Advertising Your Website: 5 Most Popular Methods To Get Your Business Known

By Yhordan Serpentini | January 19, 2022

The first few steps in starting a business can act as major roadblocks for success. One of the most important challenges that you will face, had faced, or are currently facing—as a small business owner—is to gain traction. No matter how good or bad your business idea may be, the chances of failure excessively increase if no one knows about it, or if it is not gaining enough attention, which is why advertising your business is crucial for its success. Here are five of the most common and popular methods for advertising your business.

Public Relations (PR) Advertisement

Public Relations (PR) marketing is a great way to advertise your small business. PR is the practice of managing the information of an individual, or group of individuals, that is then published to the public—it is how the public will perceive you as both a person and entrepreneur. For example, being featured about some of your current accomplishments, such as helpful contributions or community work, in your average magazine or local newspaper, will affect how people see you.

How will this help advertise your business? Simple. The more articles that are published about you or your business, the more you are likely to gain attention. Even if your business isn’t the main focus of these articles, or if your business wasn’t mentioned at all, advertising yourself to the public—especially if it is in a positive manner—will bring positive attention towards you, which you can then shift towards your business.

Digital Advertisement

Digital advertising is a very popular way to advertise your small business. One of the main forms of digital advertising is through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns that are displayed on other websites or videos. If you are unfamiliar with PPC, they are basically the pop-up ads that crowd the sides of a website, or play during a video advertisement break, like the ones on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook.

A really common type of PPC campaign is Google Ads, which is an advertising network that tries to tailor your business’ advertisements to potential consumers. This is a type of advertising commonly referred to as personalized ads, which is when the IP addresses from your search history are scanned to promote advertisements related to what you have previously searched for. This is why sometimes when you search for the name of a movie on Google, you are then later recommended videos about that same movie on YouTube.

PPC is a great way for you to grow potential clients, but it is not the ONLY way. You can also create a website if it is more flexible with your budget since you will likely need to anyways as your business gains more traction (refer to our last blog on web hosting for tips on starting a business website). There are numerous strategies to help promote your business digitally, so get creative!

Direct Mail Advertisement

This form of advertising, although still common in today’s digital era, isn’t as popular as it used to be. That is not to say it isn’t effective as the possibility of gaining traction will always be higher and more preferable than nothing at all; however, it is the most inefficient in terms of cost since you will consistently need to pay for printing and shipping.

To quickly summarize, direct mail advertising sounds exactly as it suggests—you mail pamphlets, envelopes, and/or magazines that promote your business directly to random mailboxes. If you can afford the cost constraint, as well as are more than willing to do anything it takes to get your business known, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t advertise directly through mail.

Direct E-mail Advertisement

Almost identically to direct mail advertising, direct e-mail advertising is simply the digital version. Instead of promoting your business physically, you promote it through advertisements that are e-mailed to random individuals. This method, though has proven to work, is discouraged if it is your only method of advertising since the majority of the time your e-mail ad will be automatically deleted, sent to junk, or simply ignored.

Social Media Advertisement

The most obvious form of advertising on this list, as well as by far one of the most effective and popular methods, is social media. Social media platforms are where the most amount of digital traffic occurs. Some businesses are entirely digital due to how much attention has exclusively grown via social media. There are multiple ways for you to advertise your business through social media, some of the most common ways are through personalized ads, bots promoting your business, real accounts promoting your business, promoting on your own personal social media account, and/or having your own social media business account.

One of the biggest benefits of promoting your business through social media is that word-of-mouth does the majority of the work for you. For example, people who have seen your business advertisement might also let their friends or families know about it too, which will then let those individuals repeat the process to their friends or families. There are also numerous social media platforms for you to repeat the process, such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Advertising Your Website: 5 Most Popular Methods To Get Your Business Known