Entrepreneurs, online advertising comes with great benefits, but do remember to abide by the guidelines for online advertising. An entrepreneur has to ensure that all online advertising is easily recognizable as advertising and that they are not guilty of covert marketing. There are common guidelines for covert marketing in place and the main thing to remember is that all advertisements in places where editorial content is usually seen must be conveyed to the consumer as advertising; a consumer has to immediately know that advertising or paid content is in question.
The main guidelines to abide by are as follows:
- Advertising has to be easily recognizable in all its forms.
- An entrepreneur or an employee of that company must not falsely claim or give the impression that they are not acting for purposes relating to their trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely represent themselves as a consumer.
- Word choices, font size, images, font type, text color, background color, layout and media used, for example, determine whether something is considered to be an advertisement.
- Marking a post, message or advertorial clearly with the wording ‘advertising message’ in the beginning is adequately marked.
- Children and young people must understand that they are seeing an advertisement; it must contain a clear marker.
- If an advertisement is not clearly recognizable as an advertisement, the entrepreneur might be violating the rules on covert marketing.
Important notice to bloggers: A blog is considered to be an advertisement if a company has paid for their name or products to be mentioned in the blog. This includes posts written about free samples.
Tiliduunari’s 5 tips for online advertising:
- Advertise on Google with Google AdWords: Even a small budget will get you results and you only pay for the clicks on your advertisement.
- Advertise on Facebook, it is effective and you get your advertisement on the biggest social platform.
- Utilize e-mail marketing, because e-mail marketing is a very cost effective way to get your message across to potential buyers.
- Improve the position of your homepage in search engine results through search engine optimization.
- Get more visitors to your homepage with the help of banner advertising.
