Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Online Advertising: How Banner Ads Can Help Your Business Reach Out

As the internet is emerging as one of the most trusted sources of information about anything and everything, businesses are realizing the power and hence are reaching out to their prospective target audience (customers, employees) etc. online.

Advertising is important for any business!
For any business, advertising is crucial. Its a part of the overall marketing strategy and is a critical piece in the overall go to market plan for the business. Its important for any business to create an impacting influence on its target audience. Advertising plays an important role in the same.

Advertising: the challenges for an SME
For Small and Medium enterprise one of the biggest challenges in terms of advertising is to effectively reach out to the intended target audience, with the right message, which engages and generates intended result for the business. But advertising traditionally through Newspapers, Magazines is costly. Though effective, its a costly medium for a business for reaching out to its target audience.

Another challenge is the engagement these mediums cause and the reactive responses of the target audience to the advertising. For SMEs its difficult to gauge the real effectiveness of advertising through these mediums and hence it becomes difficult to drive real ROI.

Online Advertising comes to the rescue!
Online advertising has proven to be one of the most cost efficient and effective advertising mediums for not just small businesses, but all emerging businesses. Banner Ads are the most common form of advertising on the internet.

What are banner Ads and where can I see them?
Banner Ads are nothing but a form of advertising which is the most prevalent online. Banner ads provide a means of reaching thousands of potential customers with your marketing campaigns. These campaigns can be started easily and can be tracked strongly while giving powerful return on investment for a business. Banner ads are highly engaging with the type and kind of content which they can display. Eg: a banner ad could display a simple, well designed Jpeg to a highly interactive flash based game!

You can see these banner Ads on various websites which allow advertising and also as part of various web pages. The simplest form of such advertising is the ads that you see around your email box while you are accessing it. Eg: if you have a Gmail account, you will see contextually created Ads which will be relevant to the conversation you are having on Email and be positioned for you!

How do I create my first Ad?
One of the simplest ways to do it is to use the Google Adwords Ad engine. Its a free tool which needs a little education to learn and once you have a hang of it, you can easily sit and manage your online advertising yourself.


How effective are these Ads and how is the ROI calculated?
Very effective is the answer. The technology which the Ad engine works upon is basically a contextual focus engine. Every user is being studied by the Ad engine intelligently (artificial intelligence). Based upont he user patterns, the Ads are targeted to the user.

The effectiveness of these campaigns is often measured by calculating the "click-through" rate. This rate is the percentage of times an ad is clicked, based on the number of times it's viewed. If a banner ad is seen by 200 site visitors and 10 of them actually click on the ad, the banner ad has a click-though rate of 5%.

The real ROI which has to be calculated further is, once the click through rate is confirmed you need to confirm your webmaster as to how many of these clicks actually converted into queries/ sales for your business.

To ensure that your marketing budgets are being utilized properly, you must ensure that your online Ads are targeted to the right set of target audience. Eg: if you are a pain killer medicine, hosting your Ad on a discussion forum for technology may not be a great idea.

For SMEs, online advertising is one of the easiest and the simplest most forms of advertising and outreach. And not just that. Its much lighter on the pocket compared to the other traditional forms of advertising as discussed above.

To know more on how your business can leverage the power of the internet to go to the next level, drop in a comment to this post to get in touch with our team of experts at the IndiaMART Knowledge Services.

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