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Ads on social media, ads on blog posts, ads on Google search, ads in emails, ads on Spotify, and ads on news sites. Where aren’t there ads these days??
When digital ads can be found on just about every social media platform, website, or podcast you can get your eyes on, social media managers today need a really good grip on the different types of digital ads out there and when to use what type.
That’s why we’ve put this blog together, to help you understand what a digital ad is all about and the different types you can use to grow your business.
What is Digital Advertising?
Simple digital advertising definition: any form of online advertising. Digital advertising examples include social media ads, paid search ads, and native, and display ads. The idea of digital media advertising is pretty similar to traditional advertising - to raise brand awareness, increase sales, or make consumers aware of a new product.
Seven Types of Digital Advertising to Know
1. Display ads
These types of digital ads are banner ads or pop-ups that appear on websites. The point of these is to get people to click on them and take them to the brand’s website. The advantage of this type of digital advertising is that you can get your ad front and center of your target audience. The con is that these types of ads get an extremely low click rate and are often perceived as annoying.
2. Native ads
Talking about being annoying, native advertising is a great solution. Native ads take the form of helpful content which also ‘happen’ to be an ad. Think blog posts, sponsored advertorials, youtube videos, etc. Although native ads can be hard work to produce, they come across as authentic, credible, and helpful.
3. Social media
Social media ads can also be paid or organic. Paid ones will be labeled ‘sponsored’ and can be leveraged to reach specific audiences. Organic social media ads can be stories, videos, short posts, carousels, and more. Both paid and organic ads are easily spreadable - if someone enjoys your content, or your paid ad is humorous or exciting, they’ll send them to their friends. This increases your reach with minimal effort on your part.
4. Search engine marketing
Again, we must differentiate between organic and paid SEO ads. With excellent SEO skills, you can get your ad to rank one of the first on Google search. If you can manage this, it’s ideal because it’s free. However, few people are able to outrank every other company on Google search, which is where PPC ads come in handy. Sometimes referred to as ‘Google Ads’, these allow you to get right to the top of the search page, with the caveat that you have to pay every time someone clicks on your ad.
5. Video ads
Video ads have the major advantage of being both interesting and taking minimal: effort to engage with, making consumers far more likely to pay attention. Video ads can be mid-youtube videos, on websites, or on apps. The disadvantage is that they take time and a lot of creativity to produce.
6. Email marketing
Once you have an email list, you have the major advantage of being able to send email ads to people who are at least somewhat interested in your brand. There are a few ways to gather an email list but a common method is to have a pop-up on your website that requests the viewers' email address. You can then send promotional emails to those who have already shown interest in your brand.
7. Audio advertising
These can be employed on online audio platforms, like music sites and podcasts. The costs of producing these are low and they can be recycled across many platforms. You can also reach specific audiences and use site analytics to track ROI. The obvious downside is that people don’t generally enjoy having their song/podcast disrupted by an ad. They, therefore, have to be made cleverly and kept short to have a chance of being listened to.
Benefits of Digital Advertising
There’s paid digital advertising and there’s organic advertising, which is any kind of advertising you don’t have to pay for. Both forms of advertising have benefits and they complement each other as part of a digital marketing strategy.
Let’s start with paid digital advertisements. The two main benefits of these are:
- You deliver your message to a targeted audience. For example, if you use a pay-per-click ad, the only people clicking on that ad will be those interested in seeing it. Or if you use social media ads, they’ll be put where your target audience already is, thus increasing the chance that people will actually buy through your ad.
- You can track ROI. You know how much you paid for your digital ad, so you can divide the profit earned by the cost of the investment to determine your ROI.
What about organic digital advertising?
The benefits of these are:
- They’re free! If your product/blog post ranks really well in Google’s search, you get pretty much the same value as you’d get for a paid Google ad.
- Builds relationships: Say you have a weekly newsletter that you send out to an email list. Over time, your helpful content builds trust with your readers, which in turn makes them more ready to convert.
- Credibility: At the end of the day, most people know a paid ad when they see one. That doesn’t necessarily mean people don’t trust paid ads, but people have greater trust in organic ads. In fact, studies show that 70-80% of people ignore paid ads and go straight to organic ones.
How can Workamajig help you with your digital advertising?
It’s one thing to create fabulously engaging digital advertisements. It’s quite another to do it in a way that is cost-effective and brings you a worthwhile return on investment. How do you achieve this? The answer is two-fold:
- By managing your ad projects effectively so that time and money aren’t wasted.
- By tracking ROI so you know where to spend your advertising budget in the future.
Workamajig is a project management software that is designed specifically for creative teams and ad agencies. With it, companies like yours manage their advertising super easily and effectively.
The following are just a few ways that Workamajig makes your life easier:
- Know the full story with a real-time daily feed of all updates across projects
- Show you if your ad budget or timeline is at risk, with all items needing attention displayed in one place
- Create, customize & export reports plus built-in Gantt & burn charts to show you which of your ads are most effective