In 2007, the New York Times shocked readers by revealing that we see over 5,000 advertising messages per day. It’s a staggering number, and a revealing admission that of all the advertisements we see each day, very few are memorable.
Local businesses can report much the same: of their billboards and display ads, only a few of the thousands of people that walk past them every day can remember what they were advertising and why they offered value.
Offline advertising, it seems, just isn’t as effective as it once was. With customers in major cities paying less and less attention to billboards and flyers, businesses are taking their ad budget to a more measurable medium: the Internet.
Read on to learn about the five biggest advantages that online advertising mediums such as Google Adwords offer that traditional local advertising methods simply can’t match.
Read more: internet marketing in Orange County
Adwords is measurable
Measuring the customers you get from a billboard is tough. While some customers might mention where they heard about your business, the vast majority fail to tell you where they heard about you – or in some cases, where you found them.
Adwords, on the other hand, makes it incredibly simple to track visitors from search keyword to advertisement, from advertisement to landing page, and from landing page to checkout. Every step of the process, and it’s all in one simple platform.
Adwords is scalable
Scaling your Adwords budget from $20 per day to $200 per day is simple. Scaling your billboard campaign, however, requires a series of phone calls, several weeks, and a considerable budget for artists and raw materials.
One of the biggest advantages of online advertising is its scalability. Whether you’re aiming to rapidly expand your local customer base or sell lots of inventory in a huge discount sale, online advertising makes it easy to expand your audience in a hurry.
Adwords is affordable
Online advertising is very lucrative for businesses with the skills to optimize their campaigns properly. With the right conversion optimization, you can source new customers online for a fraction of the cost of acquiring customers via billboards.
While online PPC is undoubtedly an expensive venture early on, once you’ve found profitable keywords and effective ad copy, you can source new customers at prices that make radio, offline display, and newspaper ads seem very overpriced.
Adwords is easy to use
From setting your budget to testing different advertising images, using Adwords is far from difficult. While offline advertising is also easy to set up, you’ll often spend most of your time waiting for other people to take action on your campaign.
Adwords gives you a hands-on, user-friendly interface for managing your search and display campaigns. If you aren’t interested in managing them yourself, it’s an easy process to set up Adwords campaign management with a marketing agency.
Adwords is flexible
Want to capitalize on a hot new trend? While billboards and other offline display ads would take weeks – if not months – to set up, a timely new Adwords campaign is up and running in minutes.
Adaptability is key, particularly in today’s economic climate. Search marketing gives you the ability to rapidly adapt to new challenges and capitalize on opportunities – a process that’s far slower and less effective in the offline advertising world.
