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More advertisers are spending more money on digital advertising.
That's right. More is very much the name of the game.
“Consumers are increasingly spending a tremendous amount of time with interactive screens and content–from mobile to desktop and audio to OTT–and brands are in lockstep with a growing commitment to digital ad buys. Mobile captured more than half of the total digital ad spend last year and we can easily expect that share to continue to climb. Video also saw significant growth. That is no surprise—especially after seeing buyers clamoring to get into last week’s NewFronts presentations in New York.”
— Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB
“Digital advertising revenues have been steadily rising for several years and buyers continue to increase their investment. From mobile to video, consumers are constantly turning to interactive screens, whether for information, entertainment, shopping, sharing, or more.”
— David Silverman, Partner, PwC
if you aren't already reaping the benefits of a digital marketing strategy then hopefully these 5 points should help change your mind:
1. Quick Revenue Wins tHROUGH A
"SELF-SERVICE" PLATFORM
Advances in underlying technology have been a primary enabler of growth in the digital advertising space. Advances in access, bandwidth and speed have been continuous over the 21 years and have been the backbone of growth enablement.
These improvements have not only helped to improve the user experience but also unlock new formats and devices that have greatly contributed to the industry growth. The emergence of mobile, video, and audio all began with advances in access, bandwidth, and speed.
20 years ago, SMEs could not easily advertise without significant upfront expenditure and a substantial risk on return to their marketing and advertising spend. For many such businesses, the cost of advertising was a risk that could not be easily taken. Digital advertising’s evolution has greatly democratized the ability for all businesses, regardless of size and budget, to target audiences based upon geographies (location), demographics, psychographics, and behavior.
Self-service platforms combined with low marketing spend requirements have opened up this mass media to all forms of business; it doesn’t matter if you are a fortune 500 company or a local pizza place. SMEs that were initially attracted to the industry through paid search and certain performance-based ad formats have continued to advertise through growing social media sites, easy-to-use self-service platforms, and industry-specific lead generation platforms. Digital advertising has successfully delivered lower price points with reduced risk, plus the benefit of transparency into advertising effectiveness and ROI. Through the use of self-service platforms, flexible budgets, and ROI transparency, companies can quickly ramp up or turn down budgeted spend, based upon their achieved ROI. This flexibility greatly lowers the risk associated with the advertising process and has facilitated more inclusive participation.
For you, digital advertising means one thing above all else: control. Control over budgets, over results and effectiveness.
This is an incredibly attractive prospect for advertisers who are budget and growth conscious.
2. Targeting with deadeye accuracy
Digital advertising in whatever form, be it paid search or paid social usually has one outstanding objective: to help you reach a desired goal for as little cost as possible. And now that may sound that the usual sales pitch you're used to but digital advertising delivers one thing better than any other advertising medium: targeting.
Traditionally, digital advertisers used to target based on the following:
- Geographical — targeting audience from specific country, state or city. Some advertising platforms offer even more granular geo-targeting, down to the city block. It is also known as “hyperlocal” and is often used for mobile ad campaigns and Facebook.
- Placement-based — targeting specific websites, pre-selected from the list of available ones on the ad network. This type of targeting is essential for advertisers in case an ad network doesn’t offer full fledged contextual targeting solution across all of its websites. For instance, if you’re an advertiser selling boats, you’d be more interested in targeting sites that are related to hunting/fishing, since they are frequented by your potential customers.
- Time-based — allows advertisers to determine time slot or day of the week to show their ads.
- Device-based — enables advertisers to display ads based on users’ device, OS version or browser version.
- Demographic — targeting method used by advertisers to display ads to certain audience segment, based on parameters like age, gender, marital status, education, etc.
But, as technology has progressed a new form of targeting has emerged: behavioural targeting.
Behavioral targeting is a method of targeting ads at users based on their browsing patterns, including sites they visit, their searches, purchases, etc.
Behavioral targeting uses data analysis of the audience to categorize it into individual segments. Expectations are that users belonging to the particular segment will be more likely to respond to ads based on the predicted interests. It is worth noting that contextual targeting and demographic information are used in combination with browsing habits analysis. However, since the interests of the audience are decisive in behavioral targeting, the ads served on the website aren’t required to be contextually relevant to web page’s content.
The most common way to track behavior and determine browsing habits is through cookie files stored by the browser during the session. When your browser requests a page with some content, server will reply with the HTML elements for loading on the browser along with the cookie text file that contains a unique anonymous id. This is saved on your hard drive.
With this scary level of accuracy you'll not only be getting an easy return on your investment, but you'll also discover new, decision-making information about your customers and prospects.
3. Support your offline advertising
Running cross-channel campaigns with unified creative is the holy grail of advertising.
With the "out of the box" nature of digital advertising, it's perfect for playing a supporting role for any larger marketing campaign you've got coming up.
I mean, think about it logically. Having more opportunities to be seen across multiple different platforms can lead to only one thing: more conversions.
With customers rarely converting the first time they see an ad, this means that customers can choose to interact and engage in the channels that they feel most comfortable, which in turn, could theoretically increase the chances of conversion.
Radio listeners are 52% more likely to include that brand-name in their internet browsing
Typically, we need to see something three times before it truly sinks in. It's the frequency advice we give to advertisers who come to us for our radio offering and the same logic applies to digital.
But synergising your digital advertising with your traditional advertising does more than just amplify opportunities to be seen. It also has tangible benefits that carry well beyond individual campaigns.
As an example, radio listeners are 52% more likely to include that brand-name in their internet browsing. If you're running consistent paid search, you'll be there to benefit from this increased traffic. If not, it'll likely just go straight to a competitor who is!
It pays to be prepared with this one and we think we've come up with a pretty good solution.
4. Build out An all-encompassing presence
As the duopoly of Google and Facebook keep gobbling up more of the internet they're making it easier for us, the advertiser, to have a consistent, all-encompassing presence across the channels.
For the low, low price of a single video you can now have a solid presence across Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp and Facebook. And, on the flip side, that video will see you across Google, Display network and Youtube.
And even though the benefits of having a presence across all these channels may seem obvious (Improve your reach and engagement.) there are some other benefits that don't get as much publicity.
Most importantly, it's a statement of trust.
With public favourability towards advertising hitting a record low of 25% in December 2018, according to Credos, it's now more important than ever to have a consistent presence across channels.
Have you ever been served an ad for a product, or just shopped for a product on amazon only to find yourself questioning the brand. I'd bet one the actions you take in response to that is to run a quick Google search to see if you can find anything on the brand. In today's techno-progressive society, we search across channels to prepare ourselves for a purchase. It's part of the buying process now for us not to take brands or products at face value.
So, as a digital advertiser, your ads going out across all these channels will be building share of mind with your customers and trust with new prospects.
5. MEET YOUR CUSTOMERS WHERE THEY ARE
Our lives and careers are moving at a million miles an hour. The life of the SME is a life of dynamism and evolution. It's likely that if you haven't already put another hat on your head, you will be at some point.
With that in mind,
Afterall, some professionals devote their entire careers to delivering excellent digital advertising results and when you think about the sheer amount of individual parts go into building the whole.
If you're still running the same paid search ad you first set up and can't seem to build up your quality score or you only seem to get leads and no conversions from Facebook campaigns then it may be time to think about bringing some of those professionals on board.
In fact, we run our own free digital audits that can be a great indicator as to whether you need to think about outsourcing your digital advertising.
In addition to being completely free, these digital audits are run by our digital experts who have years of experience dedicated to digital marketing.
If you're interested, click the link below and we'll let your account manager know:
