Digital transformation is no longer a“future”term. The rate at which society is changing and adapting to digital trends is what fascinates me about the future.
Digital is everywhere, From education to sports to entertainment and even politics (Digitization agenda). Every facet of our lives in the modern era has its fair share of the digital transformation agenda.
The Marketing and Advertising sector has had its fair share of digital transformation with the introduction of Digital Media, hence experts coining the term“Digital Marketing & Advertising“.
For a long time, most companies’ main advertising channels were event sponsorship, newspaper, television, or radio ads.
One of the challenges businesses had with these forms of advertising was targeting the right audiences and measuring the impact these advertising tactics had on their long-term advertising goals.
For example, companies running crawler ads on morning show programs have no control over who is viewing the ad at that specific time.
Meanwhile, digital advertising enables businesses to adopt an advertising approach that is data-driven, measurable, and controllable.
What is Digital Advertising
Digital Advertising is a targeted, data-driven advertising strategy for businesses wanting to promote their brand or encourage customer engagement through its digital channels.
Digital Advertising is so popular amongst businesses these days because it works. It is an advertising approach that enables companies to capture new customers or reengage with previous customers whiles using data and analytical tools.
Differences between digital and traditional Advertising
Advertising used to be disruptive, annoying, and expensive. Only a few companies that could afford to pay huge sums were given slots for ad spaces on radio and television.
This resulted in a negative experience for businesses with limited advertising budgets. Meanwhile, the introduction of Digital Advertising allowed small businesses with little or limited advertising budgets to promote their product or services with a few advertising dollars.
Here are a few reasons why businesses are choosing digital advertising over traditional advertising.
Firstly, Digital Advertising allows businesses to target audiences based on behavior or interests. Because of that, you can structure content that is relevant to selected segments of your audience.
A social media Ad or display Ad can place your content in front of people with direct interests in your product or service offering.
For example, a social media ad can help you target people interested in cakes and have interacted in a bakery community in the past 30 days.
Unlike running a commercial on the radio or in newspapers, you won’t know who exactly is reading or listening to your content or whether they have an interest in your product offering.
Secondly, Digital Advertising has tools that enable businesses to track, test, and refine advertising results.
Unlike traditional advertising where you will base all assumptions on insufficient data, you can measure how many people are clicking on your ad resulting in sales or conversions.
Lastly, digital advertising has advanced demographic targeting features that make it difficult for traditional Advertising to catch up.
For example, a business in Ghana can run digital advertising campaigns that appear to only people in Tanzania. Unlike traditional advertising, which is very difficult to achieve the same.
Digital Advertising examples
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
When you need to find information about a product or service, what do you do?
You search on Google, right?
Search Engine Marketing(SEM) is a method of promoting your business’s online visibility on search engine results page (SERP) with paid advertising. It is one of the most popular digital advertising methods used by most businesses.
A simple query like “cake shops near me” can place your business in front of many customers looking for information related to your business.
Advertisers target particular keywords that when searched, their business will appear on top of the search engine results page. Since users are trained to click through the first few results that show on Search, it is likely your business will receive traction when keywords for your business are triggered.
Search Engine Marketing uses the Pay-per-Click(PPC) module, which means advertisers only pay for ads when users click on the results.
Social media Ads
Social media is one of the trusted methods businesses use to reach and engage their customers. With over 3.8 billion people connected, companies can reach wide audiences when running social media ads.
One of the main advantages of running social media ads is that it is powerful when companies want to test, track and target their digital advertising campaigns to increase sales and conversions.
Because of its targeted nature, businesses can run advertising campaigns that target particular customers based on behavior, interest, demographics, and customer data.
It is also undoubtedly the best channel businesses use when engaging with their customers.
Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram provide businesses with robust ad targeting techniques that help companies achieve their long-term advertising goals.
Display Ads
This is one of the oldest digital advertising techniques used by businesses for brand awareness and also to drive action to your company’s website. Display ads come in the form of banner ads, text, popups, animations, and images that appear on blogs and websites.
With its modern and advanced targeting nature, businesses can choose to show these ads on highly relevant websites that will drive traffic and action for their products or services.
Imagine you are a business that sells protein supplements and you want to run an ad. It makes sense to run display ads that appear as a banner or popup ads on a website whose content is all about gyming and healthy living.
Display ads are a great way to show your products or services to an already engaged audience and ensure that they click on the message you are offering.
Video Ads
Video Ads are a great way to tell your business’s story to customers using video and motion graphics that play before, during, or after streaming content.
Platforms like YouTube make it easy to run digital advertising campaigns in the form of videos that appeal to your customers.
Native Ads
Native ads are camouflage ads that blend with the content they are added to. It usually involves partnering with online publishers to create sponsored contents that relate to content they publish on their blog.
For example, a car dealer company can partner with bloggers who write about cars to create sponsored content(Advertising +editorial) aboutthe best cars in 2022 according to fuel economy.
Users who read these blogs may find them engaging because of their useful nature. While it’s still a paid ad, readers do enjoy your company’s effort by providing relevant and useful content to them.
What digital advertising channel will work for your business?
This mainly depends on your company’s advertising goals. Social media and video ads are great for increasing conversions, while display and native ads are ideal for brand awareness as well as driving conversions to your website.
Frequently Asked Questions
Digital media offers businesses real-time advertising analytics that is very useful to track engagements and interactions as compared to tv advertising.
Native advertising is considered an effective digital advertising approach because businesses can blend paid content with editorial content making it looks useful to readers or website visitors.
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