Online Advertising is the art of using the internet as a medium to deliver marketing messages to an identified and intended audience. It is helpful for attracting website traffic and brand exposure, but first and foremost, online advertising is designed to persuade the targeted customer to engage in a specific action – like, making a purchase.
The different types of Online Advertising
There are many different types of online advertising – or internet advertising/web advertising as it is otherwise known – and it can be difficult to know where to start. To help, we have highlighted some of the most important types of online advertising for you to consider:
- Social Media Advertising
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- SEM (Search Engine Advertising) – including PPC
- Display Advertising – including banner advertising & retargeting
- Mobile Advertising
1. Social Media Advertising
Once you have established a clear social media marketing strategy, you can start to consider advertising on social media platforms. Most social media sites now easily allow advertisers to utilise their reach and promote their products from within the platform. They also include good analytics tools to assess the success of the investment made. This might include a promoted tweet or post, a promotion of user-generated content or even an entire campaign that is released across multiple social channels. , you can start to consider advertising on social media platforms. Most social media sites now easily allow advertisers to utilise their reach and promote their products from within the platform. They also include good analytics tools to assess the success of the investment made. This might include a promoted tweet or post, a promotion of user-generated content or even an entire campaign that is released across multiple social channels.
2. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is another great way to get a brand and message in front of the right people. It’s primary focus is to attract organic traffic to a website by improving a site’s SEO, but once you have the strategy and content in place, you can increase its reach and engagement by paying for the content to feature on relevant websites. Paid advertising can help to increase the ROI of content marketing – i.e. without promotion, the production costs can often outweigh the potential return.
Native advertising, a form of paid media, is a clever way of creating an ad that follows the theme of the site where it is placed i.e. it is intentionally designed to look like the media where it appears, and is sometimes referred to as an advertorial or sponsored content.
3. Email Marketing
Email Marketing should be an integral part of your online communications as it’s an important way to keep in touch with your existing customers. As such, consideration and investment should certainly be on your radar. Whether you love or loathe Amazon, they are undoubtedly one of the leaders when it comes to sending targeted email campaigns and we can all learn a lot from them in this respect.
4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is designed to increase the visibility of your website on the search engine results pages (SERP) by paying to appear on search engines, such as Google. It is not to be confused with SEO (search engine optimisation), which is the art of appearing as high as possible within the search engines without having to pay for it. SEM is often called PPC (pay per click) and can be used on Google Adwords or Microsoft Bing Ads for example. The effectiveness of the investment is generally measured by CPC (cost per click) or CPI (cost per impression).
5. Display Advertising
Display advertising is when your advert – usually made up of branded photos, videos, graphics or rich media content – are placed on third party websites, which when clicked, refer the user back to your own website. It’s important to consider the journey the user takes when they click on an ad as it would be a waste of time, effort and money to attract web traffic that doesn’t convert to business because the UX on the landing page hasn’t been properly thought out.
One of the safest ways to advertise online is through carefully selected website placements that will complement your brand positioning. It means you’ll always appear on sites that you actually WANT to be on, rather than sites chosen by a third-party platform. This can be time consuming, so other alternatives include ‘contextual targeting’, which is the automated process of selecting relevant websites based on the desired keywords, and ‘topic targeting’, which is site selection based on having specifically similar content.
One of the most effective forms of display advertising is retargeting, or remarketing as it is otherwise known. Unlike other banner ads, retargeted ads are served to users who have already visited your website or are an existing contact in your database.
6. Mobile Advertising
With so many of us spending such a big part of our day using our smartphones, it’s no wonder advertisers are using mobile advertising to reach their customers. However, this is becoming an increasingly regulated way to market products and services, so it should be approached with caution. Different types of mobile specific marketing includes advertising via mobile apps, push notifications, SMS/text messaging and MMS.
Using Programmatic Marketing for Online Advertising
Programmatic marketing, the process of automating the purchase of digital advertising inventory in real time, is a growing (and complex) phenomenon. It uses algorithms to expose an advertiser’s product or service to a specific customer, in a relevant context. In simple terms, it provides an arena to auction advertising space to the highest bidder; all at the click of a button. As long as you have clarity surrounding your digital marketing objectives and messaging, then programmatic marketing can be a useful aid for automating the online advertising process.