Bring me 1 million likes for me or do $1 million in sales for me and I give you $100 to spend on advertising. If you’re not able to do that, you’re a loser. Ever heard such rubbish from clients? If you work in online advertising, it’s what you hear every other day.
What many Pakistanis fail to realize that online advertising works just like offline advertising. Just like when you show a billboard ad to someone, it does not guarantee a favorable response from your intended target audience, just like that an online ad does not guarantee a like. Similarly, when you show a television commercial to someone, the viewer may or not go and buy the product,
Most Pakistanis think that when you are advertising your Facebook page, you’re buying fake likes and hence you are not being ethical. That’s not the case at all. You are just increasing the reach of your Facebook page so that more people can see. They may or may not like your page. That is totally up to them. You are not putting them at a gunpoint to like the page.
Online advertising, put simply, is the use of the Internet to reach out to your desired audience. It is done via various mediums that can include social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest or search engines like Google and Bing. Currently, Facebook and Google occupy the greatest portion of the online advertising chunk. These mediums, although better than traditional mediums of TV and radio, are still mediums at the end of the day. And they require a creative message and a dedicated strategy in order to appease the customer.
However, the main difference between online advertising and traditional advertising is the use of data. While traditional advertising is largely based on intuition, online advertising is more calculated and its performance can be measured and controlled. The latter also allows you to track your customers and sales i.e. know exactly when and where are your sales coming from, who your customers are and what are their interests and demographics etc, which websites your customers are visiting, and which of your ads are working and which are not.
It does not mean however that online advertising is purely scientific and doesn’t allow for experimentation. As with any advertising, you always need to try bringing something new to the table and spend a few money on it to see how it fares with the audience. And in the case of online advertising, the data resulted from these experiments will be too concrete as to not allow for any doubts.
Most importantly, online advertising is not magic. If your product is crap, no matter how creatively you try to advertise it, it will not sell. If the customers come to a website after clicking on its ad and see that the product they intend to buy is out of stock, you will lose their loyalty. If they see your ad again, they will probably block you. Enough said.
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