What is Advertising in Business?

Business owners use various advertising techniques to attempt to persuade or influence customers to buy their products or services.

Various mediums can be used to communicate a company’s advertising message. The message and tone they use must be targeted to the right audience and be persuasive for it to work.

What is the Aim of Advertising?

The main aim of using advertising is to attract new customers through raising awareness of their products or services and then convincing their target audience to buy from them.

Business advertising helps businesses in several ways:

Attempts to influence the buying behaviour of customers and clients
Communicating information so that the viewers or audience are likely to purchase the product or service
It attracts new customers
It creates product and services awareness
Used to build brand loyalty

Different business advertising approaches:

Business advertising can take several various forms from more traditional advertising, such as placing adverts or press releases in newspapers and magazines, to online advertising involving pay-per-click style promotions, email marketing, website ads and running campaigns on social media platforms. The most common forms of advertising mediums are:

Traditional media:

Cold Calling

By phone or in person. You can take the opportunity to visit residences or businesses to mention your services or drop off flyers or brochures.

Direct mail

Can be beneficial. Brochures, flyers and catalogues can be delivered directly to homes or businesses in targeted geographic areas.

Outdoor advertising

Billboards, banners and electronic displays at sports stadiums are good at raising awareness of your business.

Radio

Your local commercial radio station is an excellent place to run targeted ads for local businesses that are targeting the local community with their products or services.

TV

Television adverts can be expensive. But if you want to appeal to a broad audience that can access your product online, tv adverts can be very effective.

Newspaper & magazines advertising

Can be expensive and will reach a more general audience rather than your target audience.

2. Using Digital Marketing

Social Media

Particularly popular with advertisers because you have easy access to user demographic data enabling companies to tailor ads to their target audience.

Google

Advertisers pay to display ads, services, product information and video content to web users.

Email

Build a customer email list and send out regular email newsletters can be useful for maintaining links with existing customers and informing them about new products or services

Websites

Local or national website advertising is good for raising awareness of your brand.include keywords focused on the area, updating your business blog with fresh, engaging content regularly and more.

Defining your target audience

To save your business a lot of wasted time and money on advertising, you need to know your target market. You need to understand the target audience you want to reach with your advertising campaigns.

Once you have narrowed down your target audience, you will have a better understanding of how to reach out to them. For example, if your target audience is mature, then more traditional marketing methods such as newspapers and magazines are likely to be more effective than running a Twitter campaign because your target audience is less likely to hang out on Twitter.

It is the same if your target audience is Millennials. Millennials are less likely to read newspapers and magazines, so a Facebook or Twitter campaign is more likely to deliver you the results you are looking for.

In Conclusion

With so much choice available, it can take a lot of research time and effort to not only narrow down your target audience but to also understand where they hang out and communicate your message to reach them.

You can save your business or organisation a lot of money when you know which form of advertising will work for you.