With
most businesses moving to the online space in the present era, we see thousands
of new websites springing up every day. Like the physical business world, online advertising is the backbone of
digital marketing which attracts traffic and potential sales to your website. However, you can advertise your brand,
product, and services in two ways. One is
the free advertising, and one is paid. In this article, we try to understand
both and decide which one is the best pathway for better business success.
Free Advertising
Free
online advertising comprises of online advertising tools that can increase your
website traffic, craw it as well as index it in various search engines without
any cost incurred by you. They can even help build backlinks and a referral network to increase your reach and brand
exposure. Free tools provided by these advertising sites include
§ Website indexing directories
§ Blog Directories
§ Search engine submission
websites
§ Affiliate networks like
Google’s AdSense, and Amazon and eBay’s Partner Network
Arguments
in favor of these free advertising sites
are –
·
Easy to understand – It is very easy to understand, does not cost you even
a single cent.
·
Free postings – Today free advertising’s
popularity is rising as an increasing number of people have started browsing
free advertisement to find things they require.
·
Wide audience – The free classified advertisement websites are getting a
traffic increase with each passing day. This
has raised the possibility of businesses to make concrete sales without any investment.
Paid Advertising
In
Paid advertising, you need to pay for
online advertising services. Examples of such services include online
partnerships, website banner takeovers, paid search engine results,
pay-per-click advertising, etc. For the majority
of business, paid advertising means a pay-per-click campaign. Leading companies
providing paid advertising services are –
§ Google Adwords
§ Facebook Advertising
§ Bing Ads
§ Amazon Product Ads
§ Retargeter
Arguments
in favor of Paid advertising are –
·
Greater reach – Paid advertising comes with
capabilities to instantly expand your reach to a much wider audience. A single campaign has the power to generate for you
good traffic that gives you a steady flow of potential customers as well as
repeat customers.
·
Highly targeted – Paid advertising not only
increases your reach to the audience but
it also ensures you a targeted audience which matches your demographics like
sex, age, region or even interests. Paid
traffic provides you with a higher opportunity to make sales.
·
Highly effective – With paid advertisement, you rarely
fail. A simple mobile marketing campaign can yield a record number of
subscribers’ conversions.
·
Immediate results – The speed with which paid
advertising campaigns attract new visitors to your website is something that
makes any business resort to paid advertising.
·
Maintain complete control – A well designed paid
campaign allows you to remain in full control of your message. It provides you a
focused direction to build the brand of your business.
·
Realistic and measured ROI
– A
realistic ad spends with a paid advertising campaign can yield you a real
return on investment. All you need to do is set your maximum periodic budget be
it monthly or quarterly, analyze campaign results and finally test, tweak and
test them again.
·
Deeper insight – Paid advertising provides you with the ability to measure your
marketing efforts in a concrete manner.
You might execute a simple email campaign or an elaborate digital marketing
campaign; you have powerful tools at your disposal which yields calculable
insight into your performance.
Which form of advertising
is better?
The above arguments clearly
show that paid advertisement give you a much higher chance to get a better
business ROI. As a general rule, both
should be best used in conjunction rather
than exclusively to get maximum benefit for your business.
Free advertising increases your organic reach and helps your ranking naturally in search engine
results. However, it requires a much more
extended period and great efforts from your side. In contrast, paid
advertising channels give you a more extensive brand exposure with quick
results and more viable traffic.
Most people start off with free advertising and then resort
to selective paid advertising once they
have sufficient funds. This helps them with consistent growth. Following this method,
you would be able to reap better.
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