How to Use Different Types of Digital Advertising to Maximize Your Brand’s Reach
Updated on June 17, 2021
Trying to spread the word about your online business?
You’re probably aware it’ll involve digital marketing. After all, over 4.5 billion people worldwide use the Internet on a daily basis.
There’s a small misconception that digital marketing is all done on the Internet. Digital marketing refers to promoting your products or services across a range of digital platforms. It’s usually done online, but there are offline methods as well, such as radio and television.
What’s great about digital marketing is that advertising is easily scalable and accessible to businesses of all sizes.
If you own a shoe company, your ad could appear next to Jimmy Choo’s sponsored ad on social media. Small companies would never dream of having their ads next to big brand names via traditional advertising like primetime TV slots, but digital marketing makes this possible. It’s also pretty cheap to start a digital marketing campaign.
That said, you might be wondering why everyone isn’t using all the different digital advertising channels since there’s no such thing as bad publicity . . . right?
Before you pay for different types of advertising in a scatter-gun approach, you should know that certain types of advertising work better for certain online business models By understanding the different types of digital marketing, you can choose the best channels to target an audience that will most likely respond to your ads.
Being smart with your marketing campaign helps you leapfrog past your competitors when you take the lion’s share of traffic. We’ll provide a breakdown of the different types of digital advertising and how you can leverage them to boost your business’s traffic and revenue.
Search Engine Marketing
Online advertising goes hand-in-hand with search engine marketing. As the name suggests, it’s about finding ways to get your content or products found more easily on search engines. What makes this approach popular is the ability to target specific keywords.
There are two types of search engine marketing: paid search and search engine optimization (SEO).
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns rely on getting your ads in front of as many people as possible, with the hope that the copy does its job in convincing someone to click on the ad.
The strength of PPC marketing is the buyer’s intent. If your ad targets a keyword like “buy basketball shoes” and someone clicks on it, there’s a good chance they’re going to make a purchase. You’ll have seen these paid ads in action when searching for something on Google—notice the “Ad” tag next to the URL for the top few search results.
PPC advertising gets a bit tricky because the cost isn’t set in stone. It’s basically an auction where you need to bid on your chosen keywords. If your bid is the highest, you’ll need to pay the advertising network for each click. Higher bids will help your ad rank higher above competitors, but the quality of your copy and relevance of the ad to the keyword also play a big part.
The exact cost of PPC campaigns varies depending on how competitive a keyword is and the niche you’re in. Certain keywords in law and insurance can rack up to $50 per click!
Two search engines where PPC advertising is used the most are Amazon and Google.
SEO
Thankfully, search engine marketing isn’t a pay-to-win game. You can get your site to rank higher on search engines organically through SEO. It’s a good long-term strategy and is often overlooked by online business owners. To do well with an organic search, you should focus on creating content around target keywords.
SEO is affected by on-page and off-page factors.
On-page factors are things you can manipulate, such as loading times between pages, the quality of your content (grammar, ease of reading, relevance to the reader), and broken links on your site. Content site owners often use plugins and other SEO tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to keep their sites in optimal condition.
Off-page SEO factors are related to your link-building strategy. These can be harder to influence as you have little direct control over whether someone will link to your content. A few approaches to gain backlinks include guest posting for other blogs, requesting a direct exchange of backlinks, and using a public blog network (PBN).
Guest posting involves writing an article on another site in a similar niche. A lot of people aim to write a guest post on authority sites for greater exposure to a much larger audience, and also because the backlink from their domain will hold more weight.
However, it could work better in your favor to write for a similar-sized or smaller blog that has a loyal audience with high engagement. If you choose to write guest posts, mix up your approach by writing for different sizes of sites; you might be surprised when the smaller blogs end up generating more traffic!
Alternatively, you could just ask to swap backlinks. This is a straightforward approach but somewhat limited, as you only gain a backlink and nothing more.
PBNs used to be the bread-and-butter of all link-building strategies a few years ago. However, after several updates to search engine algorithms, using a PBN can lower your domain ranking when used incorrectly. Several SEO experts still use them, but you should consider the rewards and risks of PBNs before deciding to use one yourself.
Social Media
Although you might be shy about using social media, it could be a game-changer for your business.
Social media advertising is especially powerful for targeting and retargeting if you know your audience thanks to the ability to filter by demographics. Social media marketing is usually more effective when you pay to have your posts sponsored. Unless you grow a loyal audience, the engagement rate of organic posts is much lower compared to paid advertising.
Choosing the right platform depends on where your target audience usually hangs out.
During your customer research, observe where your leads usually ask or answer questions. Maybe they’re active in a private Facebook group or they monitor certain threads on Reddit. Once you’ve identified the most important social media platform to your potential customers, create a profile there and do your best to add value in all your posts.
You don’t have to always promote your products or services. Certain platforms are ideal if you want to establish yourself as a thought leader and give your brand extra credibility. If you can help your customers in other ways outside of buying your product, it’ll go a long way toward nurturing loyal customers.
Display Ad Networks
If you don’t have an ad blocker on, you’ll usually see a display ad featured on the sides or header of a site. Clicking on the banner will take you to a landing page or product listing page.
Display ads can be effective when you need to raise brand awareness or if you’ve just launched a new product. You can apply to a display ad network like Google Adsense or Mediavine.
Since display ads are visual-based, it’s important to employ a creative design that’s relevant to your target audience. If you sell products, you could feature a model from the same demographic as the reader so they can picture themselves using your product. You can also experiment with ad placement on your own site, as people might respond to the banner more after reading a call-to-action (CTA).
Email Marketing
Although digital marketing has branched out in many ways over the years, email is definitely here to stay.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that can push leads through the marketing funnel quicker and increase your revenue. When someone opts in and subscribes to your email marketing list, they’re giving you permission to reach out to them whenever you want because they’re interested in what you have to offer.
To take advantage of this increased buyer intent, create automated email funnels so you don’t have to actively attend to each individual. Through a series of emails, you can walk a potential lead through what your product’s USP is, how they benefit from it, and demonstrate how it’s used.
The great thing about email marketing is the ability to create different funnels based on someone’s behavior. If they read the first email but didn’t open the others, you can set a trigger to detect this pattern and offer a discount to get the reader to re-engage.
Another popular way to use email marketing is to create customized newsletters highlighting different products or features each week. Engaging newsletters give you the opportunity to nurture a loyal customer base and increase customer retention while building your brand’s authority.
Product Marketing
Once your product has launched, there’s still a lot of work to be done in promoting it.
How does product marketing achieve this?
We’ve just scratched the surface of email marketing; showing a lead how to use a product in different ways and demonstrate its value to the customer. Product marketing is a subtle advertising approach where you’re still listening to what customers are saying about your product in order to adjust the story of how the product benefits them.
A simple but effective way to put this approach into practice is by creating content that shows customers and potential leads on how to use your product. This gives you an opportunity to show off the features while, more importantly, demonstrating how your product solves your customer’s problem.
If you’ve ever been to a tradeshow, you’ll remember the salesperson who quickly showed you how to use their product and let you sample it.
You can leave a similarly strong impression without needing to go to tradeshows by creating videos. Consider uploading these short videos on YouTube so you can embed them on your site or share on other social media platforms.
Native Advertising
When you reach the end of an article, you might recall seeing a recommended article. If it’s similar to the post you just read, you might feel compelled to check it out. Think of those long and unplanned YouTube binges where you clicked one recommended video after another (good times!).
Native advertising is similar to display advertising, but the ads appear to be more natural. They are contextual and usually embedded in the content as part of the flow. They can be effective because they are less intrusive than paid ads. The recommended features are relevant to the reader, which can result in a higher conversion rate.
You can apply to native advertising networks like Taboola or Outbrain to take advantage of this digital marketing approach.
Affiliate Marketing
E-commerce businesses can benefit from this marketing approach because affiliates will send more referrals and traffic to your product listing pages.
It allows content site owners to make a passive income. They sign up to an affiliate marketing program and choose a product they promote on their site. When someone clicks on their link and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer gets paid a small commission as a finder’s fee.
Affiliate marketing is a popular method of promoting products: 61% of readers are more likely to make a purchase based on a recommendation they found on a blog.
By featuring your products through an affiliate program, you can leverage a wide variety of marketing channels, such as influencers, blogs, and email marketing. While they help you generate some high-quality leads, you still need to put in the hard work to make sure these leads convert. Refine your landing page’s copy and images to get the highest conversion rate possible.
Affiliate marketers take conversion rates into consideration when featuring certain products on their blogs. They’ll also be comparing commission rates, so remember to conduct competitor analysis on affiliate programs so you don’t price yourself out of being featured more regularly.
Experiment with Your Marketing Strategy
Mastering the right type of marketing for your business can drive additional traffic and revenue to your business.
The ability to target specific audiences means you can increase the likelihood of someone clicking on your ad and improve the chances of someone making a purchase. You can tweak your marketing campaigns after analyzing data to see which channels are paying dividends in your ad spend, while pulling back from channels that aren’t seeing any fruition.
We’ve seen businesses experience rapid growth after diversifying their traffic sources by advertising through different channels. Adding content to your business isn’t the only factor to drive growth as we found in our content ROI study.
For more useful tips on how to grow your business, check out our YouTube channel.
Remember that it takes time to build a business before it becomes a profitable asset. There are a lot of moving parts you need to arrange and get into place before you start seeing your first month of profit. Marketing is a complex but necessary piece of this puzzle.
Many entrepreneurs are often great at marketing; others are better with their organizational and planning skills. No matter what your skill set is, you can skip past the hard work of starting a business from scratch and buy a ready-made business that’s already profitable but has more room to grow.
Sellers will provide guidance and advice on how to run your new acquisition, and you can outsource any tasks that aren’t your forte to freelancers so you can focus on building your asset.
Sign up now to find a great deal on our marketplace.
