While this age is known as the information age, you can also refer to it as the digital age. With the advent of online channels like websites, social media platforms, and streaming content, you can pass important information to a large audience within a short space. Businesses have leveraged this medium to improve their marketing skills and achieve their goals.
Digital advertising is a form of marketing that employs online channels for specific goals through marketing funnels like customer engagement, lead generation, brand awareness, and launching new products. The ads can exist in different formats like images, audio, video, and text.
The increasing use of technology in human daily activities has made people rely on their electronic gadgets. It is only logical for businesses to change their means of communication from magazines and newspapers to a more effective option, digital marketing. How impactful is digital advertising to one’s business? Is it better than traditional advertising?
Keep reading to learn how your business can stay relevant in this modern yet competitive economy.
Differences between digital advertising and traditional advertising
Traditional advertising may have been helpful for several businesses, but its impact seems limited as compared with digital advertising. Hence, top companies are retiring the traditional strategy and employing digital marketing to push through the marketing funnel. Why? Let’s see.
There are two major differences between both forms of marketing;
Flexibility
Traditional advertising involves a lot of processes and requires some time before completion. You need to draft the content, print the newspaper, send the newspaper out, or paint a billboard to pass across a message. However, digital ads don’t need that much time. Within a few minutes, you can generate and launch your ads.
Another problem with traditional advertising is that you cannot change your content once it has been published. Digital ads, on the other hand, can allow you to adjust your content — targeting, frequency, timing, and more — even after the campaign is live. The need to adjust your ad campaign after publishing can be to improve its performance.
Another way digital advertising is more flexible is because of its budget. Only high-profile and complex digital advertising can have overbearing costs. However, the pricing is akin to the traditional means of advertising. Nevertheless, the advantage of digital ads is that all businesses — small, middle, and large scale — can access them based on their financial strength.
Precision
Precision is another notable difference between traditional advertising and digital advertising. For traditional ads, the recipient is unfiltered. Anyone can read magazines, view billboards, or watch TV, but they may have no interest in the products. Digital ads are tailored to the right audience that may have shown interest in your business or products/services.
Rather than shooting all arrows into the air and expecting a catch, you can target individuals that you think will patronize your business. Digital ads employ different parameters like age group, demography, gender, and marital status to determine who receives the ads. In addition to controlling the audience, you can set limits on how frequently you want the recipients to see the ads on their devices. Basically, you are solely in charge.
Differences between digital advertising and programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is a form of digital advertising. The main difference between digital advertising and programmatic advertising is the technology. Programmatic advertising works with the help of demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs).
Advertisers use demand-side platforms to place bids for available advertising space on websites. These bids are then placed on the supply-side platform. The provider with the highest bid wins and is given the opportunity to place targeted advertising to its target group on this advertising space.
Note: There are other types of digital ads, but the above are the most common. You can learn more about programmatic advertising.
Types of digital advertising
Now that you have seen the advantages of digital advertising over its traditional approach, let’s examine its types. There are several types of digital marketing, but the notable ones are:
Display advertising
Displays ads appear as visual elements — an animation, image — and text on apps, websites, and devices. Often, they accompany website content.
Search advertising
This form of advertising is also known as search engine marketing (SEM). It features in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They come as text ads and can appear along organic search results when using search engines.
Online video advertising
These types of digital advertising are video formatted. It can be out-stream or in-stream video ads. The out-stream videos are found on apps, websites, and devices, as seen in display ads. In-stream video ads can show before, during, or after the actual video.
Audio advertising
Audio ads are peculiar to when you are streaming music or podcasts. They are those ads you encounter before, during, or after streaming audio content. Audio advertising can also be played when users ask Alexa for product recommendations, for example.
The special thing: With Amazon, you have the flexibility to utilize various digital ad types through Amazon Ads or the Amazon DSP. Amazon provides Sponsored Product Ads, Sponsored Display Ads, and Sponsored Brand (Video) Ads. Additionally, with the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (ADSP), you can position your display or video ads within Amazon’s extensive marketing ecosystem. Amazon DSP offers a lot of advantages compared to other digital advertising platforms, which we will discuss in more detail later.
Why is Digital Advertising Important?
The importance of digital advertising is in its effectiveness to reach the right audience at a budget-friendly price.
Here are some of the advantages that show the importance of digital advertising;
1. Reaching potential customers
You can insert keywords in your ads or target specific audiences to reach individuals who are searching for your products or could possibly be interested in them. Based on stat, 89% of most buyers’ journeys always begin with their search queries with commercial intent.
2. Engagement and brand awareness
You can increase your engagement and build brand awareness with digital advertising. Take advantage of the design capabilities to share information about your business.
3. Improved connection with customers
The use of video ads can be creative storytelling for customers to connect with the brand. Sometimes, people want to see the faces behind the brand. You can use influencers to convince more new individuals about the quality of your products.
4. Retargeting
Digital marketing can help you retarget old customers to reignite their interest. Retargeting can be extremely efficient as customers have already shown interest in your product once.
What Do You Have to Keep in Mind When Using Digital Displays?
There are some factors you should bear in mind when using digital displays. Your commonest considerations should include;
Cost of Digital Ads
The price for digital ads can vary greatly depending on the format. There are also different billing models. With the pay-per-click model (PPC), you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can also consider the cost-per-mille model (CPM), a pricing model where you pay a certain price for 1,000 impressions. It is important to always keep an eye on the costs and set yourself daily, weekly or monthly budgets.
Targeting for Digital Ads
You can use different forms of targeting for digital ads. For example, you can set keywords on the basis of which ads are to be displayed when someone searches for this keyword. On Amazon, for example, you can also target products.
With the Amazon DSP, you have numerous other targeting options, such as lifestyle, contextual, lookalike or in-market.
Tips For Using Digital Ads
If you want to achieve the best result with digital advertising, there are some important tips you should know. They include;
1. Key Performance Indicator (KPIs)
KPIs are measuring standards to know the effectiveness of your campaigns and your strategy. Define your business goals, choose the most appropriate marketing strategy for it, and visualize the effectiveness numbers with KPIs.
Optimization is an important part of this. Ensure you test all variables to determine if your ads can maximize performance. You should track the performance of your ads to know if you need to optimize them. That way, you can know if the ad is worth your money or otherwise.
2. Focus on relevance
The relevance of your ads is their precision in targeting the right audience. Focus on people who will engage with your product.
3. Make use of Amazon’s extensive digital marketing ecosystem
There are a lot of different ways and platforms you can use to place your digital ads. However, the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (ADSP) is the clear frontrunner. The Amazon DSP allows you to use Amazon’s exclusive first-party data and target promising target groups. In comparison to Google and Facebook, Amazon not only provides demographic characteristics but also data on search and buying behavior. This gives you the possibility to reach users in every state of the Sales funnel from Awareness to Loyalty and target people who really have a buying interest in your product.
Final words
It does not matter if you are a small or big business. You need digital advertising to survive competitive forces in the market. However, it is not enough to know about this type of marketing and its benefits. You also have to stay up-to-date and focus on new possibilities for your business like the Amazon DSP.
If you want to get good value for every dollar you spend, contact an approved Amazon DSP partner like BidX. Their team of experts will provide the best solution for your business needs. Contact us today, and let’s help you achieve your business goals.
