If you’ve been slow on the uptake when it comes to online advertising, you should begin ramping up your efforts. Online ad spend has seen consistent growth and is projected to overtake print, states a recent IAB report. If you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with online advertising, it’s time to do so. If you’re of the belief that advertising online is wasting your ad budget, think again. Check these These are 9 reasons you should be advertising online:
1. Insight Know exactly which ads brought in the highest number of qualifying leads. Know how many impressions were served, where they were served, and when. Identify your optimal channels, ad copy, and ad locations. The metrics and analytics available with online advertising allow you to see the exact cost of acquiring and converting a customer. Advertising online provides you with endless insightallowing you to become a more effective marketer. Marketers went from having no data to more data than we know what to do with. This is a great problem to have.
2. Targeting Do you know the profile of your perfect customer? Online advertising gives you the ability to target and retarget the ideal prospects. Retargeting will serve ads based on prior engagement, enabling you to identify your ideal customer profile. Once you know what your customers look like, you will know just who to target and where to find all similar users online, making sure they too are being served your ads. When advertising online, you have the ability to target a population as specific as “men, age 18-35, who searched for Giants tickets between the hours of 7-10 pm” or as broad as “men, age 18-35” ensuring your message is in front of the right people at the right time.
3. Creative Your ability to target goes beyond reaching the right customers. You can take this one step further and serve the creative that will best resonate with each target. There is a common misconception that online ads are of poor quality, when in fact digital advertising provides the opportunity to be highly engaging with video and other rich media. Using flash and in-banner video ads can increase brand recognition and highlight your competitive edge. Is one of your ads under-performing A/B test your copy, your image, your headline and serve ads that are as dynamic as the online space in which they are living. A well-designed banner ad can turn your digital campaign from good to great.
4. Brand Awareness Online advertising can be used to drive traffic to your site and build brand awareness. Effectively targeted campaigns can create brand influencers and reach complementary audiences. Use the endless online display space to be creative with rich media, establish your online presence, make an emotional connection, and get online consumers excited about who you are and what you have to offer. Online display enables brands to focus on their ideal audience and tailor messages that improve both recall and engagement.
5. Flexibility Online advertising campaigns can be adjusted with a few clicks or keystrokes. You have the flexibility to respond to incoming data and make changes instantly. Similarly, you have the ability to pause campaigns or adjust your strategy in minutes. This flexibility allows you to stay in front of your customers– anticipate customer needs and adjust your ads before anyone even notices.
6. Cost Digital channels are highly cost effective for marketers. Rates are typically set through a combination of ad size, ad location, performance, and demand. Considering the reach allotted via digital channels, moving your campaigns online is often much cheaper than more traditional offline channels like radio, television, or print. Furthermore, digital campaigns have greater transparency allowing you to adjust your cost easily based on performance. In the offline world, once you’ve paid for the space in a print publication or a spot on the radio, there’s no adjusting your investment after the fact.
7. Reach We’ve heard a lot of this lately — people are watching less live TV and turning to their computers for their favorite shows, music, and to access their news. As marketers, being effective requires staying in front of your customers; as it turns out, your customers are online, so you should be too, and sooner rather than later! Moving online gives you access to a global audience, if you so desire, and it means your ads can be working for you 24 hours a day. The options are practically limitless when it comes to your reach capabilities when you take your campaign online.
8. Engagement Online advertising lets you know a customer’s exact level of engagement. You might have circulation and readership data for a print publication, but you can’t know how much time customers spent interacting with your ad, how much time they spent on your website, if they researched more of your products, and whether that ad led to conversions. An online presence gives you all of this valuable data and places you in a position to learn where your most engaged prospects live.
Online advertising is an essential element of anyone’s marketing mix. It provides you with numerous benefits, including lower costs, robust targeting, and valuable customer insights, that are not available through other advertising mediums. Your customers, competitors, and prospects are online — give them the attention they deserve, while getting more out of your budget.