What Advertising Channels Should Your Business Use?

An experiment was recently conducted examining the effectiveness of seven different types of online advertising.  The researchers’ conclusions were interesting and relevant to businesses trying to figure out how to properly leverage social media and online marketing to engage their customer base.  It turned out that corporate pages with logos (such as Facebook Fan Pages) and widgets (such as interactive elements) were the most popular in engaging users but weak as far as creating intent to purchase.  Banner ads and email newsletters (traditional online media) had the opposite effect.  Though these traditional online media channels had the lowest engagement rates, they produced the highest rates of purchasing intent.

What does this mean for the average small business trying to figure out where to concentrate their efforts?  According to this experiment, just having a social media presence would not be enough to drive purchases, but only focusing on traditional advertising like banner ads and email newsletters will not effectively increase your customer base.  In fact, the most powerful strategy would seem to be using social channels to engage new users and create community and then complement the social media advertising with traditional banner ads and email newsletters to re-engage the community and drive product purchases.

Many advertising analysts have pointed out that new customer acquisition is a weakness of traditional online advertising, even if the re-engagement of existing customers was stellar.  Social media advertising provides a solution to customer acquisition and effectively complements but does not replace traditional online ads. By using traditional advertising channels to reinforce social media, businesses can create a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle, increasing both their engagement and reach with customers.

You can read the entirety of the report here.