What comes to mind when you think of advertising?
Does it automatically conjure up images Don Draper drinking an Old Fashioned?
Or do you think of some particular adverts; maybe a billboard poster or a TV commercial, a slogan or a jingle?
This is traditional advertising; radio, TV, billboards and print media. The world is changing fast, and so is advertising.
Traditional advertising has a couple of drawbacks:
1. Traditional advertising has created ‘ad blindness’
People don’t pay attention to ads any more. Not many people are watching scheduled TV and if they are they skip the commercials.
If you’re out and about, your face is usually stuck in your smartphone screen, if you’re reading magazines and newspapers, they are so full of advertising that we just ignore it and flip through to the articles we want to read.
2. Traditional advertising has limited targeting opportunities
With traditional advertising methods, it’s almost impossible to create ads that you can guarantee your ideal customers will see. Even in niche publications, the chances of someone who wants your product at that particular moment are slim to say the least.
3. Traditional advertising doesn’t provide value to the customers
Traditional advertisers are basically trying to raise awareness of their product or service and ultimately increase sales. There is usually no value to the customer within the advertising itself. I’ll talk more about value later.
As I said before, times have changed. Although traditional forms of advertising still work to a certain extent (otherwise they wouldn’t exist, right?), we are now deeply embedded in the age of the internet.
Advantages of Online advertising:
Online advertising allows you to be very specific
Online advertising has a few advantages over traditional forms, and probably the most important to be ridiculously specific in who gets to see your ads.
The internet has created a multitude of possibilities for you to get your message out there. In fact, there are so many possibilities now that It’s difficult to know where to start, or even which platform is best for your product, your service, your music.
Well, that depends on who your target customers are and what they do online.
Think about this: when you have a problem, any problem, where do you look for the answer? Well, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that, unless you live under a rock, you Google it, or Bing it, or use some other search engine.
Most search engines record what people search for and you can access that information, not on a person by person basis, but you can see volume of people searching for specific things, these are known as ‘keywords’. Using that information you can make sure that when people search for certain things, it’s you’re advertising that they see.
On top of that, there is something called ‘pay per click’ where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
And that’s just search engines. Another platform is Social Media. Let’s use Facebook as an example, whatever your personal opinion about the social media giant is, you can’t deny that they have a massive potential audience. As i’m writing this, facebook has over 2.6 billion users, almost 20% of the world population, and the number keeps rising.
If you have a Facebook account, they know everything about you, demographics, likes, dislikes, hobbies, geographical information.
As an advertiser, you can tell Facebook to only show your ad to very specific people. So if you want to advertise to 35-45 year old men, who like kite-surfing, Asian cooking, own a golden retriever and live within 10 miles of a beach, Facebook can find them.
This is incredibly powerful in reaching exactly the people who want to buy what you’re selling. But another side to this is that you are able to find out exactly what people want, what problems they are facing in their lives and provide real solutions to them.
The effect of this is that you build real relationships with your customers based on trust.
Online advertising is easy to budget
Another question is “how expensive is it going to be?”
Well again, that depends. Some platforms are more expensive than others, and some keywords are more expensive than others, generally speaking: the more competitive a keyword is, the more you pay to advertise for it.
What is good about online advertising is that you can be very specific in how you spend your budget. You can set a specific daily, or weekly budget and make sure that you don’t spend any more than that. The real advantage of this is that you can can get a very clear picture of which advertising campaigns are working, and which aren’t so you know where to focus your efforts.
Online advertising is driven by data
This leads me nicely onto another advantage of digital advertising: Data and Analytics.
With digital marketing you can track your ads very specifically; if something isn’t working you can cancel it and work out another campaign. If it turns out to be a good campaign, you can ramp up your budget. In this way digital advertising is much more scalable than traditional forms. You can work out your return on investment exactly and easily.
With all this in mind, it’s no surprise that digital advertising revenues have overtaken traditional advertising in many countries.
If you want to get ahead in any form of business today, investing in learning the skills you need to understand online marketing is going to be essential. This is especially important for small, independent businesses with niche markets and where budget is a big concern.
What do you think about the new trends in marketing? Do you miss the good old days of TV jingles? Let’s talk about it.
