Why is online advertising used?

Answer 1

As the owner of a new local business, I have found that online advertising is the single most effective way to attract new customers. We carefully track referral sources, and have found that 40-50% of new customers heard about our business online.

I view online advertising as composed of four main components: a high quality website, organic search, paid advertising, and social networking (there is some overlap, e.g. social networks such as Facebook have paid advertising programs as well).

For small or start-up businesses on a tight budget, organic search (i.e. being found through queries on the major search engines) is the least expensive method of online advertising - it is essentially free!. The key to being found by the search engines is creating high quality content on your website. If you are technically oriented, you can also dive into the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to try to increase our exposure on the web.

I have also found that for a local business, highly targeted paid online advertising (on social networks or via local high traffic information sites) can be a very cost effective way to make customers aware of your business.