When you’re trying to market your business, online advertising is one of the best strategies. It’s especially good for new businesses because it’s far more cost effective than a lot of traditional offline marketing techniques. It also has a much better reach and you’ll be able to connect with a lot more potential customers for a fraction of the price. When it comes to online marketing, most people immediately think of social media. It’s true that it’s a good way to market your business and find a lot of new customers without investing that much money at all, but it’s not the only way to market your business online.
In fact, social media marketing should only be one aspect of a wider online marketing strategy but a lot of businesses put all of their focus into social media and neglect other forms of online marketing. You may still find some success with it and you’ll be able to drive traffic to your website but if you’re not combining it with other forms of online marketing, you’re limiting yourself quite a lot. These are some of the most effective forms of online marketing outside of social media.
- Mobile Ads
Mobile ads are such an effective form of marketing because they’re very targeted and they have good reach. We’re all walking around with phones in our pockets so if you can send ads direct to people, you’ll get a high response rate. There are also ways to use mobile ads so they cannot be as easily ignored by the consumer like they may be on the sidebar of a website, for example. The most common way to do this is by putting ads on mobile games. Most mobile games have a free version with ads on but give the user the option to pay a fee to remove ads. A large portion of people using those apps aren’t going to pay, they’ll just watch the ads instead. In most cases, the game will allow people to play for a certain amount of time or progress a certain amount and then they have to watch an ad to continue. As they want to carry on playing afterwards, people aren’t likely to just shut it off, they’ll watch the ad instead.
- Banner Ads
Getting your ads on websites that are already popular is a great way to drive traffic to your website and increase sales. The only problem with a lot of online ads is that they’ll get lost in amongst the page and can go unnoticed a lot of the time, especially down the sidebar. That’s why banner display advertising is so good. You can get some great ads that sit right along the top or bottom of a page so they really jump out at the user. If you get your ads through a good company, they’ll be able to get them on popular sites like Amazon or eBay so the reach is massive.
- Blogging
Blogging is one that people don’t put enough resources into but it’s so effective. If you want people to visit your website, you have to offer them something of value without the expectation of payment. It’s important to build a bit of a relationship with your potential customers and demonstrate your value to them before they purchase something from you. If you have a blog on your website and you’re regularly posting great articles, you can push them on social media and get more traffic to your site. You’ll also increase your search engine rankings by posting regular blog articles with relevant keywords in and getting more back links to your site. You do need to post regularly but the most important thing with content marketing on a blog is quality. If consumers see you as a trusted source of information, they’re more likely to buy products off you in the future.
- Google Ads
Google ads is the most popular form of online advertising because it’s effective and you only pay for it when you actually see some results. It massively increases sales by using pay per click ads with targeted keywords. The ads will be directed toward people that are most likely to have an interest in your products so the return rate is good. The best thing about using pay per click ads is that, as the name suggests, you only pay when somebody clicks the link and is directed through to the website so you’re not wasting money on ads that aren’t working for you.
Social media is an important part of your online marketing strategy but you need to make sure that you don’t focus all of your efforts on it and you use some of these other techniques alongside it.
