Top digital advertising practices for 2021

The fast growing transformation of businesses from offline to digital has really increased in the past few years. Many businesses are choosing this approach as the world is becoming more inclined towards reaching the highest number of people. Therefore, digital advertising has become a great asset to use to help promote your business.

This article will be about defining digital advertising, its types, and the best strategy in digital advertising for 2021.

What is digital advertising?

Digital advertising is the publishing and distribution of promotional content through the online mediums and channels such as social media channels, search engines, websites, mobile apps, affiliate programs . It is a form of advertisement that shows these types of ads and messages to audiences.

The main difference between traditional advertising and digital advertising lies in the approach that each one of them uses regarding promoting its advertisements.

Digital advertising is heavily data driven that will definitely help you as a business owner to understand the outcomes of campaigns run by the business.

While traditional advertising reaches out to the masses, however, ROI is harder to be determined than digital advertising.

Because of the availability of user data and targeting, it has become easier for businesses to reach their audience effectively.

Types of digital advertising formats

1.) Search engine marketing

When people search for something on the search engines such as Google, there appear to be a few search results with the tag ad that are seen at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

But how do these ads appear in the top SERP? It is mainly through search engine marketing where businesses bid on certain keywords along with their competitors competing to appear at the top of Google’s SERP.

SEM consists of either Pay Per Click ( PPC) where pay is through every click a person clicks on your ad or Cost Per Mille ( CPM) where pay is through every 1000 impressions on your ad regardless of clicks.

2.) Display ads

Display ads are types of advertisements that contain text and images that are placed to appear on third party websites.

These types of advertisements are related to search engines and other ad networks, which are types of companies that connect advertisers to websites that want to host advertisements.

Display ads aren’t limited to ad networks; many websites self-host display ads. The most popular examples of display ads are images, mobile, text, banners, pop-ups and video ads.

3.) Social media ads

Another form of digital advertising is social media ads. There is a great opportunity in social media ads in promoting your business to your audience.

Social media ads are planned and executed through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit.

The major advantages of social media ads are that it will raise awareness about your business, help with building a community, generate leads, increase website conversions, and boost apps installations.

4.) Native advertising

Another beneficial type of advertising is native ads. Native ads occur on social media or websites. These ads visually match the content that you are reading.

So, if one of these native ads appeals to you where you then click on it, you will be redirected to the advertiser’s website.

These ads can appear under headlines like “related stories”, “related stories”, “promoted stories”, and much more.

The goal of these advertisements is to increase traffic and drive people interested in the product or service provided to the advertiser’s website so to help a business grow.

5.) Remarketing

Remarketing is a type of digital advertising format that connects with people who previously interacted with your website or app. An example would be visiting a product on an e-commerce site and then finding an advertisement of the exact product on a social media platform.

Remarketing helps in placing ads in front of audiences. This is mainly accomplished through the use of cookies that follow people on the web or social media platforms.

How to craft the perfect digital advertising strategy in 5 simple steps

Step one: Determine your budget and its allocation

There are many platforms available that can be used to any business’s advantage. So, it’s important to analyze which platforms to choose to invest more money and time and which of those that you can invest less.

Choosing the right platform for your marketing advertising and efforts depends on how the platform can help you reach the business’s advertising goals such as Google Adwords which is used when there are already people searching for your product or service and there is a clear demand for either one of them.

Step two: Conduct research

You may be tempted to follow your instinct, as a business owner, because of the experience that you had with digital advertising.

However, it is also important to conduct your own research regarding the type of customers that are more likely to engage and buy your product or service, their buying habits and behavior, and customer loyalty.

Step three: Understand and implement the buyer journey

The buyer journey is a process where your potential customers pass through being part of your target audience to awareness, consideration, and conversion.

The buyer journey is similar to a sales funnel where it ends with conversion. It is of great importance that your target audience passes through each stage of the buyer journey so conversion can happen.

Here are the three stages of the buyer process:

Awareness: In the awareness stage, your potential buyers discover that they have a problem and want to solve it. They discover your business, product, or service.
Consideration stage: The consideration stage is when the buyers begin to take interest in your product or service. They also define the problem deeply and research options that will solve the problem.
Conversion: This is the final stage of the buyer process where potential buyers purchase a specific product or service because they believe it’s the best solution.

Step four: Know the target audience in depth

Understanding the target audience will definitely help with digital advertising efforts where, as a business owner, you will find it easier to market for your target audience.

Through target audience research, it will become easier to understand the kind of social media platforms that your audience spend time in and then tailor advertisements that will help them solve their problem and , in return, help increase a business’s conversions.

Step five: Integrate all marketing channels

To reach your target audience effectively, a business’s digital advertising messages need to be consistent across all channels.

For example, social media outlets need to match with each other in terms of digital advertising efforts yet these sites need to also have a consistent brand voice.

In conclusion, many types of businesses such as digital marketing agency for small business or digital branding agency can use these top digital advertising practices in helping their business grow and become better.

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