Bizsuccess

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

By: Susan Gunelius

The secret to online advertising success can be summed up in one word — focus.

What do I mean by that?  It’s simple.  Highly targeted ads served to highly targeted audiences are more likely to convert than broad ads served to broad audiences.

That doesn’t mean that wide-scale brand-building advertising to broad audiences isn’t effective, but for a small business owner with a limited advertising budget, focus is key.

Even large companies are realizing how powerful online advertising focus is.  In an article from the New York Times, companies like Mercedes are cited as saying they plan to fore-go expensive ad placements on sites such as national newspaper sites where advertising rates are high and audiences are broad.  While they might use these sites for brand-building and awareness advertising, when it comes time to drive conversions, they’re turning to smaller, highly targeted audiences.

The second piece to the puzzle, whether you’re advertising to a broad or targeted audience, is quality.  Invest your money into a quality ad, find less expensive, highly focused places to publish your ad, and you’re likely to achieve better results.

The downside to the trend in both small and large companies buying more ad space on smaller, niche sites is twofold.  First, it means the competition for that space goes up.  That means ad prices on those sites go up.   Second, online advertising is the only form of advertising that is expected to increase in the coming year.  With more companies investing more dollars in the digital advertising space, not only do small business owners have to compete with the trend in shifting dollars from large to small sites, but also from the overall growth in digital advertising.  Again, this only adds to the amount of competition for ad space on desirable small sites and drives ad costs up.

Not to worry.  There are plenty of smaller, focused sites online to choose from, and new opportunities arise all the time.  If you take the time to do your online research or partner with a digital advertising agency who can perform that research for you, then you’ll be able to achieve an acceptable return on your advertising investment.

Companies such as DoubleClick from Google, Tribal Fusion, and ValueClickMedia are just a few popular display advertising networks that you can join in an attempt to achieve some economies of scale in your ad placements.  Don’t be afraid to think out-of-the-box when it comes to online advertising.  After all, that’s what everyone loves about the Internet — the innovative ways people find to use it to suit their purposes.  Be creative!