Digital advertising has appealing features, but it also has limits for the average company going it alone.

At first glance, the internet would seem to provide the perfect medium for advertising – far better, in fact, than the three-channel television of yore. Sure, you can no longer reach a mass audience with a single ad on a hit TV show – but you can do something that’s even more effective.

You can precisely target the group of people you want to reach with your ads. Facebook, Google and YouTube offer the ability to do this with just a few clicks of the mouse. As a result, unlike in the olden days of television, you don’t have to broadcast your message to nearly everyone in the hope of reaching a particular demographic.

But wait – it gets even better! You can also reach your target group anywhere, anytime. You don’t have to wait until they’re in front of the television at 9:00 p.m. Your ad can show up on their Facebook timeline whenever they log on, wherever they are.

And here’s the icing on the cake: you can measure your results with a level of precision that would make 1960s advertising executives weep with envy. You can see exactly how many people saw your ad, clicked on it and bought your product as a result. That allows you to optimize your content and advertising budget, based on what works and what doesn’t.

There’s just one problem: every other company can do all of this, too. Thus, people are bombarded with ads just about everywhere they go online. So even if they’re precisely targeted, most of your ads will just end up becoming yet another thing to ignore.

Knowing this, many companies seek refuge in another approach to online marketing: search engine optimization, or SEO. Here, the hope is that by using just the right keywords, your company’s website will end up in the top results on Google when someone searches for the type of product you offer.

But most Google searches yield more than a dozen pages of results, and only a few companies will get their SEO so right that they’ll be presented on the first page. The rest will be on the dreaded second page (or worse).

Fortunately, there are steps we can take to approach marketing more effectively. Contact Procure Media today for a free consultation.