While no business owner will deride the benefits of placing ads as a helpful method of bringing in new customers, many small and local companies only look towards more traditional methods of local advertising, like building billboards, placing ads in the local newspaper or weekly, and radio or television ads.
No one will argue that these aren't completely ineffective methods of building a larger customer base, it is definitely not the most efficient and cheapest.
Almost all large companies have utilized the power of the internet to advertise and spread the good word of the benefits of using their services and purchasing their goods.
Local companies, however, have been more reluctant to take the digital plunge into creating websites and advertising local online.
Whether it be a fear of traversing the wild, wild web or just not knowing where to start, this reluctance is completely unnecessary, as the benefits of online advertising far outweigh any negatives.
The biggest advantage to be had from using online advertising is price, as you can get the same amount of eyes on your ads as traditional paper advertisements for a fraction of the cost.
When you calculate the cost of materials, research, design, and other assorted needs traditional advertisement methods can cost almost thousands more than internet advertisements, which can mostly consist of using search engine optimizations and a good website to alert potential customers to what a local company provides and the benefits it can have to said customer.
Not only that, but traditional advertising has fallen by the wayside as nearly everyone now has access to a computer hooked up to the internet.
Long gone are the days of letting your fingers do the walking across pages of the phone book, now replaced with using popular search engines to go to crowd sourced review sites and a myriad of other online only resources.
Online advertisements also have the advantage of reaching customers already interested in looking for a particular type of product or service instead of attempting to reach out to everyone in the vicinity, whether they're interested in shopping or not.
A customer can now use their favorite search engine to specifically look for what they want, and even without typing their location in up will pop a group of local businesses specializing in exactly what they want, with a ton of information about what is provided and where it is located.
Through harnessing the power of the internet, a local business can make sure that their company is on the top of that list, and that they're the first one internet users look to for their needs.