Small businesses should consider promoting themselves through online advertising since not only is it the most economical way to reach a large audience, but it is also often necessary to survive in the increasingly tough competition. Only with a price comparison, it’s easy to see that online advertising offers attractive deals.
How to Compare Online Ads With Other Forms Of Advertising
Online advertising has a lot more advantages than other forms of advertising. Most businesses find that newspaper and phone directory advertising are generally the most effective offline form. If you look into newspaper or directory ads, you can immediately tell that the price is quite expensive for a small business. The price depends on the area where you are at and the ads can be very expensive in the metropolitan area. The price comparison is one of the key factors that lead into online advertising.
Now, let’s see how long an ad can reach the audience and what the comparison is. Newspaper ads usually can run only for several days a week, for a limited frequency. Of course, the more your ads appear in newspapers, the more costs you will spend and it will only reach the limited audience in a certain local area.
The same is true for directory advertising. Though people keep phone books near them for a longer time and refer to them, the cost is still expensive and limited to a small area. Even if it may be acceptable for businesses that cover only that small area, you may want to attract customers from a larger area, operate online or even ship them worldwide.
Benefits of Online Advertising
This brings us to the real benefits of online advertising for small businesses. Most small businesses have small business space because they have limited operational budget. This means that they must be very careful in spending money as well as in calculating expenses for their advertising. Now that people spend more time surfing the web, it seems that online advertising offers a lot more benefits.
* Effective cost – Online advertising generally spends lower cost than offline advertising.
* Greater reach – More people can be reached in a shorter time with the online ads than with other forms of advertising.
* Editable – While printed ads cannot be changed once they are published, online forms can be edited quickly, easily and at little or no cost.
* Long lasting – Online advertising generally runs for long periods of time and can be easily and quite economically updated for long periods of time. Note that some forms of online advertising, such as online classified ads, expire in a short time.
While there may be customers who can not be reached online, the fact is that today most people actually spend more time reading online than the printed form. To grow a small business or at least just to survive, online advertising can be a very smart choice.
Source:
NeuroAdvertising