Is Targeted Advertising A Cost Effective Ad Solution?

“Customers can’t buy your product if they don’t know if it exists” is a saying that has been used a lot in the marketing world, since time immemorial, getting people to notice the existence of your product to the masses was a hard task and it costs a lot. The only means of advertising back in the day were TV and newspaper adverts, and though less popular, billboards were also used. Even today TV and theatre ads get a lot of eyes on your product, and live sporting events have businesses flocking to them to get a 15s slot for huge sums, but only a select few can afford that, in this cutthroat competitive space, it’s a Sisyphean task for small businesses to get their ads on a TV or newspaper. But, the arrival of the internet changed everything. You could market your product to your desired audience; you could place yourself in the customer base.

The Complexity of Blanket Advertising

With the intricacies involved in a business, it no doubt takes a lot of capital just to develop your product and fine-tune it, but the entrepreneur cannot spend all his money on that, if he can’t get the details about his product to the masses, it’s a futile endeavour. Traditional mass media advertising no doubt got your products and services on a lot of eyes, but the drawback is the audience, people who remotely have no interest in your product get exposure to it, a school-going kid will have no interest in buying insurance from the ads he saw on his TV, the grumpy old man wouldn’t be interested in the hot wheels set. It was a blanket plan to get customers, and though it got buyers, the customer acquisition cost was too much, and this was an inefficient way of getting customers to your doorstep. This is where the idea of choosing your customer base came along. The internet had been continuously gaining users, people couldn’t dismiss the internet anymore. The internet bought countless changes in how people started marketing their businesses; the little guy also stood a chance to get his name out into the world.

It's Simple, Yet Effective

Targeted Advertising in simple words is choosing to market your product or service to a specified group of people, the marketer has tools at his disposal which tell him about his customer base like their interests and their age, the advertising platforms have evolved in a way that they can cater to that, advertising platforms can direct ads to the necessary people, a book reader will get ads about books, a smartphone enthusiast will have smartphone ads displayed to him, and another good thing is a lot of websites have dedicated ad spaces, these ad spaces are actually filled with ads which cater to the user's interest, and the icing on top of the cake is these websites which host the ad spaces also get a portion of the money with respect to how much traffic they generate on the ads placed on their site.

Social Media Platforms: Biggest choice for advertisers?

Google, Facebook and Instagram are by far the biggest choice for advertisers given their user base, they are very versatile with the mode of ads they support, they can support descriptive ads, poster ads, image ads and many more, these websites have the data of their users and can control the flow of ads, Facebook has its own marketplace for sellers, the seller can directly show the product to a user who requires the product and it doesn’t cost a hefty sum, Google ads can be shown across all its major services like Gmail, YouTube etc. These advertising platforms follow a method where an advertiser can invest how much ever money he wants into the ads no matter how minuscule it is and the ad will be displayed until enough people have viewed it.

The targeted ad system is followed traditionally too, but targeted ads on the internet are where a lot of eyes are driven, it has given individuals, merchants, and businesses of various sizes the space to market themselves without dedicating a huge chunk of their budget to advertising and yet, still draw a good customer base to their online marketplace.

The Platform, the Businessman, the Customer

Targeted ads have their own fair share of troubles, a lot of advertising platforms have been found to be collecting user data without their consent and giving it to third parties, in an era where cyber crimes are rampant, users increasingly fear their personal information being stolen, people have increased their demands for the ways tech and internet companies are being regulated, online privacy is nonexistent with all the data that is being collected. There needs to be a compromise, a middle ground for advertising platforms, merchants and customers. Only then will there be a place for everyone to co-exist.