Digital Advertising: Understanding The Power Of Advertising In The Digital World
Digital communication is the number one way to engage with your audience - be that through advertising on social media, paid search advertising, content-rich blogs, or pretty much any advertising material you publish on the internet and in the digital space.
Advertising is, of course, only one piece of the marketing puzzle but a massively important one. Learn how to do effective advertising in the digital world and you are on your way to marketing success.
Get your advertising right, and you have an almost limitless potential customer base.
Get your advertising wrong, and you can wave your marketing budget goodbye with very little return on your digital ad campaign.
Let's think about the scope of digital advertising and the right media formats to use to achieve the growth you're looking for.
Choosing The Right Digital Advertising Strategy
For many years, traditional company-to-customer advertising was mostly physical. We're talking about traditional advertising like magazines, flyers, and printed ads. There was little digital content and advertising, as the prevalent use of personal devices such as laptops and smartphones had yet to develop.
These days, if you aren't on a social media platform, your advertising is all but invisible to a considerable chunk of the population.
Digital Platforms for Advertising
Digital advertising is a compelling business tool to help you get in front of a larger audience. It covers a broad scope of interfaces:
Web browsers (mobile or desktop)
Social media pages
Blogs, newsletters, email campaigns
Apps and downloadable content
If it's online and it’s advertising designed to promote your business, brand, or product, it's digital. The crucial target for this sort of advertising is to be present where your customers are. Therefore, as expert marketers know, a great marketing strategy always starts with demographic analysis.
Take the time to learn about the audiences you're selling to, what they value, how you can make their lives better, and you're one step closer to implementing a seriously valuable advertising strategy.
Not every potential customer will see all your advertisements, so it's essential to integrate some level of flexibility into your advertising campaigns. For example, if you've invested in a killer business ad campaign, you want to be able to migrate that advertising across your network and all media platforms to have the greatest impact.
We'll talk a bit more about the different channels digital advertisers use shortly. The first step, though, in your advertising strategy is to think about your customer age group, preferred digital mediums, and the advertising style they want to see!
Using Social Media Ads As A Digital Advertising Tool
Many digital advertising options are complementary tools you'll want to use simultaneously. On Facebook or Instagram, for example, a user will see a tremendous variety of digital content and ads. The ads include:
Social content (promoted posts such as sponsored advertising or paid-for influencer ads)
Native digital advertising (strategically placed sponsored marketing)
Display advertising (videos, images, and text)
Developing a clear brand and tone of voice is vital before you start advertising to improve your visibility and online presence. It aligns your advertising, so everything works cohesively to communicate to your audience those key messages about who you are, your products or services, and what you stand for. A clear digital advertising campaign will help drive traffic to your website and improve the effectiveness of your social media ads.
How Do Advertisers Use Digital Advertising?
Perhaps the best feature of digital ads is that they're adaptable and offer razor-sharp advertising accuracy. On the internet, you can target business ads as broadly or precisely as you wish. For example, you can create an ad for your product that will be shown to specific mobile device users, at a specific time, and on a specific social media account.
Targeted advertising offers the opportunity to showcase your digital ads sorted by age groups, countries, interests, politics, and anything else that matters to the audience you're looking to connect with. Targeted ads also allow you to find customers who are interested in your specific products. Now, digital advertising used on social media doesn't have to be paid for. You can create ads and content that can do your advertising for free.
Organic ecommerce listings can go viral, provided they have stellar quality content - so a fantastic product video or a funny display graphic that people will want to share can have as significant an impact as paid media advertising services. The trick is to run ads that strengthen brand awareness and promote your services consistently.
Although you might be segmenting who you communicate with through different types of media advertising accounts or combining organic and paid digital ads (like PLA Google Ads), you're constantly advertising on-brand content, which can lead to more clicks on the ad and more conversions.
Tips For Advertising Through Social Media Channels
Digital advertising isn't just about social media. If you include other digital forms of advertising, you can grow your website traffic, email list, social media following, and online presence in a shorter amount of time. You can leverage email marketing, display advertising, and search engine marketing (SEM) simultaneously.
However, social media is a tool never to be ignored in your digital advertising package since the content reach is so phenomenal. This advertising opportunity is also pretty cost-efficient, as you can use the same digital advertising across multiple platforms, replicating the same content and ad for a different type of audience.
If your business is new to producing social media advertising, here are a few golden rules for creating ads:
Have an ad strategy: Know why you're creating each advertising account, the people you'll reach on the platform, what types of digital advertising work best there, and how you're going to make your advertising unique. Starting an advertising campaign on social media without a strategy in place typically results in ineffective ads and wasted time.
Use focused messaging: Every social media site has a different demographic. Yes, there are many consistencies between the online users, but you need your online advertising display to connect with the right users for that specific media platform and account. Learn who you want to target with your ad and create ads specifically for them.
Watch what's trending: Just like Google algorithms, you won't always generate an amazing lead with the same advertising strategy. Trends, consumer behaviors, popular topics, and social movements are all important for advertising on social media, so you'll need to keep on top of the trends and adjust your advertising accordingly to capitalize on those that align with your business and brand messaging.
Finally, make sure you allocate time to evaluate your advertising results. You wouldn't create an email marketing campaign without looking at your digital advertising open rate, bounces, and click metrics. The same applies to the results display available on your social media accounts.
Just like with email advertising, as you dive deeper into your social media advertising metrics, it will provide extremely valuable insights into things like the resulting traffic to your page, Google SEO performance, impressions, retweets, views, and engagements. It's important to use that ad feedback to decide how to tweak your digital advertising - or opt for a professional content marketing agency to take over the reins if the results of your ads aren't hitting your business aspirations.
Creating Quality Ads and Content For High-Impact Digital Marketing
Now that we've looked at some of the forms of advertising available online, let's think about the digital advertising content itself.
Because ad quality is king.
Design matters because it's the difference between putting advertising on the internet that people love - or spending hours on digital advertising that yields zero results. And we all want ads that convert. The media type also matters because if you're publishing a blog post or creating landing pages for Google SEO, you will be looking more at the text content in the ad.
The essential factors to generating traffic through email marketing will be elements like readability scoring, optimizing content, and offering value to your users.
For other types of digital advertising, users want to see businesses display creativity, which can easily be done through videos, GIFs, and graphics that entertain and showcase the services offered. In the digital world, ads have greater flexibility and the options are endless.
Here are some of the many digital marketing options:
Video design - essential for YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitter marketing. A Tweet with a video is six times more likely to display higher engagement, and a Facebook video post connects with 258% more users than text alone. Adding a video to your ad design will likely increase your social media effectiveness and the ad can be easily viewed on a mobile device.
Static images - users searching on Google want to find what they're looking for easily. Rich snippets (prime positioned content with a thumbnail image) draw from marketing files on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, so use an eye-catching, motivational advertising graphic, and you're improving your Google rankings as well as your social media presence. Static images are also a great option for native advertising.
Interactive digital advertising - another type of display ad that encourages your audience to get involved. Think polls, surveys, games, anything in which people aren't passive viewers but can interact in real-time with your business. Having users engage with your ad increases their likelihood of remembering your ad and that they will buy your product or services.
Professional advertising by marketers is substantially more effective than amateur social media marketing - but both have a place in the world of digital advertising.
Authenticity in marketing speaks volumes, so combining business events such as live broadcasts or Q&A sessions is a perfect way to enhance the reach of your posted digital advertising and back up the marketing messages delivered. It is also a powerful way of advertising that goes beyond typical ads seen on the internet.
Pitching Your Advertising and Digital Strategies Correctly
Whether you're using display advertising, want to perform better on Google search results, or feel like you have room to grow on social media, it's beyond critical you pitch your marketing and ad ideas to the right people.
Your company might have the biggest social media account audience, but people won't stick around for long if your advertising doesn't gel with their values or if they don't connect with your ads.
There are four simple ways to ensure your advertising is engaging with the right users:
Learn what's important to the people you want to reach with your advertising.
Adapt your digital advertising strategy to speak to your audience in their language.
Create an organic keyword library (also pretty essential for Google marketing!).
Pay attention to ad retargeting opportunities and build a relationship with new users until they're in a position to buy.
When you have a deep understanding of the right tone, imagery, and feel that your audience wants to experience, you can apply that knowledge to your marketing, ensuring each advertising project hits your targets and helps lead your consumers to buy your products or services.
The Benefits Of Advertising To Your Digital Audience On Their Own Terms
To summarize, advertising in the digital space isn't really about your brand. It's about your audience and delivering valuable, entertaining, and rich advertising material that meets the demands of your customer demographic.
The trick to the best marketing is that it meets those needs in spades, leaving customers wanting more. Stunning images, innovative graphics, quality videos, and original marketing campaigns represent your brand in the right way - and with the power of digital advertising, it can make a profound difference to your online performance. Learn more about google shopping ads and the differences between advertising and marketing.