As you read this, there are millions of people surfing online at this very moment. Online marketing started with simple e-commerce ventures and has now found its place into every other cell phone used across the globe.
You can rarely escape online ads. You open Google to make a search and you find ads. You open your Facebook account and you see banner ads on one side of the page. You watch a video on YouTube and encounter an ad before the video starts. You may also come across an ad in the middle of a video you’re watching.
This makes the infiltration of online ads very clear. Businesses wanting to venture into digital marketing haven’t spared a single platform to market their products. With the advent of online marketing, brands have been fighting to gain maximum coverage no matter where their customers are.
From your phone’s home screen to your social media account, every available space has been targeted and effectively used by digital marketers. This has also made online marketing a very lucrative option for every entrepreneur wanting to make it big in the market.
Digital marketing has also reduced business costs to a great extent. Earlier, firms used to borrow funds from their banks, lenders or platforms offering alternative finance in order to provide for their marketing costs. These costs have now been reduced considerably with digitisation kicking in.
Choosing the right platform plays an important role in marketing your brand. It would also depend upon the product you are selling. You can’t market a rocking chair designed for retired people on Facebook. The medium of promotion says a lot about the brand, right quoted by Marshall McLuhan.
It is therefore instrumental for your business to choose the right online platform to market your product or service. Here are some of the most effective online platforms you can choose to advertise your brand:
Google AdWords
Google AdWords is lovably known as the granddaddy of digital advertising. This portal makes Google a giant is online advertising as it owns a dangerously high amount of shares in the search engine market. AdWords is also lauded as the best portal for Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
As an entrepreneur, this portal would help you in creating ads containing text, images, videos or a combination of these depending upon the keywords used by people using Google to make their searches. You generally bid on the keywords in an online auction market in real time and get to publish your ad if your bid wins the auction. Auctions are also made for screen space and position to be taken by an individual ad.
This might get a little complicated for people who are fresh in the field of digital marketing. If you are one of them, you don’t need to worry at all! AdWords offers a service named Google AdWords Express for beginners. This portal has an easy-to-understand user interface that could be used in the simplest of ways to attract more viewers online.
Bing Ads
Bing Ads is a portal pretty similar to AdWords. Set up by its parent Microsoft, Bing Ads offers the advertisers to publish their ads on the Bing search engine along with its partner networks.
The audience of Bing is far lesser than that of Google, but the same reason also pulls down the bidding prices for an ad. You can therefore opt for Bing is you don’t have the budget to go for Google and have your ad placed at an equally convenient location, choosing the best of keywords.
Though they can be difficult to come by, Bing ads also offer advertising credits to the marketers for free. Though they are not as famous as Google, Bing Ads have made a great improvement in extending their advertising network and roping in more and more clients wanting to promote their brands online.
7 Search
Though a smaller player in the industry of paid searches, 7 Search makes use of smaller and niche search engines to display the PPC ads for your business. They also tend to claim a higher return on investment than bigger competitors while they have a much cheaper rate of bidding on keywords as compared to both Google and Bing.
Though you may not get the same click volume for your website on 7 Search, but they have a really supportive customer service along with cheaper costs per click.
Facebook Advertising
This is something that everyone must have come across. Almost every second person n the world is on Facebook and it is very common to see ads while you’re checking your news feed.
Though Facebook took its own time to come across as an effective ad portal, it has proven to be the best option for small business owners. The effectiveness and reach of Facebook has already created history, which makes its advertising portal highly efficient.
Though Facebook advertising works in a way that is similar to any other PPC platform, but it offers an advantage of using image or video along with the advertising text that is displayed. This means that even if viewers don’t click on your ad, they would still be exposed to your ad, giving you a greater reach for no apparent charges.
While platforms based on search engines (Google and Bing) target visitors based on their user behaviour and the keywords used for making searches, Facebook would let you target customers based on demographics (age, gender, occupation etc) and interests of the user. As Facebook would have a record of all the interests, hobbies and ‘likes’ of a particular customer, it would give you a wholesome experience in advertising your venture!
