Advertising is one of the most important facets of marketing and can make or break your business depending on how you use it. While choosing the right form of advertising for your business can greatly increase your revenue flow, choosing the wrong form can lead to wasted time and money. With this in mind, let’s go over five effective methods for advertising, and which ones you should consider.
1. Social Media Advertising
There are two ways to use social media for advertising, and they’re very different from one another. The most straightforward method is to use an ad network such as Facebook’s Meta Audience Network that allows you to display ads directly to those on the platform. This had many advantages such as being able to precisely target your ads using factors such as age, income, gender, location, and more. The downside here is that it may take time and money before you’re able to refine your campaign and begin seeing significant revenue flow.
The second social media advertising method is more of a branding strategy that revolves around providing content for your demographic that they can engage with. This promotes brand awareness and brand loyalty while drawing new customers into your sales funnel. Being too aggressive with your advertising in this situation can actually harm your brand, so it is important to remember to be subtle or you can easily turn people away.
2. Display Advertising
Display advertising is a very specific form of online advertising that tends to produce greater results than its text-based counterparts. To put it in simple terms, display advertising is online ads that focus on the visual element. Banner ads, full-screen popup ads, overlay ads, and video ads all fall into this category and the reason they’re so successful is that they promote a higher level of engagement with your audience.
Since these types of advertising are more complex than text-based ads, many businesses turn to a display advertising agency to create and publish these ads for them. This can help create a more strategic approach to connecting with your demographic and getting better conversions.
3. Broadcast Advertising
Broadcast advertising is when you advertise using broadcast media such as television or radio. Many streaming services, such as Netflix, offer cheaper subscription models that include advertising as well. In any case, broadcast advertising is a great way to target a specific demographic and get your brand in front of them.
Speaking of which, it is important to remember that, like social media advertising, broadcast advertising is usually more about branding than direct response. This is because it can be impossible or unreasonable to get viewers to take immediate action with these kinds of advertisements. There are some exceptions, however, such as using QR codes, phone numbers, and website addresses as a part of a call to action. This is seen in many local ads and infomercials. Even so, response rates tend still tend to be lower per capita compared to many other direct response forms of advertising, but since broadcast advertising reaches a much larger audience, it can help offset this.
4. Print Advertising
The Internet has virtually killed print advertising. While running ads in publications such as magazines, newspapers, and newsletters used to be a great way to market to your demographic, most of this is done online these days. That said, there are a few methods of print advertising that are still viable.
A good example of this would be printing out fliers and paying a local gym to display them at their front desk. Business cards are also a great method of print advertising that still has a prominent niche. Direct mail advertising, on the other hand, is much more limited than it used to be. Even so, direct mail can still be very effective if used on a highly focused demographic.
5. Outdoor Advertising
Outdoor advertising consists of strategies such as billboards, street furniture, transit ads, video displays (like the ones at Times Square), and POS displays. The big benefit here is that outdoor ads can reach a lot of people if used in the right location. The drawback is that it can be difficult to control who your ads are reaching. This means that outdoor advertising is usually most effective for products and services that appeal to a broader audience.
Conclusion
The type of advertising you use depends on who your demographic is, where they’re at, and how you want to reach them. For example, if you’re advertising cat food, you wouldn’t put fliers for it on the desk of a nursing home. Instead, you’d be better off using something like a display advertising campaign that runs ads on cat-related websites and videos online. By using a combination of demographics research and common sense, you can choose the best type of advertising for your business.
