Online advertising is a pretty self-explanatory term; it’s the means by which you distribute paid ads online across various different platforms. However, the strategy behind when, where and who to advertise to is a little less simple (albeit achievable). With a good grasp on the mechanics of each online advertising and marketing avenue, there are lucrative opportunities for reaching genuine prospective customers and clients in ways that may otherwise be missed. For example, while there are some 1.5 billion active users on Facebook every day, only a handful are your desired demographic, and a handful again of people who aren’t organically following you or who have passed by your business (or website), but not stopped for a conversion. It is this latter group of people that are our focus when conducting this kind of advertising.
The list of online advertising available is endless, and ultimately where you advertise online should be driven by your goals and what you're trying to achieve. In a world that can be overwhelming for some, lean on Zimple Digital to assist with this analysis and ensure you create a campaign to deliver a quality customer. Below are what we believe to be the most effective means of online advertising.
Social advertising refers to the ads occurring on your social media accounts. This can be in your feed, to the left of your feed, your stories or in your Facebook messenger. You’ve probably noticed that these ads correlate with the products and services you’ve been searching for via typed or voice search, or the websites you’ve perused. Although this certainly lends itself to a creep factor, it’s also hard to ignore that, for the most part, it’s enormously helpful for guiding us to what we’re looking for. Or, more accurately, reminding us of what we’re looking for and presenting a solution. If you aren’t putting your message out there for people searching for what you offer, you are missing a huge opportunity. We use social media’s intuitive capabilities to formulate ads based on the interests, searches and online activity of social media followers and present them with the solution (your product or service) to their problem, want or need.
Display advertising is advertising that appears in the banners and border columns of the websites, social media platforms and apps that you use. Their purpose is to display an advertisement that matches your online activity, and deliver the message, product or service that you’re looking for. Subsequently, this is also the aim of your display advertising to your desired demographic of customer or client. Research reveals that visitors to your website who are retargeted with your display ads are 70% more likely to convert in some way (via contact or purchase). And, through the means by which display advertising reaches the correct people, there is a lot of information that can help you better understand your customer base. By understanding the pages your prospects visit and engage with, you are able to appreciate their interests and, so, how and what they want to be retargeted with, and when.
Although they serve essentially the same purpose, there is a difference between remarketing and retargeting. Remarketing is marketing to those who have engaged directly with your business, usually through email of social media sign-ins, and so opt in for more information on what you have to offer via email. However, they can also be reached, thanks to the information they have provided, via display and social media marketing.
Retargeting is online advertising that essentially follows a user using display and social marketing advertising based on their overall online behaviour via cookie-based technology (you’ll often see pop-ups on websites asking for your permission to use them). Javascript code is used to track how, when and where a user is navigating online, so your ad can meet them on websites the frequent to deliver your service or product solution to them.
Search advertising appears on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) after a search query has been registered. So, those first few results with ‘ad’ written beside them are the result of search advertising efforts. These are chosen based on Google’s auction system and how applicable your business is to each search term
