Advertising on the Internet: how can it help your company?

Internet advertising has great potential. This is a great way to reach potential customers. However, for the effectiveness of the ad to be satisfactory, it is necessary to choose the right type of ad and adjust it to the budget. Does the company need advertising in Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords), tailored to the target group? Or maybe it’s better to focus on inbound advertising, which covers a wide range of activities – content marketing, website positioning (selection of appropriate keywords), activity on social media as well as running your own thread on Gowork. Well-planned Internet marketing certainly translates into better results and increased profitability of an online business.

What are the types of online advertising and which one is best to choose for your business? From this post, you will get to know what costs online advertising generates and how it works! Why is it worth focusing on content marketing and positioning? Will cheap product promotion on the web be effective? How to appear at the top of search results? In this article, you will find out what are the answers to these and many other questions!

Online advertising is the key to business success!

The pandemic period has caused many companies to move to the Internet. According to the analysis of the data of UK Office for National statistics, in 2021, there were 2.5M additional domains registered which is increase of 79,000 eCommerce websites vs 2020. There are now 580,000 eCommerce enabled websites in UK according to the 2021 TAMI’s UK Ecommerce Market Report. These numbers are constantly growing. So how do you stand out from the competition? How to get searched on the Internet? How to promote websites? Is effective advertising enough? If you want to grow your business, it’s best to work in many areas – both paid and organic. Interest in broadly understood internet marketing should accompany us from the beginning of our business.

Appropriate presentation of the network’s products and services and high quality of service – these features are no longer enough to make potential customers take advantage of your offer, contributing to increased sales and better brand recognition. Online stores are increasingly competing with each other. However, this is not only an additional difficulty but also an opportunity for companies to improve their image on the web and to come up with new forms of promotion.

Contrary to appearances, among the various types of online advertising, it is quite easy to choose the one that works best for a given industry. To do this, we need to decide whether we are more interested in increasing our sales temporarily or gaining new fans for our brand.

The market offer is really wide – we can invest in sponsored content on social networking sites, an influencer marketing campaign, or even positioning content related to our brand on Google. Well-planned internet marketing will also include remarketing, video marketing and mailing.

Paid ads give great results, but cheap promotion is also really possible! It all depends on our needs, but also partly on the search engine results.

Cheap advertising on the Internet – where to start?

Where to start searching for the best online ads for your company? In order to choose the one suited to the profile of our business and its products, you must first define the marketing strategy of the forms of promotion. Undoubtedly, online advertising can bring profits, but improperly selected and poorly targeted will also generate costs.

Advertising a company depends largely on the type of business. A small shop offering hand-made products will choose a different advertisement, and a gastronomic establishment with the goal of increasing the sale of takeaway meals will choose a different advertisement.

Currently, one of the most popular forms of advertising on the Internet are ads bought on social media. The most popular are, of course, Facebook Ads, although more and more companies are also investing in promotion on Instagram or LinkedIn. These are the most effective ads when it comes to paid formats.

This is a good way to start our company’s adventure with online advertising, especially if the brand profiles we run on social media are popular among users. Each of them is a potential customer!

Advertising your company on the Internet via social networking sites is also a simple way to familiarize more people with our brand and build long-term sales strategies and customer relationships. The use of social media gives good results in promoting your business if you actively work on thematic groups.

Both corporations with large advertising budgets, investing in content marketing, and smaller market players, just starting with their idea for advertising services on the web, will cope here.

To use the potential of promotion on the Internet, display advertising is most often used. They include classic banners, interstitials, image ads, native ads, as well as video and social media formats. Each of them must be tailored to your audiences to bring the greatest benefits.

Advertising on the Internet – types

What forms of online advertising that use the potential of the advertising network can still be found? A good way to promote your brand online is also to set up company blogs on your websites. Websites enriched with such a section have the ability to create attractive content marketing.

If your company already has its own website (e.g. a shop), it is worth adding a place to traditional e-commerce techniques where we will share with users – our clients – content regarding our brand image, industry news or simply announcements of new products and promotions. You can also post new job offers there!

When creating blog content, it is necessary to take into account the guidelines for the so-called SEO, i.e. text positioning on the Internet. Thanks to the use of appropriate keywords and other SEO mechanisms, we will have a better chance of gaining the attention of new users. Without ensuring visibility in Google search results, it will be difficult to reach the customer and break through the thicket of competition. Website positioning must be taken care of from the very beginning to get the best-optimized website.

Organic ways to increase the reach of our brand online advertising will support the use of Google Ads. This is another type of online advertising you should know! Without ads, it will be hard to get a decent position of your content in the most popular search engine in the world.

Google Ads offers many different formats:

• The first example is a text ad. It displays like a classic search result, although it will be marked with an advertisement. It consists of a header, a link and a description below. It is these words that determine whether the customer will click and take advantage of the offer. In the process of creating an ad, it is important that there are keywords, the most important features of the product or service and encouragement to action (CTA) such as: buy now! Using such online advertising, the company is billed in the PPC (Pay Per Click) system, so you pay only for clicks on the ad.
• Another form of promotion on Google is product advertising. Advertising campaigns in this type of promotion focus on the appropriate presentation and encouragement to buy a given product. If you want to use this type of Google Ads advertising, you should take care of all the important parameters beforehand. This will be the appropriate photo, name, current price and a link redirecting to the page. After completing the most important features, it will be easier to find our product in the Google search engine and offer it to a potential customer.
• Graphic advertising is another proposition for entrepreneurs running an online business. It covers quite a wide range – it can be an image, gif or animated image. Everything that we want to convey to a potential client must be placed on it. It can be a company name, a promotion of a given service or a catchy slogan that will intrigue and make the recipient click on the graphic. The advantage of this type of advertising is the possibility of displaying it on websites, but also on social networking sites, e-mail, and even in games or applications.
• Contextual advertising is the promotion of services and products tailored to the recipient’s interests. For example, if a person has recently viewed content related to shoes or visited websites to buy them, contextual advertising will show them shoes. This format is maximally focused on the needs of the recipient and searching for the most interested ones.
• In addition to the above-mentioned promotion in the Google search engine, you can also use a less intrusive form of promotion, which is native advertising. These are articles or blog entries delicately woven into similar content. This form of advertising can appear on social media, in books and even in movies.

It should be remembered that the effectiveness of paid search ads also depends on matching the type and appearance of the advertising form to the audience. You have to approach a business customer who expects professionalism in a different way than you do with products dedicated to teenagers. There are no most effective forms of advertising. Each method of promotion must be approached individually, i.e. through the prism of the type of company, business goal or group we want to reach.

How much does online advertising cost?

Advertising on the Internet can be both advertising our services on Google (it pays off, especially to small, local businesses, such as a photo service point or a local bicycle repair shop) and on social media.

If we also want to use external sources to promote our products or services, it is worth considering buying periodic online advertisements on popular portals. Sometimes a small web banner in the right place can do wonders for our business!

Okay, but how much does online advertising cost? As we mentioned, the form and costs of online advertising for our company should depend on our needs. An accounting office looking for new clients – entrepreneurs will have a different one, and a mail-order shop will have a different one.

What budget should you set for different types of online advertising? Your individual advertising rate will also depend on how attractive your company’s online image is.

Do you have several thousand followers on Facebook and regularly upload engaging content to your account? Their advertising will cost you significantly less than if you only relied on paid coverage.

However, according to experts, the best budgets to start in various types of online advertising are:

Facebook Ads – between 90 GBP and 200 GBP per month

Instagram Ads – about 120 GBP per month

LinkedIn Ads – 290 GBP per month

Google Ads – min. 60 GBP per month

However, it is worth remembering that the rates given are only indicative! It all depends on whether our primary goal is conversion (did the customer who clicked on our sponsored post buy the advertised product?) or, for example, increase the number of page views of our business website.

Is free advertising possible? YES. You can present your company on advertising portals, add it to various business directories, be active on forums or subscribe to local groups on social media (or create your own, e.g. with practical advice). One of the free online image management tools is gowork.uk. Even if it seems to you that you do not need to run a thread because it will not translate into sales, you must monitor the entries that appear about your company to always react on an ongoing basis.

Therefore, if you are just starting your adventure with advertising on the Internet, especially in the paid version, it is good to first consult your marketing activities with a professional. All you have to do is learn how to set up your campaign correctly and run the first few tests to see which online ads will be the most effective and cheapest for you!