Is Paid Advertising Advantageous for a Small Business?

By definition, advertising is anything that gets a product or business name into the mind of potential customers or clients. It may take many forms, from carefully planned campaigns, to media exposure, or printed materials distributed by hand to random people, etc.

For small businesses, it is quite common to go for paid advertising rather than push efforts on search engine optimization. This is primarily due to the determined time and speed of implementation, and control over the content of the advertisement. Compared to SEO, which takes a longer time to see results, paid advertising is preferred by small business owners for some notable and significant advantages over other advertising forms. Some of the advantages include:

• Qualified Traffic. There are studies that showed that about 60% of searchers are likely to click on organic search results than pay per click advertising, leaving 40% to be those who are likely to click on paid advertising. Definitely lower than organic advertising, but it’s still 40% which is a significant chunk of your target market.  
• Speed. This is important for small businesses. With paid search advertising, business gets to run fast. It will not take long to be able to see measurable results. And these results can be used as guideline for the necessary changes on the next marketing strategy or campaign. If your business runs on seasonal promotions, it will be more cost-effective to employ PPC (pay per click) advertising than organic SEO.
• Low Upfront Cost. Paid online advertising may be the most inexpensive advertising option there is. The low startup costs are a great boost for small businesses with limited resources. And depending on your business’ long-term goals, PPC may be started small and gradually increase according to the demands of the business. One needs to work with an expert on search marketing in order to avoid any costly mistake or error.  
• Highly Targeted Promotions. While SEO focuses efforts on capturing all sorts of searchers, paid search targets customers who are looking for your product or service. The searchers who still click on the ad knowing that it is paid are likely to be real customers looking for your product or service.  
• Having control on keywords. Paid search programs allow businesses to target unlimited number of keywords. This means massive opportunity into hitting the words customers use in their search.
• Flexibility. Paid advertising allows you to see results immediately. The power of paid search is on the speed of implementation and its flexibility. You can test too many variables to determine which are the effective and useful among the keywords, for instance. This is not possible in organic search.  
• Greater control of marketing message. Small businesses can have control on what the advertisements say and how they look on the page. The downside is having limited  number of words you can use but this is compensated fully by the control you have on the content of your ad. Pay per click advertising, for example can allow you to create a landing page for every promotion with the sole purpose of greeting the visitors and push them gently to the right direction.

For most small businesses trying to acquire new clients or customers, or gather leads for conversion, or making a sale on the page, paid search is definitely the way to go. Paid advertising is most certainly advantageous for a small business like yours. To cut on costs and get optimal results, you can outsource online marketing and be on top of your game.