Making the most of online advertising
Online advertising offers greater ease, more control and huge opportunities for SMEs. So, want to make the most of your online advertising? Read on for Google’s online advertising tips.
It’s no coincidence that when the modern plane was first commercialised, some of the world’s most ambitious pilots emerged from Australia: Charles Kingsford Smith, Patricia Graham, Bert Hinkler. Australians have never been strangers to distance, nor what it means to overcome the challenges of the small and vast spaces between.
These pilots are all examples of Australian pioneers who helped everyone to understand and believe in greater possibilities for speed and connection with one another.
Today, Australian businesses are taking a similar pioneering step, as they take wing to the internet to connect with customers more quickly, broadly and efficiently than ever before.
The internet is helping to close gaps between businesses and consumers that before seemed insurmountable. In this new era of online business anyone, from a small mum-and-dad store in Melbourne, to a growing enterprise in Adelaide, to a large company that spans from Sydney to Perth, can connect with customers and increase sales of goods and services by shifting their advertising online.
Online Business Opportunities
Online advertising represents an unprecedented opportunity for Australian small and medium businesses to reach potential customers. Whether through massive TV advertising campaigns, or through expensive advertising blitzes on highways or in newspapers, consumers nowadays less likely to be engaged when being told what to buy. Instead, more and more people everyday are turning online to proactively search for and research the items they need and want.
This active marketplace is a ripe and profitable arena for Australian enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Whereas before the voices of small business were prone to be drowned out by the bigger advertising budgets of larger national and multinational competitors, advertising online allows small businesses to maintain effective, targeted ad campaigns with virtually no start-up costs. In particular, small and medium businesses benefit from the opportunity to directly connect with people who are actively engaged in looking for particular products in particular places.
The internet has truly leveled the playing field, not only by cutting the costs of logistics, distribution and service, but also by opening up national and international markets to local Australian players. Worldwide, there are now over a billion people who access the internet. Recent research by Monash’s Australian Centre for Retail Studies revealed that 50 percent of Australian shoppers research their purchases online before going to the “bricks and mortar” store to buy. According to Nielsen NetRatings, there are 11.4 million people online in Australia alone, all connecting, creating, sharing and communicating. Nielsen NetRatings also reports that people in Australia are now spending an average of 13.7 hours of their leisure time per week online. That means more time shopping, more time exploring, more time buying products—all at the click of a mouse.
By being ‘found’ online, small businesses can quickly win new customers outside of their traditional markets. Think about how quickly eBay emerged and rewrote the rules for auction houses, or how companies like Wotif revolutionised the ‘established’ travel business.
New Online Business Types
The best part about the revolution? It’s open to anyone, both businesses that are conducted entirely online, as well as traditional offline businesses that are looking to advertise more effectively and expand their customer base. The internet enables businesses and practices that were once unviable to prosper, as shop owners are no longer limited by the sizes of a store window. In some cases, a store isn’t needed at all. Instead, there are limitless opportunities to share products virtually within a browser window, as items that would have been too large or too niche to keep in a shop now can be displayed and sold online.
Take Our Wishing Well for example. It’s an online gift registry service, started in 2005, that allows people to create gift wish-lists online for events, from weddings to birthdays. The site made it easy and fun for people to share their wishes with guests and friends. After struggling to publicise the site through traditional forms of marketing, Our Wishing Well turned to online advertising, and overnight saw traffic to its site increase by several hundred percent. Today, online advertising continues to be a critical factor for the success of its business. And it’s all done online.
Businesses that make up the ‘long tail’: the two-thirds of the internet that account for the latter 50 percent of traffic and which cater to a niche audience, are thriving online thanks to search marketing and online advertising, because they are connecting consumers with specific products they are deeply interested in, and which they otherwise might have trouble finding.