Online advertising is one of the main drivers of visible sales growth in the 21st century. The online marketplace (Internet) is the biggest in the world today with over Five (5) billion people already on it. It therefore posits that a result oriented online advertising is achieved when the best methods are implemented to yield results.
Online Advertising, what is it?
Online Advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It is also the art of using the internet as a medium to deliver marketing messages to an identified and intended audience.
It is designed for attracting website traffic and brand exposure, and to persuade the targeted customer to engage in a specific action – like, making a purchase.
Forms of Online Advertising
There are several different forms of online advertising that creates awareness, generates leads, and brings in sales.
Display Advertising
This is a form of online advertising made up of basically images and text. They show up as banners, landing pages, pop ups, and flash ads on third party websites and blogs and when clicked refers the user back to their own website.
Display ads is mainly for brand awareness as there is no specific targeting involved. It can be used to promote hotels, games, events, and shows. Display ads are very affordable and simple to implement but they do not show up on search results unlike other ads.
Social Media
Social media has become the biggest hub for online advertising simply because of the reach and the ease of audience targeting. Different types of online advertising interface with social media ads due to the nature of the platform. It is very common to see a display, native, and video ads on social media platforms.
There are the organic and the paid social media ads. Paid ads are native ads that leverage promoted posts and reach specific people using target audiences while organic ads are a form of word-of-mouth marketing.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective way of reaching a target audience that is already interested in your business by opting into your email list. An email list is a collection of a brands loyal customers who are guaranteed to be interested to a certain degree.
Once an email list is collected, email campaigns can be sent to customers for a variety of reasons. They can be about promotions or discounts, various blogs or other content, or important business announcements.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is designed to increase the visibility of your website on the search engine result pages by paying to appear on search engines such as Google. It is the most dependable online advertising method because it’s based-on keywords that users are already looking for.
The main types of SEM are pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO). PPC are paid targeted ads while SEO are organic (not paid for).
Native Ads
Native ads though like display ads is more strategic and intentional when it comes to placement and audience targeting. They are sponsored listings that are camouflaged and integrated into the feed.
There are four subtypes of native advertising: in-feed (as seen above), search ads, recommendation widgets, and promoted listings. Native advertising is based on audience online habits and history and will show ads that may be relevant to them.
Video Ads
Video ads is simply a video promoting a business or product in a unique way. They show up as commercials before watching other videos on YouTube, Facebook and are integrated as native or display ads. The time and effort it take to plan and create a video is the most challenging part of it though it is proven to be very effective.
Benefits of Online Advertising
With the introduction of the internet, advertising has become cheaper, highly targeted, and more accessible. In this short article, we will itemize and explain why small businesses and big organizations are switching from traditional marketing methods to online advertising.
Global reach
The greatest aspect of the internet is that it is borderless. The lid of being restrained to only customers in your vicinity is taken away hence you can reach people in other states, countries and even continents depending on your budget.
All-Time Business
Your business is not restricted to a time frame like 9am-5pm but it is opened always even while you sleep – 24/7, 365/366 days. If done appropriately, online advertising makes you more revenue because it is not timed.
Low Entry Costs
Online advertising is for everyone not for the big corporations alone but also small businesses because of the minimal rates that apply. There is no minimum amount required to launch an online advert.
Cost Effective
Apart from the fact that you can start an online advert with low amount it is cost effective. You can generate leads for a fraction of the amount expended. Therefore, small businesses have embraced the platform of online advertising to project their businesses.
Results are Measurable.
With your online advertising campaign, you can track everything – Impressions, likes, shares, clicks, conversions, sales, ROI. This information allows you to take better informed decisions about your marketing strategy like cutting your losing adverts and scaling your winning ones.
Scalable
Online advertising is infinitely scalable. If you have a running advertisement that is working you can easily scale it to more people with the click of a button. Many companies have taken advantage of this fact to create massive businesses by simply scaling a working ad set.
Real-Time Reporting
In online advertising, reports are tracked real-time which means that if any advert is not working you can stop it and tweak for better performance and if it is working, you can also scale it up immediately to improve your ROI.
Automation of Lead Generation Process
With online advertising, you do not need to be watching over your campaigns as it runs especially if you have created a great advert. Everything will be on autopilot giving you opportunity to concentrate on other aspects of your business.
Timely Marketing
Another great advantage of online advertisement is that it takes less time to create and start a campaign. There is no waiting for any special group of people or third party to begin, everything can start and be completed in a short time.
This has led to the emergence of “growth hacking”, which is a new school marketing style that rapidly tweaks different ads on multiple ad platforms to see what works quickly.
Multitasking Capabilities
You can create automated marketing campaigns and funnels that do several things at the same time. Your website can host many visitors all at a time and your email campaign sends out emails to new subscribers and your embedded calendar automatically books new sales calls to potential customers.
Flexible Marketing
Online advertising is extremely flexible. There are no limits to how you want to advertise, whether it is a lot of money on a single marketing channel or on multiple channels. There are different platforms from which to choose from as it works best for you.
Ideal Customer Target
Facebook, with a user base of about 2.8 billion and Google have data points on all different users. They sell these data to advertisers in the form of allowing them to target users with ads based on gender, age, demographics, household income, interest and much more.
Business are able to use this information to identify their target customer thus allowing them to show ads to them.
Retargeting Made Easy
Retargeting of customers who have contacted you online is easy with online advertising unlike traditional marketing. Whether they viewed an ad or visited your website, you can retarget this exact same user with follow up ad. In the marketing world, it is well-known that retargeting interested customers is ten (10) times more effective than targeting cold traffic.
Purchase Decisions
Nowadays, majority of consumers use the internet to research first before making a buying decision. This means that not advertising online puts you at a disadvantage compared to your competitors who have one. Advertising online is where you must be to increase your sales and conversion rates.
Conclusion
Every business is unique with her key result areas so the specific online advertising methods should be used for it and results obtained maximally. Online advertising should be focused on the desired goals and be stimulating to the audience.
The online advertising world is creatively endless and full of possibilities, so choose what works best for you.