Digital advertising used to be seen as an alternative to traditional marketing. Today, it should be viewed as a vital component of your marketing communications efforts. While there are many types of digital advertising, there are some common advantages that make the medium extremely valuable. Digital advertising is immediate, strategic, flexible, and extraordinarily scalable. It’s low cost barriers to entry make it well within reach for almost any organization. If you are thinking of getting started with digital advertising, five important types to know include search engine, display, social media, video, and product advertising.
1) Search Engine Advertising
Search engines are where many people begin their journeys to find answers or product solutions. The most popular search engine is Google, accounting for 91% of the search engine market share in 2022. Other search engines include Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, among others. The important thing to note is that over 70% of Google search traffic goes to the first ten results. If your pages doesn’t make it on the first page of Google search results, the second page of Google search results only recruit 6% of traffic. The moral of the story is that you want to be on the first page of Google search results. If you’re a new company or even just a small company with minimal “website authority,” it will be challenging to land in the top ten search results organically. That’s where paid search engine advertising comes in, sometimes referred to as search engine marketing or SEM. Search engine advertising is an auction-based pay-per-click (PPC) model where you can buy you way higher up a search engine results page or (SERP). For many terms you may often be the only advertiser and can secure a spot at the top of the list. With search advertising, marketers choose the search terms for which they will have their advertisements shown as well as the copy and associated hyperlink of the advertisement itself. The audience for the most part defines itself through their search queries however specific audience targeting including demographic, time-of-day or location can be layered on top of a search advertising campaign. Want to learn more about how search engine advertising can support your marketing strategy, or simply what “website authority” means? Contact us today to talk!
2) Display Advertising
Display advertising is simply advertising that primarily uses images, such as banners, photos or gifs on websites. This type of advertising can be purchased directly through a specific website or more commonly through a programmatic advertising platform including Google. These platforms will display your ads on millions of websites around the internet. One of the biggest advantages to this type of digital advertising is the option for targeting audiences based on various attributes including demographics, purchase intent, and internet usage. Display advertising can also take advantage of retargeting, or show ads to individuals who visited your website or even a specific page. Have you ever shopped for a pair of shoes on a website only to visit another website and there is an ad for the shoes you were just browsing? That is the result of display advertising retargeting. Does this information sound like Greek to you? Don’t get overwhelmed- we can help. Connect with us so we can help decipher the best digital advertising strategy for you. An important difference between display advertising and search advertising is that display advertising hits potential customers when they are not necessarily looking for your product. For that reason, display advertising can be better suited for brand awareness and generating product interest, not necessarily immediate conversions. Another drawback to consider is ad-blocking software that some people install on their web browsers.
3) Social Media Advertising
While social media advertising overlaps with display advertising because they both generally use images, social media advertising puts the advertiser’s brand front and center on the audience’s feed in a specific social media platform in a less distracted way than website display ads. Social media advertising can be very affordable and is an excellent tool if you want to test and scale your advertising. You can start with as little as $5 per day advertising on Meta (Facebook and Instagram). Then, as you see success, you can increase your spending to scale. Social media advertising is effective due to the precise targeting capabilities using the social media platform’s data and information to deliver the most impactful ads to the right audience. Businesses can target users based on demographics, location, interests and more. On LinkedIn for example, businesses can target advertisements to audiences based on past and current job titles or even company size. Social media advertising can also take advantage of retargeting, serving ads to past website visitors and customer email lists. The most popular platforms for social media advertising are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest. With the immediate results and low cost, companies can stay lean and easily pivot if necessary.
4) Video Advertising
Video advertising is one of the most popular and effective ways to reach online audiences. As the name implies, video advertising includes marketing content that appears or plays before or during a streaming video. While video content is the most difficult and expensive to create, it’s often the most effective and can tell a deeper story. Videos are easy to consume and a convenient and impactful way to learn about a product. Forbes reported that the average user spends 88% more time on a website with video. With this type of engaging content, audiences pay attention, stay tuned, and brand awareness increases. Advertisers need to be intentional and focused when it comes to creating the best video content due to the time-consuming nature of the creation. Audiences can immediately be turned off by the voice-over, or, if they’re viewing the video somewhere where they can’t have the volume on, captions are a must-have. Videos also need to be cut to the right lengths for specific platforms. Facebook and YouTube are the most popular websites for video advertising, with other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok not far behind. Because Google owns YouTube, advertising on the channel is often the easiest and most important place to start. YouTube advertisers can take advantage of targeting options including internet usage, retargeting and demographics.
5) Product Advertising
Another type of advertising available on the Google Ad Platform is product advertising. When you search for a product have you noticed the Google shopping tab, which displays shopping results for millions of products on the internet? There is an organic component of this tab that allows anyone to connect their website’s products to these results, however, did you know you can advertise here as well to have your products boosted. Product ads are easy to consume: they contain a title, visual, and price. If someone clicks on the product ad, they are brought (or should be brought) to a landing page where they can read a product description and easily purchase the product. A bonus: using Google Shopping can propel a product to the top of Google’s search engine results. Perhaps most importantly product ads hit customers exactly when they are searching for your products, not when they are reading an article or browsing social media. For this reason, product advertising should be a vital component of any B2C company that sells physical products. Some popular product marketing tools that integrate with google shopping include Shopify and WooCommerce.
Choosing the Best Digital Advertising for Your Company
Digital advertising is not a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. The types of digital advertising that may work well for one company may not be a fit for yours. It’s also time-consuming and challenging to start from scratch. That’s why companies wisely seek consultants, make strategic digital marketing hires, or utilize marketing agencies to reach their marketing goals. When looking for digital marketing support, it is important to consider all of the qualifications. Be sure the individual or company has all of the Google certifications: Ads, Analytics, and eCommerce. Additional useful certifications include YouTube and HubSpot certifications, if applicable. Conway Marketing Group has expertise in every facet of marketing, including digital advertising expertise (plus certifications!). Reach out to our team to discover how we can help your business save time and money, and execute a digital advertising strategy. Learn more about Conway Marketing Group’s digital advertising services here.
