What is the importance of paid advertising in marketing?
Advertising, whether paid or free, plays an important role in marketing. Paid advertising, if done well, gives better and fast results, but you have to be able to compete with everyone else who wants to pay. The option of specific and granular targeting online has allowed people to succeed with paid advertising on a much smaller budget, compared to what was possible ten or twenty years ago. Let’s discuss more.
Advertising refers to sending a message about a product, service, event, business, etc. to a target audience. With paid advertising, you can broadcast your message to different platforms and expand your reach simply by paying more. On the other hand, marketing is a broader term that includes advertising as well as pricing, competitive research, and all other aspects relating to establishing a product in the market.
Advertising eases the process of marketing, and paid advertising has certain advantages, such as reliability and easy scaling. For instance, if you have some free method of advertising, such as posting to your social media page, that might work and get you some sales. But there’s no way to scale that up quickly. You would just have to work on building the social media page’s follower count, which takes time. The advantage with paid ads is it involves paying for access to a very reliable, repeatable, scalable source of customers. Take social media ads, for instance. If you make a social media ad, and it’s doing well and earning you a profit, it’s usually fairly simple to get more customers by simply turning up the daily ad spend. There’s reliability with paid advertising, because you know you’re getting what you pay for, as long as it’s a tested and trusted medium.
The three main reasons advertising is important in marketing are:
1) People Get to Know All Their Options
2) Ads Make People Try New Things
3) Ads Give Personality to Your Business.
When you can do these things with a method that scales better and gives reliable results (after thorough testing), it’s worth spending a little money.
Marketing without advertising is much more difficult in the long run. The success of marketing depends upon the efforts you have put into all aspects, including advertising. Each generation of people is more aware of advertising gimmicks, and so the standards of advertising are rising. You cannot get by through deceiving or manipulating people, and people expect ads to lead with value.
Some people think that advertisements are all deceptive, scummy, and harmful. Well, some certainly are, but there would be no business and marketing in the absence of advertising. My post: “Welcome to a World without Advertising“ goes into more detail. In conclusion, the importance of paid advertising in marketing is undeniable. You can get by without it for a while, but it’ll cost you in other ways if you neglect it throughout your career as an entrepreneur.
Russel Brunson puts it well: whichever business is able to spend the most on getting customers will be the top player in that niche. You don’t have to be the top player in your niche, but the reality is that if you are too averse to ever spending money to get more customers, it’s probably indicative of a flaw in your business model. A healthy business should be able to spend money to get customers because they have a reliable amount of turnover and know they’ll make their money back and then some.
Most businesses aren’t quite ready for that at first, but successful ones should be, over time.
Please feel free to reply to me if you need clarification.
Good Luck!
Thanks,
Cleo
