Global VS Local Online Advertising

The growth of online advertising now means that the entire world is your oyster when it comes to promoting your products or services, but is it really better to focus on global or local online advertising?

Both global and local online advertising channels have advantages, though of course what may be best for your business may depend to some degree on what you are offering. Why limit yourself to only local customers if you can enjoy the whole world and millions of addition prospects? You may even find that your goods and services can fetch a much higher price overseas and help you to dramatically increase your profit margins.

Geographic location can have an effect on the effectiveness of your online advertising, however what is most important is that your ads are targeted to your ideal customers. In most cases this is about more than just where they are located. If you haven’t created an ideal customer profile yet, now is the time to do it. The better idea you have of who you need to reach, the higher the return you will realize on all of your online advertising. This includes age, sex, marital status, income, and assets.

Armed with your ideal customer profile you can better identify the online advertising networks that are best for reaching these prospects regardless of whether you are using targeted ad networks, Google Adwords, guest blogging or social media marketing as a part of your online advertising strategy.

However when putting together your online advertising plan you will want to keep in mind that there is one way that global, non-targeted online advertising can be better for maximizing marketing ROI. This is when it is far cheaper to reach a much larger number of prospects that can return more real customers than when targeting a smaller group. For example, if you had the choice between paying $50 for 500 targeted Twitter followers or getting your message Tweeted out to 100,000 non-targeted users, the non-targeted campaign should yield ten times the amount of actual real customers that will acquire your product.

Also, if you have a product or service with global potential, remember that global online advertising can help your brand spread incredibly fast, providing your branding is good. This means having a branded website and customized social media profiles all unified with your toll free vanity number.

So the real answer to the question of whether global or local online advertising is better, is that you may well benefit from both, just pay attention to your returns.