Online is where people are. To reach them as a small business, you need to be there, generating brand awareness, increasing leads and making sales. That’s why digital advertising is so important.
An Overview
What is digital advertising if not the best way to reach customers where they spend most of their time? The Internet.
It leverages the popularity of trusted sites like Facebook, YouTube, Yelp, Google Search and more. In order to deliver services to their own customers, they sell you ad space on their websites. When you advertise on a platform, you are in effect supporting that platform that your customers love.
This form of advertising allows you to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. You may think you’re doing this already through newspapers, flyers, or radio ads. But as we explore digital campaigns together, you’ll see just how much digital is raising the bar in advertising.
Digital advertising isn’t just putting an ad up on Twitter, Pinterest or Yahoo. It uses Internet-based advertising tools to research, manage, track, analyze and improve online advertising campaigns.
When done effectively, digital marketing seamlessly integrates into your target customer’s user experience on that website, guiding them back to your own site and business. It does so in a natural and non-intrusive way.
It can be personalized to maximize relevance to your target customer. This, in turn, maximizes conversion rates. And because it’s digital, you can track virtually every step your customer makes in relation to your ad.
This allows you to achieve an ROI not possible through other means.
What is digital advertising? It’s not just one thing. It can look very different depending on where you advertise and how you do it.
This diversity allows you to choose which ones are best for your business and customers. Some methods and platforms will be decidedly better for you than others.
Some businesses will find AdWords very effective for them. Others find LinkedIn ads get them a lot of new leads. A lot of research into your industry, customers, and competition goes into deciding how to answer, what is digital advertising to you?
Being in the right place with the right strategies will cut costs. It increases profits. Using the wrong strategies and platforms can leave you feeling like digital advertising doesn’t work.
Each type has its pros and cons as well as varying strategies. People who know how to run Google Ads campaigns may struggle with Facebook ads and vice versa because of these differences.
Next, let’s explore the primary types of digital advertising. As we do, it will become clearer how well these align with your brand and business model. You’ll see how you can use them to meet your marketing goals like: