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What is Digital Advertising? Definition, Types and Strategies
Digital advertising is the present and the future. As the total number of internet users’ increases, more marketers are turning to this digital space for advertising their businesses.
What makes this form of advertising so effective is the plethora of affordable options you have at your disposal. This allows you to market your business to a larger and even more specific target audience.
If you’ve been wondering what digital advertising and marketing is, you’ve come to the right place. This article will tell you everything you need to know about this form of advertising and how you can effectively use it to promote your business.
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Table of Contents
What is Digital Advertising?
Digital advertising is a data-driven process in which a company publishes promotional content about the products or services they’re selling on various online platforms. Some of these platforms include search engines like Google, social media websites, and other websites.
An effective digital ad campaign aims to target consumers at every stage of their purchasing process. Therefore, the main goal is to bring awareness about the brand or product and encourage users to make a purchase. This, in turn, will improve the amount of revenue a company generates on the whole.
What Are the Different Types of Digital Advertising?
There are four main types of digital advertising. Here are some details on each of them and how you can use them to promote your business.
Social Media Advertising
Social media platforms are an excellent place to advertise your business. Some of the most commonly used platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Advertisements on social media platforms can be in the form of videos, images, or text. Social media advertising is great because it can help you target a certain audience effectively.
Social media platforms like Facebook collect a lot of information on their users so that the digital advertisements on users’ feeds are tailored to their preferences and interests. This can improve the chances of converting users into customers of your products or services.
What’s more, some social media platforms allow businesses to access options for additional bidding. For example, you can opt for the cost-per-send (CPS) feature on LinkedIn. This way, you can reach passive candidates more effectively.
Internet users spend 33% of their internet time on social media platforms, so it’s wise to include your digital ads on these platforms.
Search Engine Advertising
You can pay search engines like Google to feature your ad on the search engine results page (SERP). This works on the basis of keywords.
What this means is that every time a user searches for a certain keyword, your ad will be present at the top of the SERP.
For example, if your business sells office desks, you could use a keyword like “oak desks for sale” in your ad. So, when a user searches for this keyword, your ad will be present on the SERP.
A keyword like the one mentioned above is useful because it’s transactional. This means that it’s related to purchasing a product.
Using transactional keywords are more useful because you have a better chance of attracting a user to visit your online store if they’re already looking to buy something.
You can advertise your business, products, or services with Google Ads. This is a relatively affordable method of digital advertising, and it has a great return on investment (ROI).
According to Google Ads, the value of search clicks (i.e., the clicks your digital advertisement gets on the SERP) is 70% of ad clicks (your other ads on Google-owned platforms).
Therefore, you can receive 8 times what you spend on your ad clicks. You have to pay for ad clicks in the form of cost per click (CPC). Here’s a breakdown of the calculation.
Influencer-Based Advertising
Using influencers to advertise your product is a quick and easy way to reach your target audience. Influencers on social media platforms like Instagram usually have hundreds of thousands of followers or even millions in some cases.
Therefore, getting them to post ads for your product will bring awareness to their followers about your business and what you have to offer. It will also help in converting these users into eventual customers, as the influencer uploads more posts over time.
A long-term advertisement plan can prove beneficial as that will do a better job of convincing users of the quality and effectiveness of your product.
A report by Mediakix shows that 81% of marketers admit that influencer marketing yields a comparable amount of ROI as other methods.48% of marketers admit that influencer marketing is better than other methods.
Therefore, this type of digital advertising is definitely worth exploring for increasing brand awareness and generating leads.
Display Advertising
Display advertising is a type of digital media advertising in which graphics such images and videos are used to promote a product on various digital platforms like websites, social media platforms, and others.
This is particularly useful when used on websites like YouTube because it is already a video-based website. If you use Google for your ad campaign, you can also have your ad videos featured on YouTube before a user plays a video.
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular, as research shows that video marketers have accounted for an increase in brand awareness by 54%. According to HubSpot, video is the number 1 strategy used by content marketers over various others.
What Are the Advantages of Digital Advertising?
Now that you understand what it is, you must learn about why digital advertising works. Here are some important advantages to using these kinds of ads.
Digital Advertising Is Accessible to All Ad Budgets
One of the best things about digital media advertising is that you can create an effective promotional campaign, regardless of what your budget is. Advertising on platforms like Google and Facebook start at a relatively low price.
This makes it accessible for small businesses as well. So, you can make a bid for the cost-per-click (CPC) and begin promoting your business. As mentioned earlier, with search ads on Google Ads, your business can get an ROI that’s 8 times the amount you spend.
So, the ROI may stay somewhat consistent even if your ad budget is low, provided that your campaign is effective.
That said, if you have a relatively high ad budget for your business, you can pay more money for better reach. This way, you can increase your business’s awareness, and possibly the number of conversions as well.
Digital Advertising is Targeted to Specific Audiences
Platforms like Google and Facebook collect a lot of information on users. This includes what their interests are, what part of the demographic they belong to, and the pages they follow.
So, when you use either platform for your digital ads, certain algorithms will ensure that your ad is marketed to people who are interested in the content you’re trying to promote.
This way, your ad will have a better chance of being successful in grabbing users’ attention. This, in turn, can improve the number of conversions you get on your website.
Digital Advertising Shows Quick Results
While it’s important to use techniques like SEO to organically increase the traffic on your website, an effective digital ads campaign will provide quick results.
The number of clicks, traffic, or phone calls will almost instantaneously increase with advertisements. While on the other hand, a content marketing strategy may increase traffic after months of effort.
Quick results are especially useful for small businesses that need to increase the revenue on a timely basis.
Digital Advertising Helps Measure the Results of Your Ad Campaign
With traditional advertising, it may be difficult to track how many people have seen your billboard, or your ad in a magazine. However, with digital advertising, you can track exactly how many people have clicked on your ad.
What’s more, with display advertising such as video marketing, you can track how many people watched the video and whether they watched it till the end or not.
This way, you’ll know whether your ad campaign is as effective as you’d hope it would be. If not, you can tweak your strategy according to the data you have to improve the effectiveness of the campaign.
If you’re using Google Ads for your ads, you can track your progress by simply logging in to your account. There, you can learn about how much of the video users watched.
Digital Advertising Allows You to Advertise Anywhere
With traditional advertising, businesses’ ads were usually restricted to certain geographical locations. However, digital advertising offers businesses to reach their target audience to any part of the world through the internet.
What’s more, as more people are using their mobile phones to use the internet, they can view your ads on the go.
In 2017, the global ad revenue was greater for desktop devices at 55%, while it was 45% of mobile devices.
However, in 2019, the ad-revenue share for mobile devices was more than half– 52% for mobile devices and 48% for desktop.
The percentage share of ad revenue from mobile devices is expected to increase over the years.
What Are Some Digital Advertising Strategies You Can Use?
If you want to know what digital ads strategy you should use for your business, you must first access what your goal you’re trying to accomplish with your ad strategy.
Here are some goals that you can achieve with an effective ad campaign.
- Increase awareness of your brand
- Generate more leads
- Increase the total number of customers
- Encourage customers to spend more on your products or services
- Increase the number of sales of your products or services
Once you have your goal in mind, you can tailor your ad campaign to accomplish that. Here are some strategies, along with digital advertising examples, that you can use to make the most out of your advertising campaign.
Target Your Audience Effectively
To make the most of your digital advertising, you must effectively target the audience you want to market your business or products and services to.
You can increase your leads, conversions, and eventually sales by reaching the people who’ll be interested in what you have to offer.
Here are some ways you can ensure that your digital ads reach your target audience.
Use Platforms that Track Users’ Interests
You should consider using platforms like Google and Facebook for your ads because these platforms make a record of users’ interests and searches.
This information is then used in advertisement algorithms to ensure that users see ads that they’ve shown interest in in the past.
Use Effective Keywords
We cannot stress how important keywords are for finding the right target audience. Other than being used for SEO purposes, keywords are also important for search ads by Google Ads.
The keywords you use should always be related to your business. Here’s what a Google search ad looks like.
Use Remarketing Strategies
Remarketing is a process in which your ad appears on a user’s screen after they viewed your ad or a product or service related to your ad.
This can be a good way to encourage users to make a purchase by reminding them about what your products or services your business provides.
Make a Note of the Demographics
You should aim to limit your target audience by their demographics. Important factors for determining your target audience include people’s age group, gender (in some cases), geographical location, parental status, and more.
Use Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM) for Raising Awareness
When using a digital ad platform like Facebook or Google, you can choose to pay for impressions instead of clicks. Impressions are the number of times your ad appears on users’ screens. An impression is still counted, even if it appears again for the same user.
This is an effective strategy for increasing awareness of your business. This is because your goal with this kind of strategy is to increase awareness and not necessarily invite users to make a purchase at the moment they view the ad.
Use Geofencing Advertising for Reaching Your Target Audience
An effective way to market your business to your target audience is using geofencing advertising.
Geofencing advertising is a marketing process in which your promotional content is limited to a certain geographical location.
So, if a user moves out of the location, they will not see the ad anymore. This form of advertising is limited to mobile for the most part.
This form of advertising is important because it allows you to spend money only on people who will be interested in your product or service and can access it.
For example, if your services are limited to a specific city, there’s really no point in advertising it to people who won’t have access to it.
So, you should consider limiting your digital ads to specific geographical locations if your business’s services are limited to that location.
Create Attention-Grabbing Ad Copy to Generate Leads
To generate leads, you’ll have to make sure that your ad makes them interested in what you have to offer. The best way to do that is by creating an attention-grabbing ad copy. Ad copy is the message that you’re trying to tell your audience through your ad.
Your ad copy should be a combination of text and imagery, or a combination text, audio, and video.
You must make sure that your copy is short and clear. Your audience should be able to comprehend your message in a matter of seconds.
Users don’t like running into ads on the internet, so you have to do your best to make sure to spark interest in your business or product.
That said, research shows that the lowest number of users found static images of digital ads annoying (34.2%).
Use Influencer Advertising for Increasing Customers
Working with an influencer who is a part of your target audience is a great digital advertising strategy for increasing your total number of customers.
For example, if your business creates reusable water bottles for gym-use, you can work with a fitness influencer to promote your product. Because they have some relation to the product, they’ll have a better chance of convincing their followers why using your product is a good decision.
In addition to that, a fitness influencer on Instagram is bound to have many other followers who are interested in fitness. Therefore, those followers are the perfect target audience to market your product.
If your business has many followers on one or more social media platforms, you can consider partnering up with an influencer to promote each other’s social media accounts. This can be a good way to promote your business at a relatively low cost.
In the example below, @sydneyloveleigh in a fitness influencer on Instagram. She can be categorized as a micro-influencer because her followers on this social media platform are in the tens of thousands.
In this example, Sydney is promoting a product by an activewear brand called Nuxactive. This promotion is useful for Nuxactive because its products are related to the content she produces and shares on her account, i.e., fitness.
Therefore, this way, Nuxactivehas the opportunity to interact directly with their target audience – which is Sydney’s followers.
Other Forms of Influencers You Can Work With
There are other forms of influencer advertising you consider opting for when promoting your business. Another form of influencers is celebrity influencers.
Paying a celebrity for promoting your brand may not be feasible for small businesses because they are significantly more expensive than micro-influencers.
Other than that, you can consider using a blog influencer to promote your business.
In order for this form of digital advertising to be effective, you must get in touch with a blogger who has a significantly large following. You can either work with a writer or a video blogger on YouTube.
Promoting your business through videos is an effective method, so working with a well-established video blogger is an excellent idea.
Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising for Conversions
If your goal for your digital advertising campaign is to increase the number of conversions on your website, you should consider using a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) advertising model.
Both of these are essentially the same thing, and you will have to pay the advertising platform for each click you get on the ad.
There are various platforms that provide this service. Some of these include Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Bing Ads.
On all these platforms, you’ll have to bid for a price. Factors that influence the bidding cost for each can vary on the following factors.
- The industry your ad falls under
- The competition for the ad space
- The number of times your ad will appear on a screen
- The relevance your ad has to your target audience
Use Email Marketing to Encourage Customers to Spend More
If you want to effectively market your business, email lead generation practices are the best way to do just that. Email marketing requires you to have a comprehensive list of subscribers.
You can use social media platforms for developing and increasing your list of quality subscribers. You must remember that you have to give something to get something in return.
Therefore, attract customers by offering a promotional discount or a free sample book. This way, you’ll have more people interested in your business, and hence, generate more leads as a result.
As users subscribe to your email list, you’ll have a method of communicating with them. This is how you can convert them into customers
Now, it’s important that you keep your subscribers interested in your business.
You can do this by sending emails when you’re promoting a certain discounted deal for your product.
You must avoid sending regular emails to your subscribers because this will be considered spam.
As a result, your emails will go into the spam folder, and users will lose interest in your business.
With the well-timed and informative emails, you can eventually use this form of digital advertising to convert your leads to customers.
Once you have customers on your email subscribers list, you can use this opportunity to encourage them to spend more on your business.
You can do this by informing them about certain promotions, or you can consider giving regular customers discounted deals and other perks.
This way, they may purchase more of your products or services and increase your business’s overall revenue in the process.
Email marketing is still an effective strategy for small businesses because it doesn’t cost much, and it can be a great way to get in direct contact with your customers. Email marketing accounts for 23% of the marketing tactics small businesses use. This is the second-highest share and is tied with digital advertising.
Use Video Advertising for Your Mobile Advertising
A lot of users spend time using the internet on their mobile phones. Therefore, it’s important that you create advertisements that are specifically tailored for mobile devices.
One of the best ways to advertise your business on mobile devices is through video advertising. You can also use platforms like Facebook and YouTube for your video-based digital ads.
On both Facebook and YouTube, users cannot skip video ads for about 6 to 10 seconds. On YouTube, the ad usually plays before and after short videos.
However, it can play in the middle of a significantly longer video as well. On the other hand, on Facebook, the video ad usually plays after about a minute of the video. Now, it should be your goal to get the message across in the first few seconds.
This way, users will know about your brand, and they may want to search you up at another time.
Your second goal with that ad is to encourage users to continue watching your ad, even after they can skip it.
Therefore, you need to grab their attention from the moment your ad plays. Provide them with interesting information at the start, and elaborate on it in the rest of the video.
Video advertising is becoming increasingly popular because it’s a quick and effective method of promoting a business or product. In the US, the share of mobile ad requests increased from 5.6% in the first quarter of 2017 to 51.6% in the second quarter of 2018.
Use Gaming Apps for Targeting Your Audience
Many gaming apps on mobile devices incorporate video-based digital ads within the apps.
These apps can be a good way to reach your target audience. For example, if your business is an online bookstore, you can target trivia-based gaming apps on mobile devices.
Players of such games are bound to be readers as well, so this is a quick and easy way to generate leads for your business.
Optimize for SEO
In order to make sure that your digital media ads are successful, you must have some knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a process in which you optimize your online content in a certain way so that it makes it to the top of SERPs. So, if you’re using Search Ads on Google Ads, you must know which keywords to use.
Your aim should be to use a keyword that users search for. This will improve the chances of them finding your ad.
You can use a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest to find your keywords. It’s a free tool, and all you have to do is just type in words related to your business or the products or services you provide.
With every search, the tool will provide related keywords that users search for and the competition for those keywords.
Unspecific and common keywords tend to have high competition because more users search for those. Using such keywords for your Search Ads may make it difficult for users to locate your business.
SEO Counteracts Ad Blockers
A lot of users now use ad blockers to counteract the spam ads they find all over the internet. Between 2014 and 2018, ad blocking increased from 15.7 % to 25.2% in the US.
This is because users don’t want to have to deal with intrusive ads every time they’re on the internet. These ad blockers can make it difficult for users to find your ad, and consequently, your business.
One way to way counteract this is to optimize your digital advertisements for SEO. This way, users can reach your ads organically as well.
Last Few Words on Digital Advertising
What really sets digital advertising apart from other marketing strategies is that it provides businesses with fast results – and the best part is that it’s simple to use and affordable.
That said, you have to make sure that you target your audience effectively and provide them with content that they’re interested in.
In addition to that, make sure that you select an advertising platform that will provide you with the best access to your targeted audience.
This includes using Google Ads for targeted search ads, Instagram for influencer advertising, and video advertising for platforms like YouTube.
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We’ve made it our goal to educate ourselves on current SEO trends and algorithms for various types of websites and online platforms. This allows us to be in a better position to help your business grow faster and more effectively.
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