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7 Best Online Advertising Channels for Small Businesses

ONLINE ADVERTISING CHANNELS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES - SOCIALLYBUZZ
  • Andre Kay
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Best Online Advertising Channels for Small Businesses

Considering how much time people spend online, it makes sense for small businesses to reach new customers and grow their business through online advertising channels.

Online advertising for small businesses involves using online channels to advertise their products and services to prospective buyers. 

In the past years, advertising was mainly via channels like television, billboards, magazines, etc. Today, the majority of advertising has gone digital. Because the internet is vast and can be used for different purposes, many online advertising channels have evolved with time. 

In this article, you’ll discover the best online advertising channels for small businesses. 

You can explore these channels and choose the best ones to reach your target audience. 

About Sociallybuzz:

Sociallybuzz is a leading social media marketing, management, and digital advertising agency for small and medium-sized businesses. With over 12 years of experience, we know how to create and execute marketing campaigns that will help you grow your business. Our social media agency specializes in using the power of social media to create highly targeted campaigns designed to get you more customers and sales.

>>>> Check out some of our case studies <<<<

Social Media as a Marketing Channel 

social media platforms

With more than 4.7 billion users globally, social media marketing is often regarded as one of the most prominent and influential marketing channels.

The ability of social media to precisely reach your audience makes it a powerful advertising tool. An essential aspect of social media is that it allows you to engage your target audience through text, pictures, or videos. Some social media channels can send your prospects geo-targeted ads based on where they are at any given moment.

Social media is excellent for customer service since it enables real-time chat response. It improves customer engagement and accessibility to your business.

Social media platforms can also be used to address concerns, request feedback, and provide customer support. 67% of the time, customers use social media for customer support, and 33% prefer it to a phone call. 

Start by creating social media accounts for your small business. It is essential to choose the best social media channels for your target audience where they are most active and concentrate on expanding those channels.

Social media channels you can choose from include:

Recommended: 100+ Social media stats and trends for small businesses you should know

Facebook 

Approximately two billion individuals use Facebook each month. You can reach a larger audience and the particular customers you want to reach by paying for placement on the platform. 

Although Facebook is a social media channel for staying in touch with family and friends, many users follow and engage with brands on the site.

It can be challenging to gain organic traffic on Facebook because of the constantly evolving algorithms.

Online adverts or sponsored advertising can be helpful in this situation. 

Facebook offers a staggering amount of market segmentation and targeting flexibility. Facebook targets users based on gender, age, geography, demographics, hobbies, and online behavior. Additionally, a company can save an audience group and retarget it for a different ad at a later time. 

Recommended: Best Ad Audience For Facebook Ads

Instagram 

Instagram is a highly visually appealing channel owned by Facebook. It allows advertisers access to a large audience. Instagram has 500 million daily active users worldwide and is the fourth most popular social network by user count, with 1.386 billion possible ad reach.

Although this has a much smaller user base than Facebook, it has a sizable portion of people in a target demographic.

The highly sought-after Millennial and Gen Z age groups make up 90% of this app’s users. 

Sharing high-quality product photographs can be a fantastic and eye-catching way to use content marketing to generate engagement.

You can run complete and professional advertising campaigns directly from your phone since most smartphones are now equipped with top-notch cameras and editing tools.

The channel also lets you put your business’s address and phone number to every post, making it more straightforward for potential customers to contact you.

Recommended: How to get clients on Instagram

Twitter 

Twitter, a social media platform launched in 2006, is an important advertising channel for small businesses, big brands, and influencers. 

Advertising on Twitter allows you to reach many potential customers who you might not have otherwise reached. Two-thirds of Twitter users say they found a small or medium-sized business this way. 

Twitter ads come in the form of promoted tweets or promoted accounts. The Promoted Tweet is the easiest. The only significant difference between the promoted tweet and your brand’s typical tweets is that they can be seen even by those who do not yet follow your brand. 

They can be liked, retweeted, and replied to like regular tweets. This presents a fantastic opportunity to strike up a conversation with potential customers. 

The promoted account attracts new customers to your business by displaying your full account to potential customers. Stick to popular and uncontroversial themes to generate positive buzz without creating negative trends. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional networking website with business-related information and job openings founded in 2003. It has more than 875 million active users in more than 200 countries worldwide.

LinkedIn is the most secure and reliable platform for businesses. It offers incredible opportunities for advertisers looking to promote B2B (Business to Business). 

You can advertise your product or service on LinkedIn using InMail — an advertising message sent directly to a user’s inbox.

You can choose four kinds of LinkedIn ads: Text ads, dynamic ads, sponsored messaging, and sponsored content.

Each type has unique advantages that can be useful to your business. 

TikTok

The social media channel, which has over 1 billion users, was launched in 2016. TikTok has one of the highest engagement rates of all social media channels. This makes it an effective social media channel for video marketing. You can create and share videos up to three minutes long. 

The secret to successful TikTok advertising is to have fun while producing engaging content for your audience.

You have various campaign options to pick from, including reach, traffic, app installs, video views, catalog sales, lead generation, and conversions. Make sure to pick the ideal one for your business.

Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing  

  • Set precise objectives. What exactly do you aim to achieve with your social media channels? Are you attempting to grow your following? Become a thought leader? Or increase sales? Setting clear goals will go a long way in ensuring your social media campaign is effective. 
  • Leverage your unique selling point. Define your value proposition. Make sure to highlight how your business stands out from the competition.
  • Make sure your brand image is the same across all social media channels. If your brand appears in multiple ways on different social media channels, your target audience won’t be able to identify it.

Recommended: 15 best social media tips for small businesses

Website as a Marketing Channel

Being active on various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram does not eliminate the advantages of having a dedicated business website. 

Most consumers turn to online searches whenever they want to learn more about a business or its products. 68% of online shoppers and 89% of B2B buyers learn more about new products and services using search engines. These searches affect how they view your business and whether they choose to buy your products and services.

The goal of every online marketing campaign, whether email marketing or social media marketing, is to get potential customers to visit your website to close a deal. Regardless of how they arrived at your website, it should be easy to navigate, attractive, and pleasant. A visitor will only stay on a website if he can discover what he needs right away or if it’s not difficult to use or purchase anything.

A poorly designed website can throw your customers and potential customers off balance. 

A professionally made website helps spread your message and raise brand awareness. Furthermore, it can increase brand equity, loyalty, and trust.

Think about using content marketing on your websites.

One of the fastest ways to get more customers to your business website is by regularly publishing relevant and original content. The website content you create can be in various formats, such as blog posts, eBooks, Interviews, Infographics, etc. 

You can start with blogging; it is a simple way of reaching out to your customers. Content as part of your website advertising strategy allows you to educate and assist your prospective customers till they’re ready to buy from you and not always advertising to them and overwhelming them. It enables you to share details about your business and generate comments and thoughts. You can utilize this data to learn more about your consumers’ needs.

When you use content marketing correctly, it will increase the likelihood that customers will make a purchase.

Tips for Website 

  • Make sure the domain of your website matches the name of your business. Your intended audience will become confused if it doesn’t.
  • Choose a low-cost web hosting provider. There are a lot of excellent choices.
  • Ensure that your website’s general layout contributes to increasing sales and boosting revenue.
  • Use content marketing to drive traffic to your website. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a Marketing Channel

SEO is improving your website’s and your content’s search engine ranking. It generates organic traffic — visitors who find your website through organic search results. 

SEO is also known as organic SEO, implying you don’t need to spend on it. You generate free traffic once your website ranks high on search engines because people are more inclined to click through to your website if you appear higher in the search results. 

The optimization is carried out on a website by strategically positioning keywords and keyword combinations. These are keywords associated with your business that buyers are already looking for.

The best practices for SEO include adding related keywords to your URL name, title tags, headers, content body, and image captions. This, along with other strategies like regular publishing and offering external links, is intended to raise the credibility of your website, which will then influence its ranking in search.

Ranking for just any keyword is not important. The objective should be to rank for the appropriate keywords. 

SEO Tips

  • Optimize your content. One of the most important components of SEO is keywords. Learn how to find the most relevant keywords for your website and how to tailor your site to them.
  • Create new and engaging content. Your content must be of high quality and relevant to your audience. Additionally, you should routinely publish new content and update previous content to ensure that it continues to benefit your visitors.
  • Make your website and content mobile-friendly. Google prioritizes indexing the mobile version of your website first, where an increasing number of consumers are spending their time. 

Email as a Marketing Channel 

Email marketing is the most direct, affordable, and efficient way to engage with potential consumers, nurture them and turn them into paying customers. 

It helps to establish and maintain customer connections by routinely delivering helpful information to them.

Email marketing targets explicitly those already interested in your business — potential customers who signed up for your website’s email newsletter by entering their email addresses. 

Email marketing seeks to increase brand recognition and boost conversions by reminding subscribers of the benefits of your business’s products and services. Email is an extension of your business’s website. Make sure that your email campaigns represent your brand image. 

Keep your emails simple, appealing, and to the point. Also, remember to add call-to-action buttons. Additionally, whenever you have new thoughts or information, convert it into a blog post and include the link in one of your email campaigns. 

One valuable aspect of email marketing is that you have total control over your content. 

Tips for Email Marketing

  • Since businesses should be as transparent as possible with their customers, integrity and openness are essential components of email marketing.
  • Customers want to receive more personalized emails. Generic emails are no more appealing. Decide to send your subscribers more individualized emails.
  • Make your call to action clear. What precisely do you want email recipients to do? You’d want them to visit your website to make a purchase. Facilitate their task. A concise description, such as “Click here to learn more” or “Click here to buy,” should be included with the call to action (CTA) button. A CTA button should also be at the top and bottom of your email. 
  • Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly. Today, mobile devices are used more frequently than desktop or laptop computers for email reading. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly so text and photos can be viewed and read.
  • Avoid bombarding customers with emails. Sending out frequent emails to subscribers is a proven method to turn off potential customers. Decide which messages are important ahead of time, and space them out when you send them. Make a content calendar to keep track.
  • Create engaging content. You only have a little window of opportunity to grab and hold a customer’s attention, and it all begins with the topic header. The header must be compelling to entice the receiver to open the email. The email’s content must then live up to the promise made in the header, be expertly formatted, and have links that the receiver will want to click. 

Search Engine Marketing as a Marketing Channel

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of obtaining traffic from search engines by running sponsored ads. SEM is often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) or paid search. 

It involves paying to appear toward the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when a user types a keyword phrase into Google or another search engine. SEO does not impact search engine marketing which appears as an advertisement with a link to your website. 

You will be charged each time a user clicks on your search ad and goes to your website or landing page. If you want to start with SEM, you start with Google ads. Google Ads enables you to display ads on YouTube and in search results. 

Tips for Search Engine Marketing 

  • To start your campaign, go to Google Ads or a similar search engine and follow the instructions. Most search engines have representatives available to attend to any inquiries you may have.
  • Make a list of your negative keywords and update it. You will inevitably receive clicks for keywords that have little to do with your business. Add these to your list of negative keywords to prevent future spending on those clicks.
  • Make PPC-specific landing pages to which your PPC ads can link. This enables you to market more directly to the kind of user who might click on your PPC ad.

In Conclusion 

You can use various channels as a small business owner to advertise your business.

Each digital marketing channel complements the others, and running campaigns through them can be engaging, cost-effective, and rewarding.

You’ll better understand your audience as you experiment with paid channels like social media and search, which will improve your content and overall marketing success.

Examine each channel you currently use, and then add or remove based on your findings. You only want to keep the channels that give you the best ROI.

About Sociallybuzz:

Sociallybuzz is a leading social media marketing, management, and digital advertising agency for small and medium-sized businesses. With over 12 years of experience, we know how to create and execute marketing campaigns that will help you grow your business. Our social media agency specializes in using the power of social media to create highly targeted campaigns designed to get you more customers and sales.

>>>> Check out some of our case studies <<<<