Digital advertising has become a prominent channel used by marketers to promote products and services in today’s world. This is because almost everyone is on the web. It has become a part of our lives since the existence of the internet as we are using it almost everyday in our daily lives. From social medias, to performing searches on search engines, to using it on our mobile phones remotely anywhere in the world. That is where the people and the market are for you, marketers, or business owners, to reach out to your potential customers.
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According to Statista, it is expected that digital advertising spending from all around the world would reach around $389 billion dollars in 2021. That number is expected to further increase in the next few years making digital advertising one of the effective method businesses are using to get their customer’s attention.
What is digital advertising?
Digital advertising is the process of promoting your brand,products, services, or offerings, to potential customers via online platforms such as search engines, websites, social medias, or any other digital channels. Nowadays, people are everywhere on the web and anyone could exploit the use of the internet to advertise digitally to their target audience and gain the benefit from it. You can advertise on other people’s website, online discussion forums, or even on social medias to your friends and families.
Digital advertising vs traditional advertising
Before we have the internet, businesses promote their products or services using traditional advertising methods which includes billboards,newspaper ads, magazine ads, flyers, posters, brochures and many more. Now,this is not to say that this is not effective, it certainly has some certain value to it especially on creating brand awareness. Imagine you are driving and passing through a billboard with a brand on it. Subconsciously, the brand’s name will be registered in your mind and that is of a value to the advertisers. But what digital advertising can provide is much more to this.
Targeted audience
Digital advertising can provide a more specific and more targeted ads to your target customers. For traditional advertising, there is a certain limitation of how deep you can specify your ads to your targeted audience as it will be more to the broad and general audience in nature. By using ads online, you can set the demographic of who you want to target and get better results. Using platforms such as Google Ads, Bing Ads or Facebook Ads, these platforms studies the behaviors of their users and allow you to use their data for you to advertise better.
Affordable and Scalable
Creating ads online is not expensive as you may think. You can start with as low as $5 per day on Facebook and scale it as you please. It is a great start for especially small business owners or micro businesses out there to advertise at a budget. You can even get data of what you have advertise, analyse them, and scale them if it seems necessary.
The cost is nothing like the cost to advertise on newspaper or a billboard. Newspaper ads may cost you around $100,000 while billboards around $1,500 per month to start with. These channels are more suitable for stable-income businesses and large corporation for them to advertise to their market.
Easy to use
The idea of advertising is to reach out to many people that you can and promote your offerings. If you have many friends or followers on social medias, you can simply post something about your products and let your friends or followers know about it. Ask them to share your products on social media if they like it. You can also go through discussion forums that you can find online and promote on those platforms as well. By doing this, you would already reach out to a few people who may be interested in your products. And this is the easiest way to advertise without spending a dime.
Types of digital advertising
1. Search Engine
Almost every shopper in the world would go on and start doing product research online before deciding to buy. They would go on their preferred search engine such as Google or Bing and start searching away. Usually on top of every search, it will appear a few ads relating to the keyword of what you are searching, making it at the top of the first page of the search.People would be inclined to click the link and see what you’ve got to offer from there, getting them to your front door.
Keyword is key here should you opt to choose this type of digital advertising. Go on Google keyword planner or Ahrefs keyword explorer and check on low competitive keywords related to your niche. It will be a lot easier to compete with other businesses using this technique for you to get better results.
2. Display Ads
Display ads mainly embeds compelling images and videos into the ads to further entice people to make a purchase decision. It also doesn’t just appear on search engines but other websites that is affiliated with the search engine. For example, under Google, you can also display ads on YouTube,which is one of Google’s subsidiaries. At the start of any video that is related to your niche can appear your ads before the viewer proceed with whatever they want to watch.
In search engine, you can plant in images to your ads and make it more interesting and intriguing to people who are searching your products rather than just normal text ads.
3. Native Ads
Native advertisements are ads that appear on websites that blends into the content of the web page. It doesn’t entirely look like an ad but appear more in the name of other related stories, promoted stories, recommended reading or sponsored content, that is related to the specific web page that you’re on. As such, readers who are curious to know more would eventually click on the ads and direct them to your selling page.
You can try native advertisement using content discovery websites such as Taboola or Outbrain.
4. Social Media
Statista suggested that there are:
- 2.74 billion active users on Facebook
- 2.29 billion active users on YouTube
- 1.22 billion active users on Instagram
- 689 million active users on TikTok
- 442 million active users on Pinterest
- 430 million active users on Reddit
- 353 million active users on Twitter
What we can understand from this is that your targeted customers are highly probable that they are on these social medias. As such, you should leverage on these platforms and perform social media ads through Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, Pinterest ads, Reddit ads and Twitter ads as well. All of these allow you to create text, image, and video ads for you to engage with your potential customers and make a sale out of your products or services. Nowadays, social media has become something that is indispensable that we are on it every single day in our lives.
5. Influencer
There is also influencer marketing as a means of digital advertising. Influencers are people with a lot of followers on social medias. Usually, it was always celebrities that have amazing followers but now, you can become a celebrity after being an influencer. What good it does to us advertisers are that you can utilize them to promote your products at a certain fee set between you and the influencer. Once they post a review of your products, your product will reach out to all of their followers that can go up to a million followers.
The charging mechanism varies and depends on how many followers does an influencer has. The more followers they have, the higher the price they can demand. If you’re just starting out, look for micro influencers and scale to big-time influencer when you have the budget.
6. Email
Email also is another form of digital advertising. The term email marketing would probably comes to mind when using this channel but despite the marketing automation process where it caters to every stage of a buyer’s buying decision, digital advertising through email can simply be an email that consist of a newsletter or a sales that is happening at your store to your subscribers. Each and every other week, send an email listing your products or a sale you’re having to entice and constantly reminding your subscribers your brand and products that you are offering. Plus, if they’re already subscribing to you, they’re interested already – one foot at the door.
Digital advertising metrics you need to know
1. Reach
Number of people who saw your ad.
2. Impression
Number of times your ads was displayed even if it was shown twice to the same person.
3. Click-through-rate (CTR)
Percentage of people who clicked on your ad compared to impressions.
4. Conversions
Number of goals completed generated from your ad. Goals of an ad can differ from getting sales to email newsletter sign-up.
5. Cost-per-click (CPC)
The average cost for someone to click your ad. The more clicks you’ve got on your daily ad budget, the lower the CPC.
6. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
The average cost for acquiring a new customer. The more customers you acquire on your daily ad budget, the lower the CPA.
7. Cost-per-thousand impression (CPM)
The average cost for every 1,000 views or impressions of your ad. The more impressions or views of your ad on your daily ad budget, the lower the CPM.
What makes a good digital advertising?
1. Provide value to your customers
Most importantly, when advertising to your customers, be sure to provide value of your goods. Showcase the unique benefits that it may brings to the life of your customers and once they understood that, they would probably want to buy from you. The idea here is to show and not just tell your customers how good your products are. By showing and demonstrating the usage of your goods, they will be able to get a clearer picture of it to a point where they decide they want to buy from you.
2. Make offers they can't say no to
Offer your customers amazing discounts or other perks when they buy your products. It can be discounts, rebates, buy one free one offers, or reward points. Make sure to address why they should buy from you and not others because of the offers that you are giving out. One of the techniques used bye-commerce owners are providing free shipping whenever you are buying from them. Some customers may find that compelling to them and makes them loyal to the business that offers it.
3. Intriguing design ad copy
The ad copy itself should be appealing to the public. With a catchy headline and phrases inside the ad copy, nothing can go wrong in trying to hook the audience into knowing more about your goods. Sometimes, it’s how you can address the pain point of the people that you write in the headline that would turn your targeted audience into customers. The design also must be clean and organized that people can easily understand and register them in their mind.
Digital advertising tools and helpful websites
As we monitor CPC, CPA, or CPM, the advertising cost may not be what you expected being on the higher side. The costliness of your ad is actually a reflection of the effectiveness of your ad itself. In overall cases, higher CPC, CPA, or CPM would need some improvement as it reflects on lower number of clicks, acquisition, or impressions. This is where optimization of your digital ad campaign is required.
Make sure whatever the advertising cost, it is relevant,economical, and most importantly effective. It must have a balance between how much it costs us and how much sales conversion that we are getting. We don’t want to pay a lot for advertising and end up with only a few conversions. The ideal goal would be to pay as minimum cost of advertising it can be and be able to achieve high conversion rate. That is where optimization of ads is needed.
Some of the websites or advertising tools that you can use to help optimize your ads are as follows:
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