Targeted adverts, viral content and e-newsletters: what each one buys you

The three technologies named on your specification reach a customer in a different way and let a business down in a different way.

1. Targeted advertising online takes the waste out of a budget, because the platform shows the advert only to people whose data matches the target market, so more of a £500 spend lands on people who might buy and the cost of winning each sale falls.
   1. Its weakness is that an advert following a customer from site to site feels intrusive, and the business is holding personal data it must collect and store lawfully, which is a cost in itself and a threat to its reputation if it gets that wrong.
2. Viral advertising spreads at almost no cost because the audience does the sharing, so one video made once can reach a hundred thousand people without the business buying any extra advertising space.
   1. It cannot be planned, though, since the audience decides what gets shared and content sometimes travels for the wrong reasons, so a business can treat a viral hit as a bonus but never as the campaign it budgeted for.
3. E-newsletters go to people who have already shown interest by handing over an address, so a far higher share of them read it than would read an advert shown to strangers, and the next one costs only the time taken to write it.
   1. Their weakness is that an email is easy to ignore and easy to unsubscribe from, so sending too many trims the very list the business spent months building.

Social media: reach, reviews and influencers

1. Social media does three things for promotion that a printed advert cannot.
   1. Reach: a page and its posts sit in thousands of feeds for the cost of the time taken to write them, so a start-up is visible before it has any advertising budget at all.
   2. Spread: customers pass the message on by sharing a post or leaving a review, and a recommendation from another customer is trusted more than anything the business says about itself.
   3. Reply: the business can answer a question or settle a complaint in the same public thread, so a problem turns into visible evidence of good service.
2. Paying an influencer to use the product borrows the trust their followers already place in them, which is how Gymshark grew by selling online through fitness influencers instead of buying television time it could not afford.
3. The weakness is that complaints are public, so one angry post sits underneath the advert where every future customer can read it, and it is shared faster than the business can answer it.
4. A page also has to be fed, because one whose last post is two years old tells a customer the business has probably closed, and that upkeep is paid staff time even though the account itself is free.

What technology changed: the cost per person and the ability to measure

1. Technology changed promotion in two structural ways, and both matter more than any single method.
   1. Cost per person reached: posting to a feed or emailing a list costs a fraction of a page in a newspaper, so a business run from a spare room can promote at a scale that once needed a national advertising budget.
   2. Measurability: the platform reports how many people saw the advert, how many clicked and how many then bought, so the business can trace a sale back to the advert that caused it.
2. A shop owner who spends £300 on a billboard never learns who saw it, while the same £300 spent online shows which version produced orders, so the next £300 goes to the advert that worked and the cost per sale keeps falling.
3. Measurement is what lets a business stop paying for promotion that does not sell anything, and that discipline matters most to a small firm, where £300 wasted is money it cannot spend on stock.
4. Deliveroo promotes through the app on the customer's phone, so an offer lands on the same device the order is placed on and the business can see whether that offer was used.