The pandemic had severely squeezed the marketing channels for small businesses. After a year of trouble and turmoil, most businesses are excited to return to their pre-COVID norms and eventually restart their shop. The excitement is heavily accompanied by the hope to gather more customers due to the short supply being met now. Hence, more than half of businesses included in a report hinted at increasing their marketing frequency in the Q3 of 2021. Most hope to incorporate more marketing channels to grow their small-medium business.

The pandemic exposed the importance of effective marketing strategies and advertising channels. Spreading your brand’s message on the right channels can garner new customers, but advertising on the wrong platforms will lead to loss of resources and no relevant leads. Hence, here are the three top paid media platforms you should be using.

1. Facebook Ads

Facebook has long enjoyed the most active users. However, after the addition of advertising, the app has become a haven for businesses to market their products and produce higher sales effectively. In addition, the pay-per-click pricing model makes it highly affordable for small businesses and produces great returns.

Some of the benefits of advertising on Facebook include:

• The platform boasts more than 2.8 billion active users.
• The average return on investment of Facebook ads is 400% – 450%.
• Cost is cheap, ranging from $0.5 to $3.5 (depending on industry).

Advertising on Facebook is a no-brainer. Apart from the large user base, the company also offers great options such as audience targeting, which is arguably better than that of Google Ads. The app can display your ads to not only those who made a prior purchase of your product or a similar product but also to those who are interested in your industry. Facebook offers a lot of options to small and medium businesses.

2. Google Ads

The most commonly known marketing channel to grow small and medium businesses is Google. Google handles ninety-two percent of the world’s searches. Hence, the company collects and analyses more data about a person than any other company. Such strong analytical abilities allow Google to predict exactly what a person wants and when they want it. However, for such premium services, a premium price is also levied. The pricing policy is similar to that of Facebook, but costs start from $1 to $6 (depending on the industry). Though this might seem far-fetched, on average, every dollar spent on Google Ads brings in $8 of revenue. In addition, Google also displays ads on third-party affiliated websites. This increases the specificity of the ads displayed to a particular customer.

Microsoft advertising is similar to Google Ads and boasts a substantial user base. Though it cannot be regarded as a great marketing channel to grow your small business on its own, when run in conjunction with Google Ads, it could produce great results. Create a Microsoft Advertising account and import your Google Ads into the account. Now you can run two similar campaigns and on two great platforms.

3. Amazon Advertising

Amazon advertising has not yet hit mainstream marketing channels to grow small businesses, but it has certainly started to leave an impact. About 50% of all online shopping searches in the US start from Amazon. So, a business’s commitment to their sales can be questioned if they’re not yet selling on Amazon.

More than half of Amazon’s sales come from third-party sellers, and the e-commerce giant has also started to open physical stores around the world. Amazon also follows a similar pay-per-click policy to that of Google and Facebook. However, an average rate of $0.81 for every click is significantly lower than that of the other two. Most would argue that the app does not observe enough traffic to invest in its advertising policy significantly. However, e-commerce has enjoyed a dramatic boost after the pandemic, and the numbers will only move upwards.

The aforementioned companies are the top advertising channels to grow small and medium businesses. Each of the platforms discussed above is a great method to better put your product out in the market. However, they do not have to work in isolation or independently. Instead, generate multichannel marketing strategies to incorporate the best of all these worlds and effectively target potential customers.