It’s possible, despite your best efforts and investments in advertising trials, that you have been unable to prove the effectiveness of traditional advertising for your business. Advertising is a technique that should be abandoned in favor of other investments if not directly proven profitable; whereas, marketing is a broader process that includes how you and your product are presented, so it cannot be removed from your long-term business plan. You should have a sound advertising strategy, which might include not advertising at all.
Since the advent of Google’s AdWords/AdSense platform and Yahoo’s Overture platform, both leveraging the very profitable market they have created for dynamic contextual advertising links, along with older school applications like Advertising.com (now part of AOL) and DoubleClick (now part of Google), traditional advertising has taken new, innovative forms. Now, businesses, even with small budgets, can more effectively reach their target markets and contend against larger competitors through Internet advertising, which is currently best done with text link advertising via online bidding processes.
Google has been the primary force in the democratization of advertising. Suddenly taking brands global isn’t just for big corporations with large-scale marketing budgets and strategies. Also, keep your eye on a company called SpotRunner (.com) and its competitors, which melds the better aspects of the Google targeting and bidding platforms with more traditional, local television and Internet advertising. Don’t be surprised if Google or its wannabe competitors pay enormous dollars one day to control SpotRunner, its competitors, and its future market.
With democratized advertising campaigns, your ads can be created, participated in, and more controlled by the public through user-generated ads and results-orientated advertising, which allows you to precisely test and measure your marketing strategies. Aspiring ad networks beyond Google and Yahoo include Blue Lithium, Revenue Science, Valueclick, Bidclicks, Adbrite, Right Media, Tacoda, and Bidvertiser. With friends like these, traditional advertising might no longer be the best way to reach your marketing objectives. Most likely, each year you will be able to justify spending a greater portion of your marketing dollars on nontraditional Internet-centric media at the expense of traditional broadcast and print channels.
For instance, with your own small advertising budget, you can effectively expose your company via the Internet using Google AdWords (adwords.google.com). You only pay when your ad is clicked on (Pay per Click/PPC), and you have granular control of your campaign to adjust details like budgets, keywords, and dates whenever you choose. You can make as many changes to the advertisements as you want until you get the desired results, without breaking your budget.
Google and Yahoo sell text link ads in a bidding process, even for tiny sellers and buyers of ad space, and have exact statistical conversion data with a multitude of ways to adjust and precisely measure your customer conversions.
