From the course: Small Business Marketing

Deciding to use paid ads

From the course: Small Business Marketing

Deciding to use paid ads

- It's increasingly difficult for businesses to be heard with free or organic placements. There will come a point where paying for advertising is the best way to grow your business and there are two important considerations that should factor into your decision to start spending money on advertising. The first one is reach. Ask yourself, how many people am I reaching with my marketing activity and how fast is my reach growing? When you pay for advertising, you can expand your reach to people beyond your fans and customers, and you can guarantee that a certain number of people will actually see your ad. And that number will be correlated to how much you're willing to invest. The second consideration when deciding whether you should start money on advertising is targeting. You should ask yourself, am I reaching the right people at the right time with my organic activities? When you pay for advertising, you'll have the option to target your ads to your target audience or the people who you think are most likely to buy your product or service. You can target people in specific geographical regions, people with certain demographics, interests, and even people who have shown a certain behavior. You'll also get more control over when and even where people see your message. Since a lot of social media content is consumed on mobile, it's possible to pay for ads that show when people are in a particular location, like near your store for instance. Online advertising is powerful because of its targeting capabilities. So if you find that you're not quite reaching your exact intended audience with your organic efforts, it may be a good idea to start thinking about spending some money on advertising. If you're ready for the next step in terms of reach and you would like to fine tune your targeting, it's worth considering paying for ads. Of course, you'll want to make sure that you're also ready to convert people to the action that you want them to take once they've seen your message.

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