Online advertising has been proven to be one of the most effective means businesses can expand their reach, diversify their revenue streams and get new customers. There are many options available today which businesses can use to get to their target audiences, ranging from pay-per-click (PPC) and Paid Social to in-app ads and online Display Advertising. The most effective advertisement campaigns are a combination of two or more of these options.
In general, the goal of every online advertising (online ad) campaign is to create product awareness, expand product reach, find new customers, diversify your revenue, and drive customers, leads, and traffic to your website and to make a call regarding your products and/or services.
Therefore, if you’re are a newbies or your business have been online for long but you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with online advertisement, now is the right time to do so. Again, if you’re one of those with the belief that online advertising is wasting time and ad budget, think again. Online advertising has been proven with realistic facts to be more effective (when done rightly) in consistently increasing business growth and it’s projected to have overtaken print advertisement in the last few years. Hence if you’ve been slow on the uptake when it comes to online advertising, it’s time now to start ramping up your efforts. Below are 13 reasons you should be advertising online:
1. Targeting & Retargeting
Online advertising also provide you with the ability to know the profile of your loyal and lead customers. This way you can better manage your online advertisement campaigns to target and retarget your best prospects. The power of retargeting sets in owing to the fact that most potential customers are less likely to close a deal the first time they discover your website or product.
Retargeting is an advertisement strategy whereby you are able to save your customers purchased history and used that information to get back to them in the future. This digital advertising strategy leverages the potential of cookie technology to provide marketers and business owners the ability to track users or visitors who once visited their website but failed to convert or take action. Thus you are able to track them and serve them with your internet ads on other websites hence the name retargeting.
Once you can identify the needs of your customers, you will be able to target and to find all similar users online and ensured they too are being served your ads and at the right time. Serving your ads to the right people and the right time has a huge benefit on your returns. Not only will you be able to spend less on your online advertising campaigns, you will also be able to produce the most effective online advertising with high conversion rates.
Remarketing or retargeting significantly increases brand awareness and provides plenty further opportunities for the users to revisit your website and close a deal at a later time or even get similar products to your customers.
2. Insight
In order for your online ad campaigns to be very effective, you have to know the insight or performance of the strategy you implement. That is to say, you have to know exactly which online advertising campaigns brought in the highest number of qualifying leads, how many impressions were served, when and where they were served, and you have to identify best performing channels, ad location and ad copy. While there are many analytics and metrics available online which allow you to determine the exact behavior and performance of your online ad campaigns, it’s worth noting that some come with a price tag. Therefore, you should be able to choose the one that best align with your goal and advertising budget. Some of these online advertising tools also allow you the ability to verify the exact cost of acquiring and converting a customer, this way you can better manage your budget. Digital advertising tools provide you with much insight,allowing business owners and marketers to be much more effective in planning and creating digital advertisement or marketing.
3. Creative
The ability to reach your target audience is vital but you should be able to incorporate some aspect of creativity into your online advertising campaigns to better serve your audience. Here is where the common misconception that online ad are of poor quality, meanwhile digital advertising provides the best opportunity to engage your audience with video, infographics, short quiz, and other rich media. You can highlight your competitive edge and increase brand recognition by using in-banner and flash video ads. A/B test your images, headlines, copy for better performance and serve ads that shows better performance characteristics. Well-designed banner ads have the potential to turn your digital advertising campaign from good to great.
4. Brand Awareness
Digital advertising is a great strategy used to drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness. The more traffic (people you take to your site) you drive to a site, the better people becomes aware of your product and services. Effective targeted online advertising campaigns can create huge brand influence, and reach complementary audiences. Establish your online presence, create emotional connections, and get consumers excited about what you offer and whom you are by using the endless online display space to get creative with rich media. Online display allows businesses to focus on their ideal audience and tailor messages that promote both engagement and recall.
5. Flexibility
Digital advertising campaigns give you the ability to adjust with a few keystrokes or clicks. It allows you the flexibility to respond to incoming data and make prompt or quick changes. Also, you have the ability to pause campaigns or adjust your strategy in minutes. This flexibility allows you to stay ahead of your customers and competitors, anticipate customer needs and quickly adjust your ads before anyone even notices.
6. Scale
The demand side platforms, also known as DPSs, have centralized the buying of auction based display media across multiple inventories and data suppliers online. But while offline, you may have to coordinate with multiple providers.
DSPs give marketers and business owners the ability to scale their digital advertising campaigns faster and strategically. Many digital marketers are turning to self-service providers to create their own ads, manage campaigns, choose budget, scale and optimize across their networks as they dim fit. You can also hire the services of a provider who will scale, optimize, and spend accordingly, but this usually have a heavy price tag. Whichever service you choose, scaling your digital advertisement campaign has never been easier.
7. cost
Generally, online ad channels are highly cost effective for marketers compare to other advertisement channels. Rates are typically set through a combination of ad location, ad size, demand, and performance. Considering the reach allotted through digital channels, getting your advertising campaigns online is often much cheaper than most traditional offline channels like television, radio, or print. Also, online advertising campaigns have greater transparency allowing you to adjust your cost easily based on performance. But in the offline world, once you’ve paid for the space on the radio or in a print publication, there’s no adjusting your investment after the fact.
8. Reach
Recent research studies have shown that, more and more people are quitting watching live TV and turning to their computers for their favorite shows, music, and to access their news. This is good news to business owners and marketers. Since most of your customers are on the internet, you can use this to your advantage by being effective in your digital advertising campaigns thereby staying ahead of your competitors and customers. Moving online gives you access to a global audience not just that, your ads will be working for you 24 hours a day. When it comes to online reach, your potentials and options are practically limitless.
9. Engagement
Digital advertising lets you know a customer’s exact level of engagement. You might have readership and circulation data for a print publication, but it’ll be impossible to know how much time customers spent on your website, how much time they spend interacting with your ad, where your website traffic is coming from, whether they researched more of your products, where your leads are coming from, and what ad channel or campaign is performing better and convert more. An internet presence provides you with all of this valuable data and places you in a position to learn where your most engaged prospects live.
10. A/B Testing
There most always exist a means by which digital marketing agencies can verify or identify exactly the performance of their advertisement campaigns. Questions like where the traffic or leads are coming from must be rightly answered to be able to determine the effectiveness of the advertising campaign or better manage their customers. Thus analysis is a crucial component of any online advertising strategy.
A good marketing analytic tool must be designed to generate the desired information about the advertising campaign, such as click through rates, lead generation, impression share, trends over time, traffic generation, and cost-per-conversion. These tools are also valuable in determining how consumers discover and ultimately interact with your website.
11. Growth Hacking
A marketing phenomenon and strategy popularized by startups and small businesses with tight marketing budgets. Growth hacking technics/strategy put together creativity, analytical thinking and social metrics to give out products and gain exposure. Growth hackers implement viral marketing, social media and other low-cost alternatives to traditional media for growth and success. Sean Ellis, who created and first used the term “growth hacker,” put forward that growth hacking is not a replacement tool to marketing, but it’s different in that every strategy employed in growth hacking is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.
Growth hacking is effective because:
- Every decision is informed by growth
- Products and services are redirected as tools for growth instead of something to sell
- It’s fluidity keeps it adaptable and low-cost
12. Advertising Campaign Analytics
There must be an analytic medium by which digital marketers and agencies can verify or identify exactly the performance of their advertising campaigns. Questions like where the traffic or leads are coming from must be rightly answered to be able to determine the effectiveness of your digital advertising campaign or better manage your customers. Thus analysis is a crucial component of any online advertising strategy.
A good marketing analytic tool must be designed to generate the desired information about the advertising campaign, such as click through rates, impression share, trends over time and cost-per-conversion. These tools are also valuable in determining how consumers discover and ultimately interact with your website.
13. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most common elements in an online ad campaign. Some advertisers and marketers launch email-only campaigns to highlight content downloads or time specific offers, whereas others use email marketing in combination with other digital marketing channels such as SEO, and Social Media marketing. Email marketing may be highly effective; making it the number one choice of must business owners and marketers in today’s advertising.
The effectiveness of email marketing and reasons it’s growing rapidly has been strongly backed by research studies. These studies has shown that one the internet, email is the number activity, an average office worker visits his email approximately 25 times an hour, 88 percent of customers preferred email newsletters to other marketing strategies, and the number of emails is expected to increase by 5.5 by 2019. Email marketing has been cited as the most effective strategy of customers’ retention. This explains why email marketing is integrated in all marketing analytic tool, marketing automation tools or platforms as the basic means to reach out to customers.
Online ad or digital advertising is an essential element of anyone’s marketing mix. It provides you with numerous advantages, including better customers’ engagement, lower costs, robust targeting, retargeting, customer insights, growth hacking and valuable customer analytics that are not available through other advertising media. Your competitors, prospects, and customers are on the internet, give them the attention they deserve, while ripping more out of your advertising or marketing budget.