Digital Advertising 101: Everything You Need to Know About Online Marketing

Now more than ever, most business is done online. The old ways of advertising, including printing posters or spending exorbitant amounts of money on billboard ads, are fading away in favor of digital advertising and online marketing.But what if you’re a newcomer to digital advertising overall and don’t know where to start?No need to worry – we’ve put this detailed guide together to teach you everything you need to know about online marketing in a flash. Let’s dive in!

Goals of Digital Advertising

All digital advertising is primarily driven around accomplishing three different goals:

• Inform – Informational ads are all about establishing awareness of your product or brand. People won’t know that they should spend money at your store if they don’t know you exist! 
• Persuade – Persuasive ads are about converting traffic (consumers who reach your site or store portal) into paying customers. 
• Remind – Reminding ads are those that keep your brand at the forefront of your target audience’s minds and make sure that your brand doesn’t fade into obscurity. They are heavily connected to customer retention.

All three types of advertisements are important but are necessary at different phases of your customer’s life cycles.For example, informational ads are often used to draw in new customers or to establish brand awareness for the first time. These ads are most important for your target audience members who are not yet paying customers or loyal site visitors.Persuasive ads are at the crux of all digital marketing; they involve convincing people to stop by your site and make a purchase. Naturally, these are the most important types of ads in many ways since, without effective ads in this area, you won’t have any conversions or any paying customers.Reminding ads are also important at the end of the consumer lifecycle. Improving customer retention – which measures how well you keep customers coming back for more – is key to maximizing profitability, as it is almost always more expensive in both marketing dollars and other costs to get new customers than it is to keep existing customers.You need to keep these goals in mind as you evolve your digital marketing campaigns and push for greater success.

Types of Digital Marketing

Just like there are different marketing objectives, there are also different types of digital marketing altogether. Your marketing campaigns will likely blend multiple of these ad types together for maximum efficacy.

Social Media Marketing

As the name suggests, social media marketing involves placing ads on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.Social media marketing can be effective and helpful because of a few key reasons:

• It’s great for building brand awareness and connecting with customers, especially if your social media marketing manager communicates with them regularly.
• It’s also good for customer retention since it can keep brand awareness at the forefront of your target consumers’ minds.
• Social media marketing can generate significant traffic if your ads are crafted well enough – a single well-placed video ad can draw and convert a lot of people if the ad is placed on the feeds of your target consumers.

PPC Advertising

PPC or pay-per-click advertising is a kind of paid advertising where you or your marketers create an advertisement, then place a bid to have it shown to target consumers based on market research. Then you pay for any results that come from the ad.PPC marketing relies heavily on using two specific types of ads: display ads and search ads (more on both types below).Either way, PPC marketing can help you connect directly with people looking for your product or services and who already intend to make a purchase in the near future. Therefore, these ads are more often about convincing a consumer that your brand is the best choice out of all the others rather than introducing your brand or focusing on long-term retention.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Naturally, search engine marketing is crucial for all digital marketing as it affects how easily people can find your website or store through Google. This type of marketing heavily relies on search engine optimization or SEO and tools like Google AdWords.SEM doesn’t involve paying for advertisements in most cases. Instead, it means leveraging smart SEO to make your website attractive for Google’s search engine algorithms and place links in key areas to help your site rank more highly and draw people through your site to different purchasing pages.You or your marketers will need to learn a lot about keywords, content creation, and more to be successful with search engine marketing.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a long-form type of marketing that uses content published online, such as video advertisements, blog posts, and lead magnets like e-books and case studies, to draw consumers and establish trust by offering value aside from a direct, paid product.For instance, your website might sell cooking tools to a target consumer base of married women between the ages of 25 and 45. Therefore, your content marketing will involve things like:

• Creating downloadable e-books they can use to get new recipes
• Making blog posts with tasty recipes written by expert copywriters
• Making video tutorials showing how to use one of your cooking tools

Content marketing often takes more time and effort compared to the other types, but it can be well worth it in certain technical fields or in industries where acquiring and retaining consumers is of the utmost importance due to stiff competition.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a direct and consistent way of nurturing leads, driving sales, and retaining customers over the long term. Through email marketing, you send regular emails to those who have given you their email addresses (usually through creating an account or a purchasing page), either recommending certain products or reminding them of upcoming special deals.Lots of email marketing involves creating aggressive ads since you’ve presumably already gotten a purchase out of the recipient consumer at least once. Additionally, people already expect email marketing to contain offers or product announcements.

How Do You Measure Marketing Results?

As you dive further into digital advertising, you’ll use a variety of tools to measure the results of your current marketing efforts, including:

• Google Analytics, which can help you track the channels that are sending traffic to your site, narrows down who is visiting your site, and even figures out what specific aspects are encouraging conversion. 
• Other on-platform analytics suites like Facebook’s Insights. These can also provide you with valuable marketing data you can use to further narrow down your target audience and refine your marketing campaigns. 

What Kinds of Ads Should You Use?

Digital advertising means leveraging a variety of different ads – you’ll have to become familiar with all of them to be successful.

Text Ads

Text ads are crafted using copy and minimal graphic content. They can be effective on some social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. But they are not the best for building brand awareness – instead, they should be used to retain current customers, offer actionable value, or promote a big sale quickly.

Display Ads

A display ad is a very simplistic advertisement with a single graphic and a link to a shopping page or download. Display ads have to be short, sweet, and to the point while also being persuasive or eye-catching. Graphic design is a key skill for these.

Search Ads

Search ads are also simple – they show up at the top of search engine results pages and are attached to certain keywords. These can help generate and convert traffic, but they are limited to text only. So the copy in the search ads has to be persuasive and attention-grabbing at the same time.

Video Ads

Video ads are ideal for content advertising, as they combine copy, graphic design, storytelling, and all other aspects of marketing into a single, converting product. Video ads can be used to draw traffic to your site, convert that traffic into paying customers and even retain consumers over the long term through informative content.

Choosing a Marketing or Advertising Agency

It’s tough to run a successful, in-depth digital marketing campaign by yourself, especially if you already have other aspects of your business to manage. To make things easier, you should pick a marketing or advertising agency that can meet your needs and fully grasp your business objectives.For example, if you need high-quality video ads made for content generation for your online store, look no further than VisCap Media: the number one video ad creation company on the web. With VisCap Media’s top-tier, highly converting video ads for your marketing campaign, you’ll bolster traffic generation and dominate the competition simultaneously.Best of all, you can contact us today and learn exactly how we can help you with your digital advertising!SourcesThe Purpose of Advertising | Lumen Learning.Why SEO is Important for Business | Search Engine JournalConversions vs Traffic | Neil Patel