Do you know what’s the best way to gain the attention of a wider audience? Show them advertisements, and they all will pay heed to you. In fact, businesses can not develop their marketing strategy unless they understand their target audience better, and how to attract the through advertisements. As of now, in the year 2022, the statistics suggest that advertising will gravitate towards social media. It is expected that the social media advertising budgets of companies will grow up to 12.45% annually by 2027.
Likewise, influencers marketing and video advertisements will become the popular choices of advertisers. This is quite reasonable because the COVID-19 pandemic times showed people that they can rely on digital platforms. And, this trend is more likely to continue until we get back to normal, or things change for the better. We understood the importance of advertisement, now let’s explore its advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of Advertisement
Unquestionably, advertisement provides a bunch of benefits to its users. Want to stay ahead in the market? Simply use advertisements. Furthermore, we have many types of advertising. A few of them are general, mobile, online, social media, and YouTube advertising. Here, is a list of 7 advantages of advertisement –
1. Provides means to introduce products and services
Advertising is a low-cost means to introduce new products and services. It lets you choose your target audience. Suppose your products and services can attract a specific audience, then advertising allows you to select factors such as age, gender, interest, location, and many more, based on which you can make your products and services accessible to them. Moreover, it helps you to achieve advertising goals by offering several options such as ad type, campaign duration, and budget. In simple words, it prompts people to choose your products and services.
2. Increases sales
It is very obvious that if advertising lets you introduce new products and services in the market, then it will increase your sales significantly. It provides the audience with all the details they require to trust the brand with their money. Not only that, but it attracts potential customers and keeps them and existing customers updated about the products and services. It has the ability to change the way the customer perceives the brand and helps them to stand out from their competitors, all the while increasing the sales. More and more people become aware of the brand when advertisements come into the picture.
3. Helps in exploring market
If you need to gain an understanding of the new market, then you have advertisements for this. It drives customer acquisition along with boosting sales. The advertising goals are achieved by educating the potential customers of the new market about the brand’s products and services. It persuades them into buying by generating the need and want for the products and services.
4. Connects directly with customers
Previously, it was a struggle for manufacturers to reach out to the customer directly. This is why there were intermediaries that made it possible. But, now we have advertisements that allow the manufacturers to focus on production and at the same time connect with the customers directly. The undeniable benefits of this direct communication are that manufacturers can save the costs of intermediaries, and the customers can get the products and services at comparatively lower costs.
5. Creates employment opportunities
By now, we know how important advertisement is for businesses to gain customers. But, it is equally important for the economy as it creates employment opportunities. With the popularity of advertisements, we can see more creative job roles. Additionally, there are companies now that solely focus on managing all the tasks involved in advertising.
6. Advertising builds brand identity
When you advertise your products or services, it automatically makes a lot of people view it. Even if they didn’t buy your product, chances are that most of them remembers your brand’s name given that you have a pretty good, engaging ad. Eventually, this will lead to the brand recognition. We all remember those Nike, or Pepsi ads in the past. They were entertaining, engaging, which made us remember them automatically, even though we didn’t consume their products even once.
7. Keeps a steady demand for the product or service
Advertising is not a one-time task. You should keep advertising your products as long as the product exists. No matter how good your products are, if they are not advertised properly, no one is going to buy them. Even if your product has been on the market for several years, you should still keep advertising them based on your budget. This way you will keep growing your user base, increasing the demand of your product, and driving more sales.
Disadvantages of Advertisement
We saw the advantages of advertising but as you all are aware, on the flip side there are disadvantages. So, let’s address the elephant in the room to complete our discussion. These are the disadvantages of advertising –
1. Deceptive advertising
Just to boost sales, some people can use advertisements to deceive customers. Deceptive advertising keeps the customers in the dark and misleads them. The information that needs to be shared with them, is kept away from them, and they stay uninformed. Usually, such advertising deceives the customers in terms of price, quantity, and quality of products and services. Furthermore, deceptive advertising can be used to fool customers about the warranty.
2. Creates confusion among buyers
Has this ever happened to you that, you saw one advertisement about something, then you saw another advertisement about the same thing, both conveying different information? And, you sit there baffled, debating which one to believe? This is the major drawback of advertisements, that it creates confusion among buyers. This directly impacts the confidence of the buyers regarding making the purchase, and in some cases, they end up making wrong buying decisions.
3. Encourages monopoly
When giant corporate entities invest millions in advertisements, then the small and medium-sized enterprises go unnoticed. This triggers a monopoly and goes against the interest of the public. There’s no denying that we need advertising to create awareness about products and services in the market, but if it is used to increase monopolistic control, then it will restrict competition.
4. Manipulates people’s spending
How many times it has happened to you that you didn’t need the products or services, and yet you ended up purchasing it because you were enticed by the advertisement? My guess is quite a few times, and we all feel guilty about it. But, it’s not your fault as rigorous research is conducted to create those advertisements with the intention of tempting customers into buying them even when they don’t need them in the first place.
5. Impacts social values
Advertisements trigger different emotions among the viewers, and not all of these emotions are positive. Some of them are negative, and it is used to gain monetary benefits. How often do you feel greedy to make instant purchasing decisions just to get additional rewards? You end up paying, even when you didn’t need it, to begin with. These advertisements are designed to create fear, pride, envy, and many such negative emotions to boost sales. Besides this, the usage of foul language makes things worse and negatively impacts social values.
6. Advertising costs money
Advertising your products or services needs extra money. It will add to the company costs, which may not be sustainable for startups. Most of the companies that are already grown spends millions of dollars every year on advertisements. Competing with these companies by spending more than their advertising budget will be impossible for a small firm. Because of this, companies will reach in a conclusion to not advertise their products.
7. Ads can be irritating
If you are advertising, you should do it properly, if not it will be irritating to the users. Nobody likes the 50th ad of the day to be boring. An average American is exposed to 5,000 to 12,000 ads each day. That sounds made up, but ads are not just what you see on your smartphone. Think about it. If you over do advertising, users may slowly start hating your product. No matter how good your product or service is, if you irritate your target audience, it will not result in good things. So you should advertise at a moderate level, with the help of their right to advertising tools, and with an engaging advertisement.