Choose your advertisement strategy judiciously

Advertising for a product requires thorough research based on demography, social demand and location of the market. Using a uniform marketing plan will not allow the business to reach out to the complete potential consumer base. Use YouTube as a video diary to reach out to the younger demography that spends a considerable portion of their browsing time on the website on a daily basis. Have a Facebook page which is easy to find using relevant keywords for the header title and allow anyone to join it. Generate new podcasts every day and post new articles on the blog every week to allow users of these interactive media to gain fresh content of your business on a regular basis.

Web marketing as a dynamic tool for advertisements

Oracle is one such company that started with a home page that allowed consumers to put in their comments and generate a sense of community with the company. After its initial success with this tactic, the organization switched to the Oracle Open World.

if you are a regular coffee drinker at Starbucks you may want to tell the CIO something that will improve the services and products of the company. These suggestions are attended to by a sound technical group of individuals who try to incorporate them into the company activities to the best of their abilities.

Although Wal-Mart wasn’t quite successful in building an interactive online community with its customers, the company’s determined efforts in this field gave way to the Wal-Mart Check Out which definitely improved things for them.

Use various modes of marketing to reach out to a wider audience

If you are looking to raise online sales of your product use the website to describe all items offered by you in great detail that is easily accessible to visitors. Link the home page to the rest of the web pages with simple text links instead of image links. Make sure that there are no repeat links between two pages as search engines such as Google usually disregard the second link in this case. If the first link is an image and the second is a keyword rich text link then your website may be losing out on valuable search traffic since search engines will only pick up on the image link.

Use the blog as an interactive session between your business and its customers. Allow everyone to leave comments on their experience at your website and address specific consumer complaints promptly. Publish fresh content regularly to allow visitors to find something new every time they visit your blog.

Twitter is a great mode of keeping in touch with your customers in real time. Not only can you update them on the new things that are happening to your business but you can also ask them for their feedback on new ideas that you are working on to understand the potential of their success in the market. Tweeting also lets you receive responses and suggestions from them instantly.

YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world and many companies are trying to figure out how to get their ads on this platform. In the last few years, the YouTube team has started to focus on implementing new ways of adding advertisements and now anyone can take advantage of these strategies.

Postroll and Preroll Ads

This type of advertising is the latest installment from YouTube and, like any other type of ad that appears on this website, it is only available on videos posted by YouTube partners. You have to create a 15 or 20 second video for your company and once it goes live, it will appear before or after certain videos. You can choose your demographics by country, so if you want to advertise in the US alone, this is definitely a possibility. Users won’t be allowed to skip the advertisement unless you want to give them this option, so most people will get to see your message without interruptions. This is the newest option available for YouTube advertising and it is also the most expensive one.

Regular Google Ads

There are two types of regular Google ads that are currently displayed on YouTube videos. You can include a small banner or text ad underneath a video or you can purchase a larger banner next to the videos of YouTube partners. Both of these strategies are effective and your ads will usually appear next to videos that are somewhat related to the title or the content of your ad.

Go Straight To the Source

Because YouTube is a free platform, you can forget about the intermediary and contact a few popular YouTube users directly. Even if they are not part of the partner project, they are allowed to display ads during their videos and some of them receive thousands of views per day. You have to find a channel that has enough subscribers and negotiate until you find a reasonable solution. Most of the times, people will be willing to include a small segment about your company at the beginning or ending of their videos.

Do it Yourself

The last method of advertising on YouTube is also the most complicated one. Instead of giving money to the Google ads program or to a YouTube user directly, you can create a channel for your business and help it grow. This will take a lot of time and effort, but there are quite a few large companies which have thousands of subscribers. They have the possibility of advertising their products directly at no cost, but it will take you a while until you gain a fan base.

Conclusion

These are the basic strategies that can be used if you want the name of your company or website to appear on YouTube. It all depends on the amount of money you are willing to spend and the type of advertising campaign you plan on creating. If you know what you’re doing, you will surely obtain great results.

Why should you use Facebook advertisements?

For beginners, Facebook is universal in nature. So it becomes possible to attract a large variety of people without doing much for that purpose. With over 400 million active users per hour, the activity of Facebook is truly mind boggling. People treat Facebook as an important part of their lives so you can reach the ones who have real interest in your product.  Even if you cannot attract people of your criteria, you can ensure that your news reaches the people.

When you look at most of the internet advertisements, you will realize that they would have absolutely no relationship with the page they are featured on. This main disadvantage can be omitted if you use Facebook advertisements. Why? It is because Facebook is a social networking media and not a static webpage. It contains the likes and dislikes of a particular profile and using that it can relate the advertisements to that particular person using its target filters.

Normally, as an advertiser you would be concerned about showing their advertisement to a person who has no interest in it. So, Facebook is an advertiser’s heaven in that sense.

How effective is the Facebook advertising?

The effectiveness of Facebook advertising can be attributed to its ad setup. When you begin to create your advertisements, you will be given an option to select your demographics. For instance, you can select a particular age group and workplaces and your advertisements will be shown only to the people who belong to those demographics.

This method is very effective and it can attract people who you want to be attracted. Although, the Facebook ads are not very attractive like their competitor’s, Facebook is very engaging and that will make their ads reach people.

Is Facebook right for you?

First of all, Facebook is always right. So all you need to do is to think smartly. For instance, let us say that you are a wedding planner. Now, you need to find women with an “engaged” Facebook status. Now, without sweating a drop, you will come to know who are all going to get married in the coming weeks. After that, you can contact them and fix a deal with them.

If you own a restaurant and if you host birthday parties there, you need to find out young people (age criteria), who are celebrating their birthdays in your town (location criteria). Thus, you need to play smart while giving your demographics and you will do wonders in Facebook.

To wind up, Facebook advertising is growing day by day and you have to use it whether you like it or not.

Facebook Apps

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Creating an app is a quick way to spread your message virally. Apps that post things to people’s profiles can spread pretty quickly. While creating an app, however, you might want to be careful, lest you repeat a certain beverage company’s fiasco with an iPhone app. You don’t want to scream out your company’s name and spew out marketing lines. You want to be subtle in a way that users hear of your company without being annoyed. You could make it an integral part of the app. For example, if you run an e-commerce business, you could create a game where a character does things to earn money and then spends it in your shop to buy cool stuff. The users think it’s just a shop within the game, while you quietly get to push your brand across.

Profile pages and Groups

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These are the most abused methods for Facebook marketing. Everyone and their aunt is creating a profile page and a group to spread their business’ word. What you need is an attractive profile with lots of pictures (if applicable) and regularly updated info. People don’t want to join a group or friend a profile that is inactive. But they also don’t want to be bombarded with sales pitches, so you might want to be a little careful there.

Facebook like button

Integrating the Facebook like button is a quick way of getting visitors to a well designed page or a well written blog post. We have already seen that the Facebook like button can increase traffic by as much as 50%. Putting up the share and like button for all your posts/pages can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site.

Events

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If you are holding a promotional event, or having an online sale at a certain time, there’s no longer a need to take a full page ad in your local newspaper. Just create a Facebook event and invite everyone you can. Keep the event open and encourage invited people to spread the word and invite their friends. If the event page is well written, invitations will spread like wildfire and before you know it, you will have advertised to more people than your local newspaper could have managed.

Notes

A lot of people like to read notes on Facebook. You can use this feature to duplicate your blog posts on Facebook. This way users can read and share the note more easily. Further, even if they just “like” it and don’t share it, their friends will still see the note.

If you are running a little low on cash and can’t advertise anywhere, You can always turn to Facebook. The only thing to remember is, use it smartly. There’s a thin line between marketing and spamming, don’t cross it.

Putting percentages into perspective

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What do the statistics say? They say that 28% of the US population uses Facebook. 11% of the US population uses Twitter. What’s the percentage for location based services? 4%. But hold on, only 1% people actually use their accounts actively. Compared to Facebook’s whopping 28%, 1% sounds diminutive. Considering US has a population of about 307 million, 1% means 3.07 million people. Doesn’t sound like a small number any more, does it? Think about it, you have a target audience of 3.07 million people to market to. All these people use a location based service at least once a week.

3.07 million is greater than 500 million

Let’s not talk mathematics here. From a marketing perspective, if you are running a local business, the 3.07 million users on location based services mean more to you than the 500 million users on Facebook. Why? You can’t target a particular demographic on Facebook. Well, you can target an ad at them, but they see it only when they are sitting in the comfort of their home.

David Breshears does a good job of explaining what we mean when he writes on TheSocialScene.wordpress.com:

I’m sitting at the bar, enjoying a happy hour cocktail, and decide to “check in” via Foursquare (or Gowalla, BrightKite, or any other LBS). A notification appears, informing me that the restaurant next door is offering free appetizers to Foursquare users. I’ve never tried the place, but a quick perusal of reviews that accompany the business listing on Foursquare makes me think it’s a place I’ll like. When I check in at the restaurant, three more notifications appear, one of which is for matinee-priced admission to the next showing of Inception at the theater across the street.

The major difference, in case you haven’t noticed yet, is that the user actually wants these advertisements. In fact, the only reason he has signed up is to see these advertisements. Contrast this to Facebook, where an advertisement has to be perfectly designed to catch a user’s attention.

Pin your hopes on the mobile market

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There is a limit to how much a service can grow. Facebook is nearing the peak of its growth. Twitter will soon catch up and its growth rate will decrease as well. But users are only just beginning to discover location based services. The reason for this can be attributed to a certain company that goes by the name of a fruit. When it invented the iPhone in 2007, it made web browsing on mobile devices popular. Since then, all devices encourage users to use web based applications. As the reach of Android and iOS grows, the number of users using Foursquare, Gowalla, etc is only going to go up. Their growth is going to piggyback on the growth of the smartphone market.

So, the next time a cynic says you should advertise on Facebook because they have 28% of the US population, smirk and congratulate yourself because you know better.