Online Advertising – Maintaining an enviable spotlight

Online Advertising has come to stay. Today, we can confidently say that you can advertise ‘Offline & Online’ or ‘Online alone’. But you’re strongly advised never to do ‘Offline alone’

Countless businesses have left Offline Advertising solely for Online Advertising. Online Advertisement coupled with Social Media Engagement deliver tremendous results. The success is not so much in the quantity as it is in the quality.While the quantitative result is quite enviable, the ability to deliver quality verifiable and measurable results makes Online Advertising your best shot at getting your message out there to One, the Right Audience, Two, at the Right Time, Three, with the Right Message.

The nature of Online Advertising positions the medium at a practically enviable and vantage position. The reason is because, in placing your advert online, you do not have to start from the scratch. The secret key is this, if the US government relies on these top (what I call) anchor websites (namely: yahoo, facebook, google, microsoft), these companies dominate the internet landscape today – if the US government relies on them for data, then you can be sure of one thing, they do have the data.

The question is, what data do they have and how relevant is it to you?

Well, this is how it works: anytime you browse the internet, certain little texts codes are left on your computer or laptop or mobile device, they are called ‘cookies’, yeah right, ‘cookies’, like giving a little child some sweet cookies in exchange for some little gossip-child-info, yeah, exactly, just what you thought.

These cookies hold the pattern of your online behaviour, the kind of sites you like to visit, the kinds of things you like to click, the kinds of things you have bought, the kind of news that you love to read, etc. These data is often read and re-read by these websites whenever you go online again and they are used in ‘targeting’, or if you like, tailoring specific adverts and information to you, based on your past online behaviour and what you will most likely do or need or want again. So, if your company, for example places an advert online, you can be sure that the adverts will be shown to the right audience, the people who are most likely to be interested in your product/service. What you’re actually paying for when you place an advert online is the data mine that is already in place for you to tap from.

Again, in terms of cost, Online Advertising is far cheaper than what you will get when you advertise Offline in order to achieve the same or more result. For example, on a Standard Pricing for a Google Advert, you could work with, say $10 per day which comes to about N1,600 per day or N48,000 per month and you could get as much as One Million Impressions or Displays of your Adverts and you could get as much as 2500 actual clicks to website.

Lets say you the decide to opt for Offline Advertising and you decide to Print One Million Handbills to match the same amount of impressions as in  the Online Advert – well then, I don’t need to buttress my point any further, am sure you can imagine already that printing One Million handbills won’t cost you N48,000 talk more of the waste of papers that most of it would end up becoming and not even being seen by the right people.

With Online Advertising, you have both a comparative and a differential advantage. You create more value with your limited resource (advertising budget) at a lesser cost.

The final point is getting your Online Advertising done right. The Online Ecology is vivacious and quite complex. Placing your advert online requires both tact and strategy as well as familiarity with the terrain so your advert doesn’t get lost in the multitude of several adverts. This means that you should engage a seasoned Social Media Expert or Online Ad Agency to place your advert for you so that you can get the most out of your Advertising Budget. While the Agency will charge you a small fee for running and managing your Online Advert and in some cases your Social Media presence too, it will be worth your while knowing that you are getting good value for your advertising budget.

We are currently placing Advert for Winnyz Interior (picture above), a bespoke furniture company and we have helped this company maintain the No. 1 Spot on Google Search for the third week in a row. This is by no means a small feat, but it gives the client joy as the calls keep coming in. It feels good to know that people have cared to ask – “hey, what are you selling there?”

Dipo Ajayi is a Lead Consultant & Senior Business Support Specialist @inventrium, you may reach him on phone: 08095487301 or send him an email on: [email protected] or follow him on twitter @lekeajayi or schedule a skype session: oladipo.ajayi