I will like to discuss online advertising with you and how it can help your business. Online advertising is summed up by Wikipedia as “a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers”.

I will like us to stress these two words promotion and marketing. You guess definitely have something to promote or market before considering bringing it online. I will simply call this a process of trying to grab from the already scarce attention of internet users. Before I dive more into this topic let me bring these basic facts to your notice;

Advantages of Online Advertisement

• Online advertisment can be targeted to your actual customers (more than other medium)
• Online advertisement can be customized to meet you intended product or keywords
• Online advertisement is measurable (if it’s not working, you can simply stop it!)
• Cost effectiveness; online advertisement mostly allows you to pay for predetermined success by way of action performed by users or visit to your site.
• Immediate action: think about placing ad on your TV and someone sees it but before they logon to the internet they had forgotten your web address or product, how can you get them back? With online advertisement, you get them to link to you right from advert.
• Online advertising is the future: it has been reported that internet ads revenue beats their counterpart in the mainstream.

While the internet continues its growth, everyone will surely join the bandwagon. Currently in Nigeria there are about 11million people on the internet as the usage keep exploding day-by-day.

Online advertisement is surely the way to go, going by its result-oriented nature. Small businesses (and large ones too) should consider using this medium. While careful planning is very important before choosing one (irrespective of the media), these are the current top advertising sites: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and a host of others. I will suggest that you contact an expert in this area so as to guide you through the process.

We will be looking into choosing the right advertisement platform for your ads in my next post here.