If you are trying to promote a business online, there are plenty of different ways you can do it. Navigating through all the different terms for the advertising options you have available to you can be somewhat daunting when you are first starting out in online marketing, but fortunately, once you get to grips with what each style offers it can be easy to understand how to use them and which is best for a given objective. Here we take a look at four of the paid advertising options you have, and what they are best for.
For most businesses, a mix of two or more of these advertising types is recommended, combined with a good SEO strategy to get you more organic traffic from Google and other search engines like Bing.
Blog Based Marketing
A lot of businesses use paid post on blogs to attract more views. What you are essentially doing here is harnessing the audience that bloggers have and drawing their attention to what you do. You can either create your own content and pay to place it on relevant blogs, or you can pay bloggers who write blogs you’d like your business to have some publicity on to review your products or write about you. This not only helps spread the word about your brand with the implied endorsement of writers whose readers already trust them, but also gives you valuable backlinks from other sites, which is great for your SEO. As long as your content is good, and you post it in the right places, this can be a very strong strategy but is more geared towards long term brand awareness and traffic growth than instant ROI.
Cost Per Impression Advertising
Cost per impression advertising means you pay someone to publish your ads on a site, and you pay every time that ad is displayed to somebody. You can pick out who you want the ads displayed to based on things like location, gender, and whether or not they have shown an interest in a certain keyword. Facebook for example will let you do cost per impression advertising targeting people who have mentioned certain things in their statuses and comments or who have liked pages related to certain topics.
Cost per impression advertising costs the least per unit of paid online adverts, but you are only paying for eyeballs – you don’t necessarily get traffic or sales. It is a good choice if you want a cheap way of getting your branding out there, or if you are trying to market something where you don’t really have anything to sell yet to cover the costs, for instance if you have started a blog and want more readers.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click or cost per click advertising is essentially the next level up from cost per impression. It is more expensive per unit, but you pay when somebody actually clicks on your ad rather than just seeing it – you are paying for traffic rather than eyeballs. Pay per click has uses for just about everyone, whether you’re trying to simply get more traffic or you want to convert people to customers, and like cost per impression you can configure who sees your ads to a very targeted level.
Cost Per Action Advertising
Cost per action is the next level up again. Cost per action is more expensive per unit than pay per click, but with this, you are paying when people do a specific thing on your site, such as making a purchase, signing up for a free trial, or agreeing to join your mailing list. You generally have to pay either a set amount per action, or a percentage of revenue if the action you’ve chosen is a sale. This will be agreed in advance with the company, such as Clickbooth Integraclick, that you set up your campaign with. Generally cost per action carries the least risk, however it can be a problem if you are paying a lot for leads but don’t have a good conversion rate from leads to sales. Cost per action is also generally only available to companies who have already proven that their sites do convert – nobody wants to be displaying ads that don’t make them any money after all.
These are four of the most commonly encountered ways of advertising businesses on the web. You can use one of them, a mix, or use different approaches for different objectives.
