Online Classified Advertising

With the ever rising costs of marketing your products, marketers were unable to meet the budgets and demanded an increase fairly often, this lead to decrease in the company’s profitability. To overcome the sky-rocketing cots of advertising, marketers have devised many relatively lower-cost marketing alternatives, one of them being classified ads. 

Internet marketing has expanded to take online classified advertising under its umbrella. Online classified advertising has all the more rapidly increased in today’s highly competitive markets because not only it saves on costs but also has a reach to a wider market that reads online publications, e-newspapers, e-zines, periodicals, etc. 

These ads are called classified advertising because of the fact that they are categorized in different classes such as: education, cars, house ware, and others. Craiglist and GumTree are tow websites which are proofs of success of classified advertising. 

Why Classify: 

• Placing classified ads can promote your business and product offerings in a cost-effective manner. 
• Classified ads receive a great online exposure if they are strategically placed. 
• These ads come under niche marketing because people looking for a certain product or serving are sure to find your ads because of the sole reason that you have classified them. 
• The sales lead generation and customer conversion potential of classified ads is far greater than any other form of advertising for the reason that they are sought after by the customers themselves. 

How Online Classified Ads Work

Tips for Successful Classified Advertising: 

All classified ads should follow the consumer behavior principle of AIDA i.e. Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Here is what you need to do to follow AIDA for your classified ads: 

1. Grab the attention of your target audience with an eye-catching headline that is how the readers or viewers will single out your ad from tones of others. 

2. The opening of your classified ad should spark the interest of the reader by incorporating something engaging in the content. 

3. Perk up the desires of your target audience for your product offerings by a well-written and persuasive body. 

4. The ad should always end with a call to action, so that customers are motivated to do what you want them to do. 

The number of online visitors is greater than ever, more so in this digital age when everything is done over the internet. The surge in the number of customers who use internet to make their purchase decision cannot be ignored. Thus, online classified advertising should be integrated into your overall marketing plans for the benefits and exposure that you can gain from it will be lost otherwise. 

Effective Online Classified Advertising Strategies: 

• The key to success is to understand your target market. You need to know them inside out. Demographics will be highly useful is depicting the internet usage trends of your customers. 
• Design your ads such that they will hold an appeal to your target audience and will be picked up by them among hordes of classified ads. 
• Keyword research is extremely important. Like other internet marketing tools, online classified ads will also only be successful if they can generate traffic to your website. For that you need to include relevant target keyword phrases in your classified ads. 
• Employ the online ad writing tools so as to help you with writing, formatting and editing your ads to get the most out of them. 
• Use software to help speed up the process of classified ads’ posting to a number of good websites. For the reason that internet marketing is all about being at the right place, on the right time. 
• Post your classified ads on your websites made for the purpose. Strategic placements will bring in a steady stream of profits along with customers. 
• Develop an auto-responder to tackle the incoming customers’ queries due to online classified advertising. 

Online classified advertising has become a cinch with all the software for posting, writing and editing ads. All you need to do now is to incorporate them in your internet marketing strategy to reap the benefits of this tool.