There are also a number of places that you can buy advertising on the internet, including:
· Pay per click (PPC) ads
· Banner ads
· Direct ad buys with other websites
· Facebook ads
Pay per click ads are one of the most cost effective. These are the "sponsored ads" that are displayed at the top and right of the search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The way these ads work is you only pay whenever someone actually clicks on your ad, not when it gets displayed. And the cost per click can range anywhere from a few cents to several dollars, depending on what industry you are in and what keywords you're bidding on.
You create ad campaigns based on keywords that people who would be searching for your business might use to find it.
For example, if you were in the tool rental business you might bid on some of the following keywords:
· <city name> tool rentals
· <city name> power rake rental
· <city name> sump pump rental
…and so on.
You can set it up so your ads will only get displayed to anyone who is actually in your city or general area, which means that even if someone in another part of the country were searching for these phrases, your ads wouldn't be displayed.
Because you can control exactly where your ads get displayed, you can target the people who would be most likely to become potential customers very specifically.
And while the general keyword might have a high cost-per-click, when you are bidding on the local version of it (with the city name included) the cost is generally much lower. This will depend on the size of your city and the number of competitors who are also bidding on those keywords, however.
Banner Advertising
If you've been online for any length of time yourself, you've more than likely seen banner advertising in action. These are the graphic ads that you see on many sites. There are a number of ways to buy this advertising space. You can work with an ad network that handles the placement of your ads for you - choosing relevant websites, controlling what cities they get displayed in, etc. - or you can work directly with other websites to buy ad space on their pages.
You can even team up with other businesses in your local market to “trade” ad space on each other’s websites. There are lots of ways to work with people who don’t compete with you directly but would still be getting visitors who would be interested in what you have to offer.
For example, let’s say you own a plumbing business. You could partner up with local electricians, realtors, contractors and various other businesses to share ad space on each other’s website. Someone who is looking for an electrician will quite likely need a plumber at some point, and vice versa. Someone looking for a realtor may be looking for a whole bunch of other businesses because they’re moving to the area and aren’t familiar with it yet.
This can even be taken a step further by offering “finders fees” for any referrals that you get as a result of another local business. You can set up a system that will track any new customers who click through from an ad on one of your partner businesses’ website and wind up contacting you. You can then pay the person who referred them a finders fee. If you set up these types of partnerships with several other complementary businesses, it can work out well for everyone involved without taking anything away from their own bottom line.
Banner advertising can be very effective, but for local business purposes you need to be sure that you are able to control where your ads get displayed. If you're an electrician in Portland, Oregon there's really no point is having your ad shown to someone who is surfing the web in Sarasota, Florida.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads have some things in common with pay per click advertising - you only pay when someone actually clicks on one of your ads and you can target very specific people. The difference is instead of your ads being shown based on keywords that people are searching for, they're displayed based on demographics that you choose.
You have a great deal of control over the ads you display, so you can get very specific with who sees your ads. For example, if you own a gym or fitness club, you could create an ad that would target women between the ages of 35 and 50 who live in your city, have a college education and are interested in other health-related topics.
Then you could create a different ad that would target men with all those same demographics. And another one for each group between the ages of 50 and 60, or any other demographics you wanted. Facebook makes it very easy to put your ad in front of the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer them.
And it also makes it easy to create multiple ads that ultimately bring potential customers to the same offer, but each ad can target a very particular group of people.
Whether or not you use Facebook yourself, keep something in mind - Facebook is growing at a much faster rate than other websites, including Google, so it is becoming more and more important that your business has a presence there, both in the way of a Facebook Page and advertising. This chart shows just how much faster Facebook is growing:
