Advertising Small Business Online
As a small business, effective advertising can increase your customer base and increase your profits.
Follow along with this helpful guide to learn how to advertise successfully. When you have a small business, it can be hard to create and implement effective marketing strategies. You must be able to reach your target audience, appeal and engage them quickly with your ads, and draw them into your business to buy your products or services. Fortunately, there are ways you can accomplish advertising successfully. This guide will detail the importance of advertising your small business, how you can transition into online advertising easily, and the costs behind advertising. 
Why Is Advertising Important?
Advertising can be important for small businesses in several ways, including:
Brand Awareness
If you run a small business, you understand how hard it can be to compete against larger businesses or retail stores. It can be even more difficult if no one knows about your business. Effective advertising ensures that people know about your business, tells them why they need your business, and shows them exactly how they can find your products or services. If you are reaching your target audience or your ideal end-user, you should start to see profitability from your advertising.
News Delivery
When your business puts out new products, holds events or fundraisers, hosts a sale or promotion, or changes products or services, you need to notify your clients. With advertising, you can reach loyal customers and new customers.
Credibility
When you push our advertising for your business, you help to develop a relationship with your customers. They gain awareness, knowledge, and familiarity with your business. Effectively, especially if they grow to recognize your business and how it can serve them, your clients will trust your business to a certain degree. You will gain further credibility through excellent customer service and delivery of high-quality products and services.
Data Collection
Furthermore, when you run your advertising with the help of certain networks, you will have access to a variety of significant information. For instance, you will be able to collect and analyze which groups of people are viewing your ads, which groups of people are clicking your ads, what days or times you see the most activity, and what devices people are using when they see your ads.
How to Move towards Online Advertising
Whether you are a brand-new business considering online advertising, or a business used to traditional methods of advertising and looking to move towards online advertising, it can be a simple procedure. Follow along with this step-by-step guide below:
Focus on Your Customer
Most likely, when you were developing your products or services, you created them with your target audience in mind. Your marketing strategy should begin in the same way, by thinking about your audience. You should concentrate on who they are, what challenges they face, what their goals are, and how your business and your product can solve or assist them. When you find an answer for each of these aspects, you will be able to incorporate that information into your ad. If you have numerous types of customers, it is best to develop an ad for each customer or prioritize reaching the most important group rather than trying to answer every customer in one ad.
Choose a Network
Although many small businesses wish to jump on the most popular ad networks, they may not be ideal for your small business. It is important to find out where your target customers are and reach them there. A few of the most common ad channels include:
Google Search Ads
Google Search Ads may be the most profitable type of ad. When your customer is searching for specific keywords on Google, your ad will appear near the search engine result page. If you use this type of advertising, you generally pay between $1 and $2 per click.
Microsoft Ads
Like Google Ads, Microsoft Bing displays your ad alongside their search bar when a customer has searched for certain keywords. They also run on a pay-per-click basis. You may expect to pay between $1 and $2 per click, although on average, they charge less than Google.
Meta for Business Ads
Facebook Ads or Meta for Business Ads offer many different forms of advertising, which may make it ideal for many small businesses. Their most popular formats include videos, images, or carousels. Typically, the cost-per-click will be between $0.50 and $3.50. Yet, they may cost more if you would like them boosted, for instance.
Instagram Ads
On Instagram, you may have various options to market your business. You can market your ad on the News Feed, Explore Page, and Instagram Shopping. You can expect to pay $0.40 to $0.70 per click. Moreover, you can create an Instagram business account and create a following on your social media account. You can use Instagram images, videos, reels, and stories to market to your target audience. Furthermore, you can accomplish brand deals with Instagram influencers with large reaches to further promote your product. Your budget should depend on their follower count and their engagement, costing between $100 and $10,000 per post.
Youtube Ads
YouTube is another easy way to advertise your small business. They offer numerous ways to target your audience, and provide different ad formats such as banner ads, in-video ads, and in-stream ads. You can expect to pay $0.10 to $0.30 per view of your ad.
Alternative Forms of Online Advertising
Apart from online images and videos, you can also employ alternative, subtle forms of advertising. For instance, you may benefit from email advertising, creating rich and educational content through social media platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, or writing blog posts with natural use of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. In these ways, you can appeal to clients with only small hints towards your services or products.
Set Up Tracking or Data Collection
It is important to set up a way to track your online advertising method and monitor your results on a regular basis. As aforementioned, you can collect a large amount of helpful data from tracking your ad performance. If you find you are not reaching the right groups of people or not appealing to the right group of people, you may need to switch your advertising strategies or redevelop an ad. One of the most popular ways to track is through Google Analytics.
How Much Should Online Advertising Cost?
As you can see, online advertising can be cost-effective from many different providers. However, it can also add-up fast when you start reaching large audiences. Ultimately, if this is the case, you want to ensure you are reaching the right audience and appealing to them. Through tracking your advertising, you can ensure you are and that you are receiving a maximum amount of return upon your ad investments. On average, small businesses spend between 3% to 7% of their revenue on advertising.
