Online Advertising Platforms: Where To Start

Brilliant ideas. Solid strategies. Gumption. There are dozens of different factors that go into creating a successful business, but in an increasingly connected world, every consumer has more options by the minute, and if you want them to find your services, you’ll need to spend every cent of your larger-than-ever advertising budget wisely. This isn’t easy; after all, you have plenty of options, too. How do you make the right choice and get the most hits for your money?

Know Your Clients’ Interests

Since the beginning of business itself, entrepreneurs have had to answer the all-important question of just who will be most likely to buy their products. In the age of the Internet, you have a huge swath of the world population at your fingertips: an estimated 3.5 billion people now have a convenient connection to the web.

Of course, narrowing down billions of people to find the ones who will want your product is no easy task, which is why the biggest online advertising platforms can do some targeting on your behalf. Facebook, with nearly 2 billion users, is perhaps the most effective widespread advertising platform for this reason, allowing you to target users by location, interests, and devices used, in addition to some demographic details. While this sometimes lands Facebook in controversial waters, there’s no denying how effective Facebook ads can be, and how many they reach for a relatively low price.

Twitter’s options for advertising have been growing exponentially as of late, and they, too, have a vast array of data points at hand to use for targeting – even letting you specifically reach out to users who use certain emoji.

Google’s AdWords service is another way to narrow your audience and stay within your budget, only charging you when people click your ads and only showing your ads when someone searches for phrases you decide are relevant. When you’ve reached the budget you set, the ads simply stop appearing until you’re ready to pony up.

What’s New

In an upcoming podcast we will be discussing advertising platforms further with a focus on the new advertising monster on its way to the top: Instagram. It sounds bizarre as an advertising platform and it is exclusive, but it has all of the right keys to be very effective for the right products. Keep an eye out for the podcast soon.

Get Personal

If you already have a database of users, one of the easiest ways to make sure they don’t forget about you is an old classic: email. Monthly services like Constant Contact and MailChimp have been around for decades, evolving to incorporate more social media-centric aspects into their software, but always staying focused on the proactive marketing inherent in email campaigns. Some CRM databases build their own email marketing tools, like iContact for Salesforce, which can go through your contacts for the information it needs to build an effective campaign. Newer service Mailify costs a little more than the older services, but takes a smart and fresh approach to its interface and thinks more about your campaign on mobile devices, all of which are crucial in the modern age.

Many a service makes promises to keep your business from getting lost in the shuffle, and choosing between them is a difficult task. Luckily, the world is smaller than ever, and your clients are right on the other side of your computer. And don’t be afraid to try out multiple services, and choose what works best for you. By really digesting your user base, potential scope, and your reach, you’ll find the right service for your business.