Matthew Rusk Student Entrepreneur in Residence

When you get into business, one of the big considerations is how to correctly advertise the service that you’re offering. These days, we live in an age where the internet rules the circuit. Everything that we do and subscribe to, comes from our usage of the internet.

Our conversations with friends take place on social media, our memories are stored on photo sharing sites, our music and film choices come from huge streaming libraries and the knowledge we consume comes from forums, webinars and blogs. So, how can we levy this when it comes to just running a business.

Advertising is key to any business’ success, especially if you have a product of a service that is offered in return for a monetary value. There are a number of services that we can use to advertise online including:

• Facebook/Instagram Ads
• Youtube Ads
• Google Ad Words

All of these advertising channels allow us to cater adverts to a specific audience. The great thing about social media is that everyone puts their own personalities and tastes into it so we can use this information to target them. If your company offers driving lessons, you could target ads to people in that age bracket in your area. If you’re a company offering a business service, such as an accountancy firm, you could target self employed people in a much wider area. You are in complete control of the demographic of these adverts.

Social media has allowed this method of advertising to become very visual so when setting up an ad campaign online, ensure that your photos or video content is eye catching, informative and to the point. You want the viewer to understand exactly what you are offering from the moment that your ad lands in their feed. 

Each social media ad method allows you to view analytics to see how many views the ad has received and how many of those views are converting customers.

Google Ad Words is slightly different as this works on keywords. You would need to list all the keywords associated with your business and create an ad campaign based on this. It will target your demographic audience when they use those specific keywords.

Online adverts almost always are cheaper to run than printed or physical media ads and certainly have more scalability potential. They are so under priced so look at them and see how they can benefit you today.

Posted under Advertising Online