Selling is the ultimate need of each and every business and each and every selling requires advertising since it’s the only medium through which audience gets to know about the product or service. So advertising carries a heavy grading in the selling process.
Advertising, economically, can be classified either as Paid or Unpaid/Organic. The names of both the advertising are sufficient to define both the term specifically, however, I will still define it for the convenience of few. So let’s proceed with the Paid one.
PAID ADVERTISING
It’s a kind of advertising that asks you to pay for if you want to make use of it. It demands money if you want to avail its benefits. Few instances of paid advertising can be television commercials, radio ads, advertising on somebody else’s website, display ads, newspaper advertisements etc.
WHY DOES YOUR BUSINESS NEED PAID ADVERTISING?
In business, whatever we do eventually lead to lead generation and hence to acquire maximum ROI. The same is the requirement of your business too, for the need of paid advertising. Below are few benefits of paid advertising.
Specific and Targeted: Paid advertising focuses on targeting specific audiences who would like and be interested in your products and services. It’s always better to be specific and targeted because it saves a lot of your time and potentials getting wasted at somewhere it’s not required. Also, target audiences are the one who is more likely to get converted into leads or sales.
Fast and Guaranteed Results: Since you’re paying to somebody, the person at other end is bound to work for you. Hence the process is always fast and results are guaranteed and since the results are guaranteed, the chances of getting qualified leads are also high. Paid advertising acts as an aid to those whose website ranking is low in the SERPs.
Affordable and Measurable: Affordable because you pay only for what you get and measurable because you know how much you’re getting. Paid advertising provides you a broad and large audience. Hence, the cost-related is dependent to the aim of ad you are running. For example-if you incur Cost-per-click, you aim to get more website traffic, for the brand awareness you go for the CPM.
Multiple Platforms: Whether you want to advertise online or need to advertise offline, you are blessed with a huge number of platforms. It’s up to you what you want to choose. If you want you can use display banners on the Google Display Network or if you want you can have simple text ads to appear above people’s searches on Google.
If I talk about social media platforms, we all know we have a plethora of options. Some of them include:
LinkedIn- Snapchat
- YouTube
ORGANIC/UNPAID ADVERTISING
Organic advertising doesn’t require or demand any money for advertisement. Unlike paid advertising, it doesn’t focus on making simple sales pitch, instead, it aims at increasing brand awareness. For organic advertisement, most of the companies take the advantage of social media or social networking sites and online search engines like Google AdWords etc.
Organic advertising is a very friendly approach to display your product and to make the audience aware of the brand.
PAID ONLINE AND OFFLINE ADVERTISING
Paid advertising can be either online or can be offline. In this section, we will discuss both kinds.
PAID ONLINE ADVERTISING
- Banner Ads: A kind of ad that is found in almost every part of the internet. These are in the form of small, rectangular ads appearing on various web pages. The subject matter and overall appearances of different brands differ from each other. Regardless of how different they are from each other, they all share a similar function- taking the user to the website of the party responsible for the ad.
- Pay-Per-Click: The most popular advertising method used by many. The method focuses, mainly, on to direct traffic to a particular website. Whenever the ad would be clicked on by a user, the advertiser will pay the publisher. Additionally, PPC ads on search engines consist of advertisers who bid on keywords and key phrases relevant to their specific target market.
- Popup and Pop-under Advertising: Popup ads are a kind of advertising that mainly aims at attracting traffic to a website and capturing email addresses. Popunder ads too have the same function. The only thing that makes them appear different is display. Popup ads are displayed in the separate web browser windows, however, Popdown ads are displayed behind the user’s main browser window rather than appearing right in front of it.
- Floating Ads: Very common forms of paid advertising methods that overlapped over a page that has been requested by a user. These ads last for very limited time and disappear after a specific period, say within five to thirty seconds. This kind of ads generally appears either in full-screen size or in a smaller, rectangular window.
- Contextual Ads: A kind of online paid advertisement that is targeted and appears on websites or other media and is selected and served by automated systems based on the identity of the user and the content displayed. Contextual ads are popular on mobile sites for mobile visitors.
- Social media Ads: I think all of us are aware of this kind. Social media generally refers to advertising through social media networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat etc. One of the best advantages of social media advertising is that you can find the demographics of users and can target them accordingly.
- Text Link Ads: As the name suggests, Text Link Ad can be something in the form text on a website or blog hyperlinked to a specific website found on another website. The link publishing website or blog will be paid by the advertiser who aims to get more traffic to the page that’s been linked.
- Unicast Ads: Unicast ads come in the form of short videos and are much like a television commercial. They are seen to influence the people as that of regular TV ads. Also, Unicast ads, in most cases, are in the form of a popup or a pop-under ad format.
PAID OFFLINE ADVERTISING
- Newspaper advertisement
- Radio advertisement
- Television advertisement
- Trade shows and Events
- Seminars and Webinars
- Flyers and Postcards
- Sponsorship advertising
CONCLUSION
There are various options you can choose from and various advertising campaigns you can make use of on the basis of what suits for you or what applies best to your business. You can conduct a research on what platforms your target audience is seen more often. You can then identify if the platform employs paid advertising so that you can enroot your flag there and drive website visitors to your site.
