I have come across many businesses in South Africa today who ask me, “why should my business advertise online?” It is no secret that businesses in South Africa had not realised the full potential of online advertising yet and the returns and rewards that this medium of advertising offers.

In the more developed countries, online advertising has become a multi billion dollar industry with many large corporations spending large percentages of their marketing budgets on online advertising. The main hindrance businesses in South Africa currently have with online advertising is that there are not enough people in South Africa who are online to advertise to. Not every household in South Africa has a computer let alone an internet connection. A large percentage of the South African population is still not online. Getting connected to the internet is still very expensive in South Africa. I would not be surprised if the cost of internet connectivity in South Africa is amongst the most expensive in the world. But plans are in place to increase the number of internet connections in South Africa and to make it affordable. I predict that within the next two years, a large percentage of South Africans will have internet connectivity and at an affordable rate. It is not a question of if a large percentage of South Africans will be online but more a matter of when and it is sooner rather than later.
With online advertising, the business wanting to advertise online must make sure that their advertising campaign is targeted towards its target market. That is the beauty of online marketing; one can target people you know will respond to your advert. Look at advertising on the TV, a business can flight an ad on TV and the demographics of the people watching that particular show or channel vary greatly. But when it comes to online advertising, one can place their ads on websites or newsletters which their target market constantly read and visit.

Online advertising also has the benefit of being measurable. If an ad is placed on a website, it is so easy to track how many times that ad has appeared i.e. how many people have seen that ad, and at the same time see how many people actually clicked on that ad. So it is easy to see if your online advertising campaign is being a success or not and tweak it accordingly to make it better based on the statistics obtained.

In South Africa today there are not that many websites that are run by South African businesses which receive a high amount of traffic. Most of the websites visited in South Africa are your major international websites like Yahoo, Facebook and Google. There are not many highly visited local websites outside the Media24 websites, the online banking websites and the airliners websites. Advertising on these websites is relatively expensive, especially for small businesses wanting to advertise online. One has to make sure if they want to advertise their business online that they place their ads on websites which have high traffic. The more high traffic websites that come along in South Africa the better and businesses will start to have the ability to pick from a variety of websites to advertise on. This brings me back to my earlier point of there not being many South Africans online. If there were more South Africans online then they would visit more websites and thus create more traffic.

The timing could not be any better right now for businesses to start paying more attention to online advertising as this sector is set to grow over the next few years in South Africa. Businesses in the Online Media sector should also start looking at producing websites with great content which will drive a lot of visitors as more and more South Africans get online.

Feel free to contact us at Rand Mediacom for any further information you may require regard online advertising in South Africa.