Digital advertising is how marketers reach their target audiences on the internet. Using dynamic content and several key techniques, they sell their products and services to those looking for them.
Like search engine optimization (SEO), digital advertising takes time and effort to learn the best ways to send targeted traffic to your website to boost your conversion rate. Otherwise, most spend their marketing budget on broad, generic advertising that sends traffic to their website that they are often not prepared to handle and that doesn\’t benefit them at all.
What is Digital Advertising?
Digital advertising means paying for advertising space across mobile apps, social media venues like Facebook and Twitter, and websites. Using specific information about their intended audience, like what they\’re interested in and how they like to buy it, they target the internet users they think are most likely to buy their services and products.
The pros? Online advertising is available to most everyone and campaigns can be run at reasonable prices. If the marketer understands the basics of how digital advertising works, they can boost their conversions and their bottom line.
The cons? Going blindly into digital advertising is an easy way to waste money because it\’s just so easy to quickly set up some broad, random advertising. The problem is that to be effective, you need to attract the right visitors to your website, not as many random visitors as you can get there.
Types of Digital Advertising
Like the rest of the internet, online ads have evolved over time from those pop up banners and tower ads that used to appear near the top of websites. Now there are several types of dynamic digital ads including the following:
- Display Ads: Visual ads appearing on third-party websites that can be in many forms.
- Email Marketing: Sending ad content via email to users who have requested such.
- Native Ads: Content integrated with the hosting platform.
- Remarketing Ads: Advertising type that allows sites to serve targeted ads to users who\’ve already visited their site.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Keyword-based ads appearing on the search engines.
- Social Media Ads: Ads that can take many forms appearing on any of the various social media platforms.
- Video Ads: Ads made up of video content.
 Oh, The Network Possibilities
Because of the growing popularity of social media, there are many ad networks and platforms available to marketers. The key is to attain a certain level of knowledge about each so we can know best how to use them for our marketing benefit.
Google, for example, offers the best pay per click (PPC) platform, not to mention being the biggest search engine on the web. Google Adwords offers a great advertising network where you can place ads within their display network, search ads, and remarketing ads. The ads can be image, text, or video-based.
Facebook\’s PPC system is a little different. You can add photos and videos in with text for your ads. Plus, your ad is served to your target audience for great exposure even if it receives no clicks.
In learning the platforms and trying small test campaigns, you can figure out which platforms benefit your marketing needs and which don\’t. You can also learn how to effectively combine ads from different networks to create campaigns that get impressive results.
Want to Learn More?
There\’s so much to learn, not only about the different ad types but about each of the popular platforms. If you\’d like to learn more about it, sign up for our upcoming workshop. You can also contact us with any questions about this topic or about any of our services that you might be considering.
