Just like many of us do when we are about to promote our businesses, We ask friends or dive into multiple online forums to ask questions concerning business advertising.
Particularly most starters will ask questions such as “What is the best way to advertise a business online? How to advertise my business? Where to advertise my business online etc.”
In many cases, people ask for free ways to advertise their businesses online. It’s all about creating awareness and getting visibility in order to grow your business online faster and better.
It is a known fact that online paid advertising helps brands grow faster online, become more popular and profitable, expand into several markets and compete with other rivals to control a larger share of the market.
The essence of this blog post is to help small businesses with all they need to grow their businesses through online advertising practices.
Defining online business advertising
In my opinion, this is a set of practices in businesses that put ads on one or several niches related to blogs or websites to gain some visibility.
It also involves buying display ads from ad networks or programmatic advertising platforms to get traffic with the hope of getting new or more customers.
online advertisers use several platforms for their paid advertising purposes. The primary aim is to acquire more traffic and dominate their niche markets.
Advertising methods such as display advertising contribute to more traffic and even organic traffic when those ads are placed on a good and popular platform.
We have discussed some of the effective ways businesses can use to grow their businesses.
Paid Business Advertising platforms
These are ad networks where businesses need to pay money for advertising their businesses. These Ads are sub-divided into categories such as PPC Ads and CPM Ads.
To elaborate more on PPC and CPM,…
PPC simply means Pay per click. This pricing model allows ad networks to charge advertisers for each click they get from the publisher’s traffic.
On the other hand, CPM is the Cost per 1000 impressions or Cost per 1000 views.
The CPM Ad rates are fixed for example the advertiser may be charged a fixed $5 for 1000 impressions or 1000 views in the case of a video.
Let’s look at the most used, most popular and most effective paid advertising platforms.
Google Ads
Google ads also known as Google Adwords is simply the biggest paid advertising platform online. It’s so big that millions of individuals and businesses use the platforms as a source of quality traffic.
I won’t be able to say exactly how many customers Google Ads has but it is estimated that about 50% of all global businesses both online and offline use Google Ads for paid advertising.
Also, 80% to 90% of all online businesses globally use Google ads to advertise their business across all sectors and industries.
The good thing is that Google owns Youtube also which is the second largest search engine and Admob which also controls the largest share of mobile Ads.
Here are some interesting statistics about YouTube you should know
It has 2 billion active monthly users, over 30 million active daily users, and over 300,000 YouTube TV paying subscribers, More than 5 billion YouTube videos have been shared on various platforms to date.
Over 50 million content creators on YouTube, Average viewing session on YouTube is about 40 minutes. 5 billion videos watched daily, 500 million mobile views per day, 300 hours worth of videos uploaded every minute
It will be fair to say Google Ads should be one of your first choices for paid advertising.
Yahoo/Bing Ads
Yahoo and Bing collaborated to form one big advertising network. Mostly I guess for competitive reasons making them one of the biggest paid ad networks for online advertisers.
It is also one of the most effective paid advertising platforms due to its large size of audience and targeting options.
This year made Yahoo/Bing Ads add great features giving advertisers more targeting options to reach a more precise audience.
They distribute Ads through the Yahoo email system, Yahoo and Bing search engines, Media.net and through other various outlets to reach a wider audience.
These are a few but very effective paid advertising platforms, Let’s look at some social media platforms used for online advertising.
Paid adverting on Social Media
Social media platforms these days have a consistent loyal audience making most of them one of the best paid and free online advertising ad networks for advertisers.
Advertising on social media sites could be one of the best opportunities to grow your small business into a big business.
Let’s discuss some of them.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is no doubt the largest social media platform on earth. It is also one of the most used social media platforms for online advertising.
Facebook has over 2.23 billion active monthly users, 1.8 billion monthly mobile users, 1.45 billion active desktop daily users, 1.57 billion active daily mobile users, and Over 250 million Facebook stories daily viewers.
Facebook Advertising Statistics
- Facebook has more than 5 million advertisers as of 2017.
- 93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly.
- Images account for 75-90% of Facebook advertising effectivity/performance.
- 20% of Facebook’s mobile ad revenue comes from Instagram.
- The Average CPC for Facebook Ads Is $1.72, the Average CTR is 0.9%, and Average CPM is $7.92.
- Facebook’s share in the global digital advertising market is 19.7%.
What makes Facebook one greatest platforms for business advertising is the number of people that use the platform all over the world with over two billion users.
Facebook also has an advanced advertising system with one of the best targeting options. Facebook also has an audience insight platform that allows advertisers to design their target audience, save them and use them for precise targeting.
Instagram Ads
First, let’s look at some statistics about Instagram, It has over 1 billion monthly active users, 500 million+ active daily users, 500 million+ Instagram stories active daily users, Over 50 billion photos, 25 million active businesses on Instagram, Over 4.2 billion Instagram likes per day, over 100 million photos and videos shared every day.
Instagram Ads has become very popular and also manage to attract over two million online advertisers. This made Instagram one of the biggest social media platforms for paid advertising.
Instagram for Business
- An estimated 71% of US businesses are on Instagram in 2018.
- Instagram Now Has More Than 2 Million Monthly Advertisers and 25 Million Business Profiles.
- 200 million+ Instagrammers visit at least one business profile daily.
- There are more than 500,000 Influencers on Instagram.
- Instagram’s Mobile Ad revenue is expected to hit $7 billion in 2018.
- 1/3 of the most viewed stories are from businesses.
- 78% of Influencers Prefer Instagram for Brand Collaboration.
- User-Generated Content Has a 4.5% Higher Conversion Rate.
- 55.4% of Influencers use Instagram Stories for Sponsored campaigns.
- The potential reach of advertising on Instagram is 802 million.
- Instagram’s projected revenue in 2019 is $14 billion.
Since Instagram was acquired by Facebook, They scared up the system to become more attractive for advertisers while making it also one of the most used social media platforms today.
On average, people spend more time on Instagram than any other social media site today making it a very good paid ad network for businesses.
Twitter Ads
Here are some demographics about Twitter, Over 330 million active users, 500 million tweets daily, 80% use Twitter on their mobile devices, and 100 million active users daily.
The above figures present a great opportunity for small businesses to grow their businesses through paid advertising.
Twitter to some people is one of the most effective advertising platforms for businesses. With a large audience and a high level of engagement from its audience.
Twitter allows small businesses to promote their tweets and trends on smaller budgets to allow small businesses to grow and scale up their sizes.
LinkedIn Ads
This is another great platform for paid advertising. As a small business, using your budget to target a specific audience is the key.
LinkedIn reported over 630 million active users and about 304 million active monthly users, It has over 30 million companies and about 20 million job listings openings, and 100 million job applications on LinkedIn every month.
One of the most important figures of LinkedIn is most digital marketers believe is a great platform to generate leads with 79% of B2B marketers believe is an effective source of generating leads.
LinkedIn paid advertising work best when you are targeting specific professionals. If you are in the B2B business, you might consider giving it a try.
It is a very effective ad platform to target a specific audience and increase your outreach.
Pinterest Ads
Pinterest is a super good platform for quality traffic. Many small businesses use Pinterest to promote their products and services.
Here are some Pinterest statistics.
It has over 250 million monthly active users and about 125 monthly users are from the US. Over 175 billion pins, over 3 billion Pinterest boards, about 81% of users are female, about 93% of active pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest.
Pinterest offers advertisers the opportunity to promote their Pins which allows users to promote their Pins. Pinterest Ad models are Traffic, Engagement and awareness. Small businesses drive a lot of sales through Pinterest paid ads.
All you need to do is to create a great Pinterest post and promote them to get quality traffic.
Snapchat
Another video and photo App that is used by millions all over the world. Their statistics present a great opportunity for online advertisers.
Here are some of the interesting statistics about Snapchat…
They have over 310 million active monthly users, about 190 million active daily users, 25% of the US population on Snapchat users on other social media platforms also, 3 billion Snaps (Videos and photos) are created daily, average time on Snapchat is 30 minutes, the average age of users range from 18 to 24 and about 73% in the US. 107 million monthly active users are from Canada and US users and 14 billion Snapchat daily video views.
Best Forums for paid business advertising
Online advertising platforms are not only limited to search engines and popular social media platforms. Other platforms such as forums are great ways to grow your business.
Forums often have a lot of people from all backgrounds spending countless hours on these platforms even more than on search engines and social media websites.
I will discuss some of the most important ones below.
Quora Ads
To me, Quora is one of the best forums online today. The platforms have hundreds of thousands of experts and people looking for solutions.
Quora actually has over 100 million active users monthly from all backgrounds. This presents a great opportunity for online businesses to target their audience.
Quora runs all major Ad types such as Image ads both on desktop and mobile ads with various sizes and contextual Ads.
They allow advertisers to use their list matching targeting by uploading an email list of people they want to target.
They also optimize their pixel to support multi-level conversion tracking and behavioural ad targeting options to allow businesses to get the traffic they need to grow their businesses.
Reddit Ads
Reddit is one of the greatest forums used by many businesses to get targeted traffic. With over 330 active users sharing links, images and text posts in and contributing to several subreddits.
It’s a wonderful platform for paid and free advertising.
Small businesses that are active on forums often use these platforms for free advertising. On Reddit, they do this by sharing their links, latest blog posts, images and text posts.
As a small business, participating in Reddit subreddits leads to followers and many upvotes which help make your post more popular.
Small businesses are encouraged to make use of these platforms to help them grow organically.
DigitalPoint
Digitalpoint is also a good forum with a massive amount of digital markers. They share their knowledge on various topics mostly related to digital marketing.
DigitalPoint also allows for paid advertising using CPM and email advertising models. Banner ads are based on a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) model.
If your services are related to digital marketing, This is another platform you can consider.
BlackhatSEO
One of the oldest forums online but is mostly used by digital marketers too. They also sell their Ad spaces to advertisers willing to buy them.
They run banners and text ads on their platform while allowing participants to share their stories, ask questions and get answers.
Conclusions
Paid advertising work for many businesses and has been proven to be one of the fastest ways to grow businesses online.
Many companies that are considered big today all became big by using their online advertising budgets judicially.
Some of the examples of such companies are Amazon which is the biggest company today and the first company to hit a trillion-dollar worth.
Others include eBay, Microsoft, Alibaba, Yahoo, Google, Wix, Tumblr, and so many other online businesses all benefited massively from paid advertising.
If you are new to online advertising, you would want to make sure your advertising dollars work for you. This will work only if you put your money in the right places.
If you already have tried out paid advertising as a small business, Please share your experiences in the comment session.
