Free Advertising Strategies on the Internet and Social Media for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME)

Advertising Definition: Advertising is a means of communication with the (intended) users of a product or service, with the aim of influencing them in patronage. It is also defined as a process of making your product and service known to an audience or marketplace. It is mostly paid for especially, the offline ones such as Television and Radio Advertising.

However, the online advertising can be paid or free advert; the former is well documented and promoted because of the monetary gain involved for the advertisers while the latter is neither well documented nor promoted and consequently, most small and medium enterprise owners or business entrepreneurs might not be aware of its availability or might not have an idea of the technique involved.

Therefore, an attempt is made to come up with free advertising strategies and platforms, with links, for the benefit of small and medium enterprise owners.

Advertising Techniques for Businesses

The techniques involve in advertising are highlighted as follow:

Creation of quality contents: In the online palace, it is being said that ‘‘Content is King’’. You should endeavour to create good contents that are optimized for search engines like Google, Bing and others. Besides Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the contents should include keywords that can drive traffic to the site. Keywords can be obtained by using free online tools such as answer the public.

Remember to include graphics (i.e., images or designs such as info-graphs) that illustrate or demonstrate the contents of your post so that the contents would be interesting to the users. Remember that if the content is of low quality, the return on advertising investment will be very low; that is why they say that ‘content is king’.

It is quality contents, perhaps from your website blog, that will be used as bait on free platforms to drive traffic to your site; this is because any user that comes across it will be interested in getting more by clicking on the links in the content which direct them to your website.

Advertising Platforms for Small and Medium Enterprise

The free advertising platforms are grouped into two consisting of internet and social media
Free Advertising on the Internet: With respect to free advertising on this platform, I ‘ll focus online forums and blogs, youtube, quora, Linkedin (and other similar platforms).

i. Free advertising on forum and blog Websites: A very good example of a forum website is NewsForum that consists of many forum platforms in nearly all walks of life (see: https://newsforum.skies.education ). A user can easily create topics or even place adverts in a forum of interest in as much as the content is relevant to the forum.
 
The same process is applicable to the posting of contents in other blogs if it is allowed

ii. Free advertising on youtube: Youtube advertising is another way of getting free traffic to your website. In simplicity, the process entails explaining or discussing your contents in a short video clip so that users can click through to your website for more information.

iii. Free Advertising on other platforms: Other platforms such as Linkedin offer advertising opportunities to individual experts although, there are paid ads on the platform to promote your expertise

Free advertising on Social Media: This consists of using a platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media for advertising.

i. Free advertising on Facebook: Facebook provides an opportunity to post in your timeline, stories, and groups. All of this can be used to post and promote your business. Also, you can register for on Facebook ads manager freely and post your organizations’ contents freely as well. Besides, there is a provision for promoting businesses in paid ads in Facebook ad manager, which can be exploited depending on your budget.

ii. Free advertising on other social media: free advertisement on other social media is similar to that of Facebook as well

Make sure you launch a series of advertising contents because you do not know which will perform the best. In fact, it has been said that 70% of Google and Facebook ads fail. And, one time off advertising strategy is probably responsible for the failure. In addition, Email marketing is necessary to sustain the traffic generated through your advertising efforts.

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, two broad advertising platforms –the internet and social media – are identified with specific examples. If an entrepreneur is on a tight budget, he can use the advertising strategies highlighted in this post. This practice will ensure long term advertising strategies for the organization.

However, paid adverts are known to boost traffic in the short term. The practice has to be continuous like free advertising in order to sustain the intended traffic.

If you have any opinion on this topic, please do not hesitate to contribute to the discussion, by posting your reply.

Source: https://newsforum.skies.education/forums/topic/free-advertising-strategies-on-internet-and-social-media-for-sme/