By Jacob Schlessel
Businesses are fighting tooth-and-nail for a new type of real estate in hopes of increasing revenue, but it may not be the type of real estate that you think. The new real estate frontier is not related to physical buildings or even vacant land, it’s the space on consumers’ screens.
Marketing platforms
Through platforms like Google Ads, Meta Ads, MailChimp, and many more, companies today are advertising to consumers at an unprecedented scale. Every search made, every post “liked”, every video watched, and almost every other action taken when using the Internet is tracked and stored as a data point by the corporations that own search engines (Google, Microsoft, etc.) and social media platforms (Meta, TikTok, etc.). This data is aggregated across all platforms enabling targeted advertising, which is the practice that advertisers use to reach consumers of a specific demographic and who are more likely to purchase their products.
Out with the old, in with the new
Local businesses should invest in targeted social media ads. Traditional forms of advertisement like television commercials and newspaper displays are not as worthwhile as investments as they used to be because fewer people watch cable television and read the paper. Social media is as popular as it has ever been and allows for seamless integration of ads into a user’s home page. Furthermore, by strategically choosing which demographic sees a particular ad, a business can maximize the return on their money they spent creating the ad and purchasing the ad space.
Search engine optimization
Another key to reaching consumers online is search engine optimization . When a consumer searches for a product, they often only look at the first few results that come up and do not bother scrolling through hundreds of results. Using tools like Moz Pro, Yoast SEO, and Ahrefs, small businesses can optimize their websites to appear closer to the top of local search results. These platforms enable search engine optimization (SEO) by ensuring clients’ websites include key words and phrases included in user searches and can vastly increase website traffic and product exposure online.
The takeaway
Online marketing is not just the future, it is the present. For how much time modern consumers spend in front of screens, small businesses need to invest in digital advertising to get as many eyes on their products as they can.
seCTer has worked with several local digital marketing consultants and can make recommendations to help your business. Feel free to contact us (https://www.secter.org/contact/) if you would like to support another local business as well as getting the valuable digital marketing services your business needs.
If you’re a local digital marketing business in our region and would like to be considered as a resource seCTer recommends, please contact us (https://www.secter.org/contact/)!