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In this day and age, many people might wonder how to use digital advertising and where to begin. We at HTH.guide have made this guide for beginners as a good starting point in the sphere of online advertising.
You have to go over a few things, before you jump into the World of Digital Advertising. Consider the type of adverts you want to show and how they look, what your strategy will be, your budget and where to distribute them.
Digital Advertising Basics
The Digital Advertising basics encompass the steps you need to make for a successful ad campaign and what the whole process is like.
You will need to build a strategy as a pre-planning step, in which you will devote time and schedule everything. After, you have to devote a budget, spend it and launch your campaign.
Building a Strategy
Researching is the way to go, when making a strategic plan for your digital advertising. First and foremost, you need a product or a solution to offer. Then figure out the target audience.
Tools such as Google Analytics reveal information about the demographic – who visits the pages you want visited and other statistics that point to an audience. You can check the success of previous ads, too.
Google Trends is another powerful tool that helps with keyword research and what people are interested in what questions they ask.
Performing an analysis of your competitors and their strategy hints on what works for them. Customer reviews on their products could tell you what they lack in terms of the service provided to the potential clients.
Try to tell a story which is compelling with your ad. People avoid ads at all costs, so you should make yours enthralling from start to finish. The closer the product is to the people, the better.
As a next step, you should write everything down and list the following:
- Name of the Campaign, plus Description
- Target Goals and Success Metrics
- Target Audience
- Distribution Channels
- Content Material
Once done, discuss the draft with all colleagues and outside people that are to be involved with the digital advertising campaign.
Setting a Budget
After the strategy phase is finalized, you need to plan a budget. Budgeting and allocating funds should not necessarily be precise, as it will depend on your monthly revenue goals and marketplaces you are targeting.
You need to consider, however, the medium which then determines who is to be involved in the campaign. You may need to set aside more money for the work of the people producing the advert.
For videos you may need to pay a video production team. A design-based advert requires money for a copywriter, graphic designer or even a developer. Have in-house talent in mind when reaching freelancers.
Keep in mind where you are going to distribute your ads. Every platform has different pricing models. Social media and some other platforms may operate on an auction-based system for digital advertising space.
Paid search channels use a pay-per-click (PPC) model charging for the number of clicks on the ad. The time that each ad is being displayed for, increases the money you have to spend for the ad. Review the pricing for every distribution in advance.
Having a schedule will help to visualize the scope of a campaign as a map and eventual execution. Set timetables and funding for all people involved in the creation of the advert, plus the timeline for the time window an ad stays open on chosen platforms.
If your return on investment (ROI) is bigger than the money you have spent for the digital advertising, it is considered a successful campaign.
Keep notes of all money you have spent, as future digital advertising planning will be based on that campaign and performance results.
Launching an Ad Campaign
Having a strategy and a certain budget set aside for your digital advertising campaign, you are ready to launch the whole thing.
The ad distribution differs on the different channels, but it should be straightforward by following the instructions of each platform and uploading your content.
Always test your ad before distributing it, but know that testing does not guarantee viewers will react to the ad in the way you want. After your ad is live and Internet users see it, there could be issues. Digital advertising is flexible, as you can check results and make changes mid-campaign fast.
Platforms have an analytic tool with basic metrics as a number of the impressions, a percentage viewed for animations, gifs, videos, etc. UTM codes can display what part of website traffic is connected to which ads. Tests can show which segment of an advert performs best. It is only a matter of re-adjustment.
Types of Advertisements
In this section we are going to cover which are the basic types of adverts that you might encounter online. There are not many, but they differ in the way they are presented to users.
Typically, we have Display Ads and Native Ads. Each type has its own sub-types, which differ in their placement on a webpage or product.
Types of Display Ads
Basic types of Display advertisements that you can see on the Internet:
- Popup Ads – Adverts that interrupt browsing by overlaying the image on top of the screen and need the viewer to manually close them
- Banner Ads – Square or rectangular ads displayed in the format of images or animations. Shown above or to the side of Web content
- Interstitial Ads – these show up during a loading screen and require the viewer to wait some time (usually seconds) before closing them
- Rich Media Ads – contain interactive elements (besides CTA buttons) such as text fields, swipe or scroll functionality, multiple choice or 360 degree rotation
- Video Ads – Standard video commercials, as seen on television – only digital video platforms allow viewers to skip some of these adverts after a couple of seconds
Display Ads are the most recognizable kind of digital ads and have the closest similarity to traditional advertising. They are the digital evolution of flyers and billboard adverts.
Types of Native Ads
Native Ads mimic the content that viewers consume or search for. Due to this, the way native ads appear might vary depending on the various audiences and target platform.
Native Ads are most frequently paid by businesses, regardless how big or small. Types of Native advertisements that you can see are:
- Social Media Ads – if you want your social media posts to rank higher in the algorithm of a platform and appear in way more feeds of non-followers who have similar browsing or shopping habits
- Paid Search Ads – if you want your web pages to rank at the top of a general search engine results page for a specific phrase or keyword
- Promoted Listings – you pay to have your product listed at the top of a search results page on a shopping site or application
- Recommended Listings – you pay to get a product or content featured in related sections on shopping or content sites (Sponsored products, etc.)
- Influencer Partnerships – if you want to partner with social media stars with many followers in their target demographic and create branded content for the feed of the select influencer
- Sponsored Content – ads appearing in podcasts, video channels or specific content. Ad could involve the content creator reading long ad copy or letting the audience know that the content is presented by a brand
- Product Placement – you pay to have your product shown without direct advertising in a video game or a video clip
Native Ads are advertisements designed to be implemented with ease into any digital feed. These adverts are meant to appear as they belong and adhere to the desires of viewers, thus they are labeled as native.
For example, consider Amazon and their Sponsored products related to this item campaigns and how naturally they appear on the platform.
Social Media Advertising
Social Media is where users and your potential clients spend most of their free time on. These media platforms may prove to be the best place to start digitally advertising.
Social media platform giants such as Facebook and TikTok are amongst the most popular platforms that you can choose for your digital advertising strategy.
Paying a good monthly chunk of your budget for advertisements on social media is smart and highly recommended. We are going to briefly review, why both Facebook and TikTok are a great stage for digital advertising.
Facebook Ads
Facebook is a tech giant and probably the most preferred social media platform to run an advertisement campaign on in the past decade.
The interest in Facebook advertising grows as people are spending more time on there and scroll their feeds frequently. You cannot argue with Facebook having 1.49 billion members worldwide, and 22 billion ad clicks per year.
Facebook ads are as cheap as $1 and reach thousands of people, so they are a must in the business of today. Not to mention that they let you choose custom audiences and ones similar to those you chose.
Facebook is clever in targeting people, as sometimes even just a few scrolls of the mouse show the ad or it is within a video audiences are watching.
Newer generations perceive the World in a way more visual manner as older ones. They do not say that a picture is a thousand words without a good reason.
Now imagine running a whole video of your product that will reach around 5000 people for one lousy dollar. That is pretty impressive, right? We think so, too.
TikTok Ads
TikTok keeps gaining popularity. Video-streaming giant upgraded on Vine – a predecessor of TikTok – with extending the length of videos and adding more capabilities to users.
That same innovation is inside TikTok ads. You can choose many different details and make a custom video advert on TikTok for cheap.
TikTok, however, might not be the ideal platform for you as its main user-base is younger Millennials and Generation Z. That is more than 800 million monthly active users, who are from 10 to 30 years old, mostly teenagers.
Despite the younger generations being on TikTok, it might be just the thing you need for digital advertising. Especially, if you do not need older people as a target audience.
Google Ads
Google Ads brings many benefits to the table and pays for them, too.
As you know, Google is the largest search engine, so advertising on it, logically should reach more potential customers to your advertised product.
Apart from stating the obvious fact above, know that you can see massive business growth even from a few PPC advert runs.
You should have an individual or a team devoted specifically to carefully run your PPC strategy for digital advertising with Google Ads to work properly.
If you think this will be a waste of money and time, you should at least try using Google Ads as an ad-platform once.
Conclusion
Digital Advertising is not as easy and straight-forward as you may have once thought. You have to devote time and effort into building a strategy, before deploying.
You have to create a map and think about what product to advertise, what your target audience is, what budget you will spend and any other specifics.
Once you figure all those things out, you have to choose one or more platforms for the digital advertising to take place. After that you deploy the ads and after a while test new variables and repeat.
All of this may sound as an easy concept, especially if you have done it before or have worked in marketing. Alas, beginners have a lot to learn, and while this article is a great start, you will need to gain direct experience from digital advertising of your own product.
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