Is Paid Advertising worth investing in for Small Businesses?
Photo credit: stock.adobe.com
Is Paid Advertising worth investing in for Small Businesses?
Yes, absolutely! Paid advertising has several key benefits for small businesses. Paid advertising is any form of advertising that you pay for, compared to owned (email/blogs and social media campaigns) or earned (social shares/reviews and customer mentions) advertising. Paid advertising is usually done through a bidding process.
Cost per click bidding lets you set a maximum spend for your ad. Users bid on keywords that operate on a pay-per-click basis.
When creating a pay-per-click advertising campaign, you provide important factors that make it simple to budget. You can set the budget for how much you want to pay per click, and you'll only be charged if someone clicks on your ad.
The most significant benefit of Google Ads is that they display before organic search results at the top of the page. This suggests you're reaching your target audience at a time when they're interested.
Paid advertising also drives traffic to your website. By targeting ads at the right audience, you can attract your target customers and convert these visits into sales. You have complete control over your targeting options with Google Ads, from relevant search phrases to your target audience's demographic and location. These features are particularly important for small fitness businesses as you can target your ad to the right audience in your local area to reach potential new clients.
Paid advertising can be controlled at a low cost for small businesses. They're very adaptable, allowing you to start, stop, pause, or even change your bids at any time.
Don't get me wrong, paid advertising has a lot of benefits, but it also has its negatives. Competitors will always be looking for the terms you're bidding on, and they'll fight for first place. Therefore, you can outbid your competition and push them down the ranks by increasing your bid on the right keywords.
Everything in life has its negatives but in this case, the benefits outweigh the negatives.
Great post, Dervla. Definitely more positives to this than negatives. I feel like I keep preaching the same thing on everyone's posts but paid ads in my opinion are great, mainly for awareness, you will rarely get a conversion from them - but as long as the awareness is there and content follows hand in hand with great SEO - then you're sorted! It can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be and the main thing is, is that it is in the companies control.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing Dervla. Online paid advertising can often get overlooked with business putting the focus on organic placement in search results. With paid advertising pushing business higher up in the search results it is definitely worth exploring. Especially as you mentioned that you can control the budget so you can really see if it works for your business and unlike traditional adverting you can change the message if you find there is no traction with keywords you have used in the ad copy. @Oxana really summed up it up when she said it can be as cheap or as expensive as you want.
ReplyDeleteInsightful blog post Dervela! I cant dispute any of the comments here! We can learn so much more from paid ads than traditional marketing advertisements such as billboards because we have the ability to analyse the analytics and see what we are doing right and maybe what can be improved going forward. As you mentioned it is great in relation to your bottom line as the cost is really up to you and what your allocated budget maybe ...... it seems to be once you put in the work paid offs will help you reap the rewards.
ReplyDeleteDervla great point about the most significant benefit of Google Ads is that effectively you're hitting the potential consumer when they're interested, I never fully appreciated this until now. There's real merit in even small businesses integrating a paid ads campaign into their marketing strategy. Also good to point out that a paid ads campaign can be cost efficient if managed correctly.
ReplyDeletePaid advertising is definitely important within the fitness industry, as you mentioned, getting potential consumers in your area seeing your ad gives you that competitive advantage, and the potential for a conversion outweighs the money paid for the ad. Happy days!