads.
Advertising helps small businesses in many ways, but the underlying point of all of these benefits is business growth. Whether it's attracting new customers, sales, brand awareness, advertising accelerates your customer base, size of the business and revenue.
There are many types of advertising that are used to promote small businesses. We’ve broken these down to keep things simple.
Traditional (offline) advertising methods
Some examples of traditional advertising methods include:
Digital (online) advertising methods
There are many types of digital advertising methods, including:
Although the field of advertising is vast and multi-faceted, all advertising methods are underpinned by three key objectives.
There are three key objectives of advertising to persuade consumers to purchase your good and services.
Objective #1: Inform
The inform phase is where you create awareness of your brand, products and services so that consumers know you exist. A seed is planted to let people know your business has a solution to peoples’ wants and needs.
Objective #2: Persuade
In the persuade phase, you convince your audience why your product or service offering is the best. It works at changing people’s perceptions and habits to influence the decision to try a new brand, switch to a brand they have trusted for some time or stay loyal to an existing brand.
Objective #3: Remind
The remind phase is all about nurturing consumers to remind them why they need a product or service and what benefits they will gain once they purchase it again.
So that’s the objectives covered, but the question is… how do advertisers do it?
Some of the most common advertising strategies and techniques include:
If you're feeling inspired to create a new advertising campaign or want to explore new advertising channels, see our Q&A section below or get an answer from an advertising expert.
You can also post a project, and we will introduce you to the best matching local advertising agency who can help.
Cross-channel advertising refers to an advertising campaign that is distributed to an audience in a variety of formats across various marketing channels. Each advertising message aligns with and works towards the same objective, i.e. to persuade customers to buy a product or service.
Advertising can have an immediate and long term effect on the number of sales depending on the objectives of your advertising strategy. Short term sales generate a higher sales volume much faster, e.g. sponsored social media content that provides new customers with a discount code. Long term sales generate higher sales and revenue over a longer period of time, e.g. McDonald’s long term brand campaign “I'm Lovin’ It”.
Native advertising is paid advertising such as articles, blogs, infographics and videos that align with the form and editorial style of the platform it appears on. A native advertisement blends in very well with a platform’s organic content and provides information that the audience expects from the platform.
The purpose of direct marketing is to get a targeted group of people to purchase your products or services, whereas general advertising aims to raise awareness of your brand and targets a wider audience.
The definition of a target market is a selected group of current or potential customers that a business decides to direct its marketing and advertising strategies in order to sell its products or services. For example, the target market for an athletic shoe brand would be 18-30-year-old males and females.
An advertorial is a paid advertisement that provides information about a product or service in an editorial form or journalistic style. An advertorial looks and reads like a publication’s own high quality content and allows a business to promote its products and services under the reputation of the publication.
Online advertising is much easier to measure compared to offline advertising. Generally speaking, advertising can be measured by the number of sales, new customers, new customer enquiries, online or offline store traffic, and click-through rates.