Advertising on the Internet allows you to make products, services or web pages known to a large number of people and can have great advantages in terms of positioning for your brand. However, to what extent should you use this new tool? For those entrepreneurs of e-commerce it is an important question, because now that you have an online store,how do they get customers to reach it? This does not have to be complicated, for that reason in this post, we will talk about the importance of creating a promotion strategy on the Internet, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of using this medium.

More and more companies advertise their products or services on the Internet. One of the reasons is the constant increase in the number of users in this medium. It is very difficult for a single strategy to lead you to success but there are many online marketing channels that you can use. In this post we will talk about those that we consider to be easier if you are a beginner in the world of online advertising.

Internet media

SMM (Social Media Marketing)

It is one of the simplest, but it will surely take more time, but above all it is "free". It's about driving traffic to your site through social media, blogs, microblogs, podcasts, etc. The purpose is for you to create content related to your product, thus generating traffic to your website and inviting them to make the purchase.

Paid Ads

• Banners and pop up

These ads contain images and videos, and require a type of interaction on the part of the user, the ad can unfold, float, stay fixed, etc. The difference between a banner and a pop-up is that the latter is a window that automatically pops up when you access a page, these tend to be annoying for some users and there are currently programs that block them.

You can promote yourself by hiring spaces on pages related to the product or service you offer, here you must take care that your market is really present on the site you choose and of course that it has considerable traffic. There are also ads by searched word through search engines(Adwords), many of them have a column on the right side of the search results where you can buy a "sponsored link", that is, you can appear on that list with a prior fee.

Regarding payment, you have the option of choosing the one that you think is the most convenient for you and the one that best suits your pocket; Both can be paid as pay per click, which is based on paying for each actual visit you receive through the system, or pay per hit, you pay for the times your ad will be displayed.

• Ads on social media

Social networks now also have the option to pay to boost your publications, among the most popular we find:

Facebook Ads: Advertisers can choose a budget according to their requirements, it can be per day or total. The most interesting thing about these ads lies in the multiple possibilities of targeting a potential audience. And they have different types of ads that you can appear in.

YouTube Ads: The most common of this platform is the viewing of videos, in which you pay for commercial viewing, if the user skips the ad, that impact has no cost. However, it also has ads placed in different areas of YouTube, each one has a specific price depending on the area where you want it to be viewed.

Twitter Ads: The ad formats of this social network are tweets, trends and account suggestions, which will appear on the users' timeline with the indication "sponsored".

LinkedIn Ads: The formats of this social network are direct ads and have the same characteristic as Facebook, they can be segmented and set the budget for the campaign; In this case, you should take into account that the people who use LinkedIn are very different from those on Facebook, as well as the reasons why it is used.

Directories

Connect your store to different directories on the Internet. Make a search for personalized directories with higher traffic and place your site depending on the sector of your business, the main advantage of the directories is that they serve as a reference to some search engines that use them to organize their own directories, such as Google.

In addition to these methods there are many others that you can use, some are more sophisticated and complex than others, and in the same way the costs are different in each one.

Advantages and disadvantages in general

Advantage

• Like conventional media, Internet advertisements can be considered in the same way as an advertisement in the newspaper, magazine, radio spot and others; Well, any of these have to get the customer's attention.

• The ads that you launch have a greater possibility of reach, but at the same time they provide you with better market segmentation, since you will be present in the places related to the business of your company 24 hours a day.

• The costs of creating an Internet campaign with the mentioned elements are cheaper than with traditional means.

• Measuring the scope is easier to evaluate, since through the various programs offered by the Internet (most of them, for free), you can measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaign in real time.

• It is possible to modify the ads more easily, as well as the change of the means by which you are advertising. It is possible that some channel is not providing you with the expected results, you contact another and continue with the campaign.

• When the customer's attention is won, they can get all the information they need easily and quickly directly from the company.

Disadvantages

Of course, not everything is honey on flakes:

• With the aforementioned means, you will only address network users, other people who are not online yet will not be able to meet you. Which leads you to create a campaign with traditional media.

• By having a greater reach in the market, you should think in different languages, considering other marketing, cultural, etc.

• Your competition can easily spot your advertising strategies and constantly try to outperform them.

• Users are usually sensitive to advertising, which in many cases they consider invasive, due to its unsolicited reception, its repetition and its insistence, especially the so-called spam that is becoming, the main problem of effective communication via the Internet . For this reason, it is important to take care of the placement of your ads and the sites where you are going to publish them; there is no point in showing up in places where people don't want to see you.

Getting the best out of the benefits of Internet advertising and developing the necessary policies to eliminate its possible drawbacks should be done in conjunction with creatives and administrators of your website, but without a doubt, creativity will be your best ally for an online campaign , especially in the case of a virtual store.