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Small Business Advertising Nigeria - Internet Advertising And More

Small business advertising Nigeria. This section teaches you how to use the power of internet advertising and other offline advertising techniques to grow your business.

Let's start with offline techniques of small business advertising.

The most popular techniques small business people use to promote their business offline are . . .

Newspaper advertising

Magazine advertising

Handbill advertising

Posters advertising

Billboards outdoor advertising

Let me quickly state here that billboard advertising is usually out of the reach of small business people. The price will kill any small business in no time.

The first four offline advertising techniques mentioned above are the most popular in Nigeria. But how effective are they?

It is often impossible to measure the impact of a handbill or poster campaign on your business. For example, how many people actually came to your business because they saw a poster announcing your offer?

What is the poster or handbill conversion rate?

How many were actually distributed by the people you assigned to distribute them?

Where did they distribute them?

How many people actually saw them?

How many people were moved to do business with you after seeing your handbill or poster ad?

It is usually difficult to get reliable data on each of the above.

Besides, my experience and those of most people, is that handbills and posters are not very effective means of advertising even though many people patronize these advertising mediums.

First, most people who receive handbills simply scan then and then throw them away. Posters are worse.

Posters occupy space and there are many competing posters.

Some posters don't last a day in locations where they are posted before someone comes along, tears off the current poster, and replace them with his own.

Newspaper advertising is no different.

When I started my business in the early days, I tried newspaper advertising. I spent =N=16,000 for ad space in a popular Nigerian newspaper on a Tuesday that the paper is known to have high sales.

The result?

Not even one person contacted me to take up my offer. What a waste!

This is where internet advertising beats all the offline system of advertising. With internet advertising you can measure results and calculate your return on investment.

There are two ways to advertise online.

1. Free Advertising

This requires that you build a search engine optimized web site that is highly regarded by search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, live.com etc

The search engines will then display your web site as a source of credible information, products, and services when someone makes a search relevant to your business in the search engines.

Bottom line.

They send you free traffic or prospects without you having to pay them for doing so. This is free internet advertising or Free small business advertising.

2. Paid Advertising

In this case, you pay the search engines to send prospects or leads to your business. A good example is Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is a Google.com advertising network where merchants like you pay for certain keywords so that your web address can be displayed to prospective clients when they search at Google.com using those keywords.

Your ad performance is measurable with this system. And you can tell whether it's worth it or not because Google will show you . . .

The number of page impressions (That is, the number of people who actually saw your ad)

The number of click throughs (That is, the number of people who visited your web site sales page from the ad) and

The conversion rate (That is, the ratio of the number of click throughs to the number of page impressions)