| By :
Jason Lom
For many decades, businesses have employed the services of advertising agencies to help brand their product or service and increase their market share. Traditionally, ad agencies have been specialists in crafting the message of the business for mainstream media outlets like television, radio and newspapers. And while the traditional forms of advertising are still very effective, a greater importance is now placed on reaching your target audience via the internet. Advertising agencies come in many different shapes and sizes. They can be as small as one or two man operations or as large as a multi-national corporation. As a general rule, smaller firms tend to work with small to medium sized businesses, while the larger advertising companies have the manpower and resources to cater to the Fortune 500 companies. Some ad agencies are more general in their focus, while others specialize in certain industries. Whatever form and size an agency has, the mission is still the same; to build the brand and ultimately enhance the bottom line of their clients. For larger clients, the older more traditional forms of advertising are still desired. The major corporations with deep pockets still like to advertise on television. For many of the best known companies, the purpose of all this advertising is not necessarily for immediate increases in sales (though that would be nice), but the main purpose is to keep the product brand front and center in the mind of the public. For example, when a company like Coca Cola buys TV ad, radio spots, space on billboards, and even the prime spot just behind home plate at the baseball stadium, it's not for an immediate response. The company knows that when people are driving in their car or watching TV at home, they are not always in the mood for a Coke right then and there. But what they are trying to accomplish is to give consumers a good feeling about their product through advertising that ties Coca Cola to good feelings like "refreshing" and "can't beat the real thing." For the big players, corporate branding is all good and well, and it pays off in the long run as consumers reach for their product when they are in the mood for it. Unfortunately, and especially in this economy, smaller businesses don't have this luxury. For this reason, more and more advertising companies for small businesses are turning to internet marketing to produce more targeted responses to their product/service and bring the business a greater return on their advertising dollar. Now, make no mistake, the big players are all online too, and with the same large marketing budgets as their offline endeavors. But the thing about the internet is that the largest ad budget is not necessarily the winner. This is because the search engines pay special attention to relevance. What this means is that a search engine like Google will actually reward an advertiser that is more relevant to the targeted keyword with a lower cost per click and higher search position than someone who is not as relevant. This helps level the playing field online and allows smaller players that have skilled advertising companies who can create a more relevant ad and website the same opportunities to compete as the big players. In addition, search engine optimization (ranking in the search engine's natural listings), video marketing, and social media have given internet marketers large and small quite a few more ways to market their brand at a relatively low cost. All this adds up to great opportunities online for small and medium sized businesses that work with a skilled ad agency.
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