Retargeting Your Banner Ads as a Small Business

Advertising a small business online is a highly confusion piece of work. Most business owners know that the top positions in the Google search results for a given keyword (or set of words) is very desirable in order to attract attention. However, search engine optimization is a very tricky beast; the algorithms under which it operates change regularly and only one person can take the top spot; often the person with the most money to throw at the system! This does not cover small businesses that are just starting out. However, there are plenty of other online marketing techniques which businesses can utilize and for the little guys, online display advertising-or banner advertising-is a good way to go.

Make no mistake about it: banner advertising isn’t easy to manage. They have to be well designed (which means doing it yourself or hiring a graphic designer to do it for you) and you have to then do things like find good ad servers and work with website publishers which often means more money and certainly a lot more time being spent. Add this up and many business owners instead turn to search engine marketing and social media marketing and neglect the banner ads.

Banner advertising though has its advantages over the more commonly used social media and SEM work. One of the big changes has been the process of ‘real-time bidding’. Real time bidding is the method by which websites can actually match up the ads they post to people who will be interested in them automatically. This creates highly targeted, highly relevant ads that are more affordable since they use an auction model, neatly obliterating the problem of spreading ads willy-nilly to be largely ignored and making you pay for the pleasure!

Real time bidding, combined with ‘retargeting’, has other benefits for small business owners too. Retargeting allows you to make several impressions with customers and visitors so that you can tap markets that may have been only thinking about your site and then may decide to drop in after seeing your ad a few times. It’s also cheaper; you only pay for individual impressions (ad views) which are much cheaper than a normal banner ad campaign and it’s easier to make that money back again.

This technology has been around for a few years now, but only the large brands and agencies were able to access them. Now however, it has opened up to the small businesses and that means a huge change in how these businesses should be viewing banner advertising. They can get the affordable prices and the wide range that was always a benefit of this form of marketing and combine it with retargeting technology so that more people who would actually care about the site will see it!

Small businesses have their own complications when it comes to proper marketing. It’s expensive and time consuming to dominate the search engines and social media is effective, but time consuming and often requires just the right personality behind it. Banner advertising seemed to be growing obsolete and too costly for new businesses. Thanks to retargeting though, banner advertising is coming back into the spotlight and makes for a great way in which the little guy can compete with the huge brands. Plus it’s less invasive to web browsers and websites may be more willing to host them since they can choose to host only ads related to the site. It’s a win-win situation for everyone, so if your small business could use a kick in the marketing pants, check out retargeted banner advertising for yourself today!