The Ultimate Guide on Digital Advertising

If you own a business in the digital age, digital advertising is necessary and cannot be avoided. With the expansion of the internet and all media forms, digital advertising is more important than it ever has been. The use of ads on social media, websites, and people’s streams is the best way to reach your audience. Learn everything you need to know about digital advertising here, in our guide to digital advertising in a digital age.

What is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising is very much like traditional advertising because it’s meant to promote and sell goods and services to a targeted audience online. That’s about where the similarities end, however. The use of traditional advertising may have been sent to a targeted audience through specific publications, but in reality, it was what can be considered a “spray and pray” method. The publications may have appealed to the audience the company was looking for, but there was no guarantee that they’d reach them effectively. Enter the internet and the digital age. Advertising was about to get a whole lot more involved. Through the use of the internet and the data, it can provide, advertising could be made far more specific. Digital advertising takes data and metrics and helps create effective campaigns that can be used to find specific online users to market to.

Different Kinds of Digital Advertising

Just as with traditional advertising, there are different ways of advertising digitally. They all have their specific uses and targets, and they can work together to really pinpoint the angles you need to. Here are the different kinds of digital advertising.

Display Advertisements

Display advertisements are perhaps the oldest form of digital advertising. Display advertisements are most often images and text in the sidebars or at the headers and footers of a webpage. They can also be placed in articles as breaks from the content. These are the most invasive versions of digital advertisements and reflect traditional advertising the most out of all the types listed here. That makes sense, as they’re the first type of digital advertisement and were based on the traditional form of advertising.

Email Marketing

Ever visited a website that asks you to enter your email for a special promotion, as well as news about the website? Well, that’s a form of digital advertising.  Email marketing is another older form of digital advertising, but one that is still widely used and accepted by users. When your business offers promotions and newsletters via email, you begin to build a list of clients that you can market to directly.  This is one of the best ways to sell your product or service. When people sign up for email marketing, you know that they are interested in what you’re offering.

Social Media Marketing

This form of digital advertising is probably one of the most important tools in your marketing arsenal. Social media provides one of the largest audiences in the world to advertise to.  One of the best parts about social media marketing? It can be entirely free if you’re clever. This is one of the two types of social media marketing, organic marketing. Organic social media marketing is when social media users post or talk about your product at no cost to you.  The key to this is creating engagement with your audience and inspiring them to talk about your product. Then, we have inorganic social media marketing. This is constituted of paid advertisements done through social media platforms or through social media influencers. While this may not be organic marketing, it’s certainly effective. Influencers have huge audiences that you may not reach without the use of their services.  Additionally, when paying the platform to target your advertisements, they’ll market them to users whose activity suggests they’d be interested in your business. Social media marketing is powerful.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is just as powerful as social media marketing, as it’s able to assimilate the platform, it exists on. Native advertising is on just about every single website, as well as placed in almost any form of digital media you can think of. Native advertising takes on the platform’s look, making it more appealing to look at and more likely to be used by potential customers. It can take on the form of an article, an image, or a video placed strategically.

Video Advertising

These are one of the simplest forms of digital advertising. It can consist of a few different things. The easiest way to accomplish video advertising, well, is to make a video explaining your business or product and post it. The majority of YouTube videos have advertisements before, during, or after the video.  Additionally, making a video channel dedicated to your business, detailing all of your services or goods, can be a good way to bring in new customers.  Another form of video advertising related to social media advertising is by sponsoring video creators and having them advertise your business in exchange for compensation. Popular content creators on platforms like YouTube have massive audiences and can help spread your business’s goods to many people that it may have never reached.

Reasons to Use Digital Advertising

The first reason to use digital advertising is that a business simply can’t survive without it in today’s age. Digital advertising is a necessary practice for success . The internet is a behemoth in which massive amounts of business is practiced and where most of your customer base spends a lot of their time, presumably.

Digital Advertising is Targeted

Digital advertising is targeted at specific online users, and it’s used very well. Digital advertising campaigns use the data that websites and social media platforms collect to target advertisements to users who want to see them.  When paying for digital ads, you can use specific targets depending on who you want to reach out to. These can include location and interests, and on some platforms can even include behaviors.

Digital Advertising is Cost Effective

When it comes to paying for digital advertising, you can most likely find an option to fit your budget. Digital advertising isn’t about paying the most for ad placement; it’s about relevancy. This is done using the targeting mentioned prior. Most platforms make sure that the advertisements you’d like to promote are relevant and appropriate and that they’ll reach the users you’d like to reach. 

Digital Advertising is Fast

With digital advertising, your results can be nearly instant. Once advertisements have been created, and the campaign details have been hammered out, you’ll pay for the campaign to start. As soon as it’s been paid for, it goes live, and results can start immediately. In this way, one of many, it’s superior to traditional advertising. The entire process is streamlined for businesses, making it easy to reach your audience.

Metrics You Should Know About

In digital advertising, many metrics affect your campaigns, and ultimately, the way you’ll develop your ads. These are the ones that are thrown out the most and the ones you should know before getting started.

• Reach - How many people see your advertisement.

• Impressions - How many times your advertisement gets shown, including multiple views from the same person.

• Cost per thousand impressions - On average, how much you pay per thousand impressions, or thousand times your advertisement was shown.

• Clicks - The number of times viewers click your advertisement.

• Cost per click - On average, how much you pay per click on your advertisement.

• Conversion Rate - How you measure your campaign’s success. A conversion can be an email sign-up, a quote request, or the sale of a product. Conversion goals are set during the generation of your campaign.

• Cost per acquisition - The average cost of acquiring a new customer. It is often determined by calculating your conversion rate.

Digital Advertising: Your Business Needs It

In today’s market, digital advertising is an absolute necessity. It is the most effective form of advertising in the digital age, and every business should look into it. There are numerous ways of using digital advertising to your advantage, whether you use the older display ads or enhance your marketing campaign by using native advertisements and social media marketing. The reasons to use digital advertising are abundant. It targets your advertising campaigns to the most likely people to be receptive to them, and it’s cost-effective. It can even be done for free if your engagement on social media is done well enough. It’s also quick to take and can be instant in some cases. As long as you know the metrics and know your audience, digital advertising is a sure win. Sources: What are the 4 types of Advertising | healthyads.com Types of Digital Advertising | idgadvertising.com What Is Digital Advertising? (Your Digital Ad Handbook) | webfx.com