Digital Advertising has proven to be indispensable over recent years because the internet has expanded rapidly and a large growing percentage of the world’s population has an online presence. It has offered business owners the medium to reach their target audience on a previously unachievable level with traditional advertising. Businesses now have a variety of advertising platforms and tools available to them online. But of course, before going into Digital Advertising, you have to have established a digital presence, that is, having a website and social media pages.
Digital Advertising and Digital Marketing are sometimes used similarly though there is an important distinction between the two terms. Digital Marketing broadly refers to all the ways a company markets itself to a specific demographic online through content marketing, email marketing, online ads, etc. Meanwhile, Digital Advertising is more specific in that it uses online advertisements to sell goods and services to a target audience. You can include Digital Advertising in an overall Digital Marketing campaign. Digital Marketing is broad, and Digital Advertising falls under it.
The Pricing Models Of Digital Advertising
To further understand the concept of Digital Advertising, it is important to understand the different pricing models used by different advertising platforms.
Pay Per Click (PPC), also known as Cost Per Click (CPC), sets a particular price for every time someone clicks on your ad.
Cost Per Mille (CPM) is the cost per thousand impressions. As an advertiser, you would be obligated to pay a particular amount for every one thousand times your ad appears online.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) means advertisers pay a set amount each time a customer takes a particular action e.g sign up for an email list, make a purchase or visit a landing page.
5 Effective Types of Digital Advertising
Social Media Advertising:
Using social media platforms is one of the best ways to interact with potential customers online. As of January 2022, according to the current global media statistics, 58.4% of the world population uses social media. Internet users spend an average of 2 hours 27 minutes per day on social media.
Leveraging the amount of time spent to push your brand’s awareness will provide a huge opportunity for your business. You also stand to gain access to customers’ data and create highly targeted ads in whatever format you feel would make sense for your business; social media ads can be in audio, video, or text formats. We shall look at popular social media platforms and how you can use them to push your business.
Paid Search Advertising:
Paid search ads are text ads that show up on the top of search engine result pages (SERPs) of search engine platforms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When people need specific answers to particular needs, they go on their browsers and search for things like ‘hair salon closest to me’ or ‘best digital marketing agency. This is where paid search ads are best optimized because customers are actively searching for something specific. It presents you with an opportunity to catch their attention and direct them to your website.
Paid search ads platforms allow you to target specific keywords, phrases, and broad matches and also allow you to block certain keywords. This helps you gain more control over who sees your ad, helping you to get relevant customers.
Native Advertising:
These are ads incorporated into the native look and feel of a website. You can partner with an online publisher to create sponsored content related to your industry which they share on their websites and social platforms.
The aim is to create engaging content that does not feel like an advert. Doing this indirectly builds on customer trust and appears authentic and genuine. Native ads include paid promotions, product placements, and display ads designed to look like native website copy.
Display Advertising:
These ads occupy online ad space and are mostly visual or auditory, e.g, banner ads, video ads, pop-ups, and ad copy. Display ads mainly help to drive brand awareness and not much else, as they popularly have a low average click-through rate of 0.35%. The advantage of this type of ad is that your business is put in the faces of numerous internet users and is a fast way to drive online brand awareness, especially if your business is starting up.
Remarketing:
Also known as retargeting, remarketing ads are display ads that use cookies to serve specific ads to users based on their browsing history. For example, while shopping on sites, you click on a product to check it out but do nothing further. Later, while browsing through your favorite social media platform, you see a picture of the product in the sidebar or promotion tab. This is what remarketing entails. It is mostly popular among e-commerce businesses and typically has a high return on investment (ROI).
Which Is Best For Your Business?
The type of Digital Advertising to incorporate into your business marketing campaign depends on the end goal you are looking at. If it’s a new start-up and you are looking at mainly increasing brand awareness first, display ads and social media ads are good choices. If you are looking for potential customers that are actively searching for the type of goods or services you offer, paid search ad is a great choice. You can also use more than one of these ads in your campaign simultaneously. Just be sure to make sure that your online information is clear, concise, consistent, and accurate before going into Digital Advertising.