How does online advertising relate to the bottom line of a business?

Businesses rely on a few things to succeed and sustain. The primary goal of a business, which will never really change, is building and sustaining a strong customer base . This is the what sales and marketing teams spend their days working on, and this is why developers and designers build the best product they can.

It's not a simple task to grow and sustain customers, and it's even harder to have customers that stay highly engaged with your product or service. There are several pieces that really help solve this puzzle, and one of them is online advertising. Online advertising can be incredibly impactful in helping new startups and businesses that have been around for years. Nothing has changed - businesses need to effectively reach their users.

People are spending less time offline, and more time online. Even online, where they spend their time is changing. (image source: redmondpie.com)

There are obviously changes to business and the way people spend time and money, in comparison to say, 50 years ago. But ultimately, people still spend their time consuming information and using products and services, just like they did 50 years ago. A key difference for businesses has been the development of the internet. Today, a much wider group of businesses have the ability to reach a large and diverse audience from all around the world (or alternatively, a very specific audience in their local area if that's their target).

Online advertising makes this possible for businesses. The enormous scale of the internet, the growth of data, and the resulting growth of a variety of advertising networks, let businesses identify who they want to reach and actually reach them in a cost environment that didn't really exist before online advertising developed. Unless you're a giant company, you can't put billboards across the world (or any other large scale promotional campaign really), and even if you could, it probably wouldn't get you very far.

Even online advertising has evolved enormously in the past few years. Look back to the late 1990s. There were a few web destinations like Yahoo! that had huge traffic and therefore they were attractive space for advertisers. Compare the few that existed in the 1990s with today - there are many contexts on the web - commercial, social, professional, educational, any many more. For most of these contexts, there are networks specifically reaching a targeted audience.

There are many ad publishers and networks (image source: growpubmedia.com)

Some of the big ones include: LinkedIn, which of course helps businesses reach professional individuals. Facebook lets you reach just about anyone based on personal data like jobs, personal interests, connections to other brands, etc. Google lets advertisers reach the biggest audience online that are intent on finding all kinds of things (ie. products, places, services). Bing (which of course is smaller than Google) also lets businesses reach yet another, large and distinct audience of people intent on finding information, products, and services. Those are a few of the larger networks. There are many more networks, that help advertisers target specific audiences around the web.

The bottom line is that no company will ever say: we want to reach fewer customers, or we don't see value in targeting our audience, or we want to spend more time getting customers. Businesses want efficient ways to grow their customer base, and online advertising is one of the major pieces that enables, cost effective customer growth. And now that there are many ad networks online, each with different audiences, it's becoming more difficult to manage campaigns across multiple channels effectively.

This is why we built the AdStage Platform . If you're interested in simplifying the management of your ad campaigns across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bing please come sign up for our private beta .