This question will pop up with a lot of people and businesses: the question whether spending the time, effort and money in advertising is actually worth it. Advertising for some people will seem like a bad piece of school homework. They feel they don’t have to do it, don’t
have the time and are better off spending their valuable time in other areas. However, before you judge whether you should advertise or not, you need to know the pros and cons to advertising.
Firstly, lets identify why people advertise.
People advertise to spread awareness of something from a message, to a product or service (it could be anything). The most typical thing to advertise nowadays is a product/service for which will hopefully get bought by the traffic produced from advertising. From this, it makes it extremely clear that if you are launching something (whatever it may be) you need advertising. People won’t know what your product/service is unless you shout out to them and tell them and the only way you can efficiently do this is through advertising. You need every bit of boost you can get to increase sales in the early stages of your product’s life cycle. Without advertising, you will find your sales sluggishly moving like a car trying to pull away in 4th gear.
On the other hand, if you are at the stage of your product’s life cycle where your sales have reached a peak and are at equilibria, you may think that spending any more money into PPC and advertising will be a waste of time. I can see the point advertisers make at this stage. The advertising campaign at the start was successful in providing brand awareness for their product. However now, everyone knows about the product and has decided whether they want to buy it or not. You feel like you can’t advertise to any more people than you already have. But, this wrong. There are 7 billion people in this world with predictions that there will be around 5 billion people online in 5 years time. There is always a market and audience to advertise to. What you need to do is learn how to approach them.
For example, if you are a car company that are trying to sell a 4 door economical car, you can approach two markets. The first being for a family and the second being for economical eco friendly drivers. However, you can’t approach the two markets in the same way. You need to bring out the benefits of the car which will make the family buy it for their market as well as doing the same for the other. Advertising may not seem essential because you are not using it to its full potential. Advertising is about how you portray yourself and the product to the customer.
If you are still unsure whether you think it is necessary to advertise or not, experiment for yourself and find out. Conduct a bit of research on your landing page to see whether your PPC campaign is actually effective or not. You can then come to the conclusion whether PPC advertising is necessary for the current situation, yourself and your product/service. If you see no major differences in sales, traffic or growth when having a campaign running to not, it is clear it is not a necessity. However, if it is having an impact, you should always keep using it. My motto for advertising is once it starts bringing in less than it is costing to run, I stop.
