So, it’s time to choose your advertising platform, is it? Oh, that’s a heady decision to make, I know. There are so many different platforms out there, with so many businesses clamoring to try to make everything work in tandem for them that it can seem like a lost cause to really be strategic with this. It’s become a standard practice (though not a good one) to just deploy over everything you possibly can, and hope for success by attrition. Well, that works, I suppose, but it also overwhelms your prospects, and won’t really give you a very pretty ROI metric to report back to the financial people. Then your butt’s in hot water. What can you do? How do you pick an appropriate advertising platform, or a combination of several, that’s likely to be right for you? Well, heck. I think I can help a little bit. #1 – B2B or B2C? The first factor to consider is, are you advertising business to business, or business to customer? This makes a huge difference in what you can or can’t immediately rule out. Why is this? With business to business, there are some channels that only work by sheer chance, where others hit them where it counts. For example, radio, television and other multimedia advertising doesn’t really work that well for most B2B advertising, because even if people are at work listening to these things, they’re disconnected from it, associating any advertising coming through those channels with B2C. Contrarily, things like web advertisements (especially simple, elegant text ads), social advertisements and email marketing are going to make that connection with them, that it is applicable to their business lives. #2 – Wide or Narrow Demographic? Ok, let’s assume you’re B2C from this point, since I’ve covered what mostly works for B2B in the first point. Now, are you targeting a wide demographic of people in general, or is this a very specific group of people? For example, a product specifically for women or men, or targeted to children, or a niche interest group would require choosing your platform a little more carefully than with a wide demographic. Things like multimedia advertising for very specific demographics work less fantastically than social advertising, affiliate programs and using niche targeting advertising services like Clickbank and Google Adsense/Adwords. Contrarily, while general demographics work fine with those, you can also use multimedia advertising more effectively, not having to worry about hitting specific time slots or networks like you do for niche interests. #3 – Budget Finally, we have budget concerns. If you have a very small advertising budget, then using primarily online advertising is going to be the way to go. Using SEO-based content posting, ad distribution services and other similar platforms, as well as that social push I keep mentioning are the cheaper way to advertise. But, if you have a good advertising budget, and see, from the other points, a good chance of hitting targets with costlier multimedia advertising, signage and guerilla tactics that do eat a good amount of money, then they are viable solutions.