What is digital or online advertising? Digital advertising is a form of marketing or advertising where businesses use Internet technology to deliver promotional advertisements, through email, search, social media, display, video and affiliate websites.
The point of using this technology is to reach a broader audience and make more revenue. Due to the significant advancements over traditional advertising, digital advertising is being considered a major component of modern marketing strategies. Online advertising basically follows the principle to advertise on someone else’s website to drive traffic to their site. The end goal may be to generate leads, conversion / sale, subscribe to a newsletter or service or fill out an online survey.
Below you will find 4 ways to differentiate yourself when advertising digitally.
Social Channels
Social media provides great advertising opportunities for your business. The social platforms offer effective targeting capabilities, allowing you to select your audience by location, age, affinity, and interests. Social media targeting makes it possible to show users relevant advertisements that might actually interest them.
Facebook is one of the biggest social channels in digital advertising with a total ads revenue of more than $6.8 billion in Q3 of 2016, followed byTwitter with $545 million in the same quarter. The opportunity is endless.
Email Newsletters
Email marketing is another highly effective advertising method to reach an intended customer. It may not be as exciting as social media marketing, but subscription rates to newsletters that people are interested in can be high if you have the right contextual ad in an email newsletter. Email is also effective when it comes to brand awareness, customer acquisition, customer retention and conversion.
Email marketing benefits both advertiser and consumer. Companies can include a range of content from industry news to promotional offers, and also include links to direct customers to their website to buy products immediately.
Research Your Target Audience
With the increasing number of people connecting to digital media, marketers are forced to adapt a diverse and creative approach to catch the attention of their target audience. The first approach is to identify customer demographics and tracking user behavior. Demographic data tells us about the type of person likely to purchase your product, while user activity provides information regarding browsing history, cookies, and past purchasing history.
Apart from demographics, psychographic information is equally important. It provides insight about a customer’s hobby, interests, behavior, values and spending pattern. So, your digital advertising campaign is incomplete without knowing who your target audience is and what their needs are.
Display Advertising
Display banners or banner ads allow you to reach a unique audience by displaying advertisement on other online properties or websites. Banner ads are popular due to the fact that they are simple to create and easy to publish.
You can target a specific audience by placing ads on niche websites (based on user interests, demographics and behavior). And depending on your target audience, you can choose from a range of formats such as text, video, image, and interactive media to capture the attention of your audience.
