Advertising is a wonderful tool that your company can use to accomplish many different goals. But there are a lot of options, and it can be very confusing even for those who went to school for marketing. So here are five reasons why you should rip the bandage off and start advertising today. 1. It’s easier than you think Any media company worth working with has a highly trained and knowledgeable team that will walk you through the entire process of targeting the right audience, creating your content and advertisements, and analyzing the results. This can be a huge help in reducing the anxiety of trying to put an advertising campaign together by yourself, especially if marketing isn’t your main job function. 2. Your competition is already doing it Within your given market, there are only so many dollars being spent. Fighting for market share can be absolutely exhausting, and to make things even more difficult, your largest competitors are taking away your share of the market when they advertise. If you aren’t actively communicating with your prospects about the value you can deliver, they will spend their money somewhere else. 3. Your sales cycle takes a long time In highly complex B2B selling, the average sales cycle can take anywhere from three months to well over a year. To make this even more difficult, according to marketing and communications firm CEB, the average number of decision-makers involved in a B2B purchasing decision has increased from 5.4 to 6.8, which means that your sales cycle just become much longer. So don’t wait to start your advertising campaign when you need new sales the most, because that could take at least a year to see any results. Be proactive and start investing now in your future success! 4. You can directly control how people think about your company Word-of-mouth can be a great thing, but in the age of social media, all it takes is one bad customer experience to completely tarnish your company’s reputation (remember the guy infamously dragged off a United Airlines flight in 2017). Paid advertising gives you the opportunity to take back control of the conversation and present your company in the exact way that you want to be viewed. 5. Increased revenue! In business, there are only two ways to grow your sales. You can either increase revenue from your current customers, or you can find new customers. It’s really as simple as that. Advertising gives you a vehicle to not only reinforce your current customer’s purchases but also open the door to a plethora of new business opportunities. We hope by now that you are feeling excited by the prospect of finding the right media partner, taking market share away from your competitors, keeping your sales pipeline full so that there is never any downtime, and staying in control of how people view your company. And, oh, yeah, growing sales!