ONLINE ADVERTISING
The online world is filled with advertising opportunities beyond search engines, link placements and opt-in emails. Ideally, full-service online advertising agencies can provide you with highly targeted online advertising, including banner ads, pay-per-click advertising (Sponsored Search,Shopping Search) in search engines, email advertising and sponsorships, affiliate marketing, social media ads in blogs, message boards, social networking sites and more.
A key differentiator between online advertising and traditional advertising is the measurability provided. Online advertising allows you to report on every aspect of your campaigns with both web analytics and conversion tracking. ROI becomes a science rather than a guess.
Below are examples of the options available to find new traffic and customers when working with a full service online advertising agency such as Risdall Online Marketing Group’s division within Risdall Marketing Group.
- Search engines have content channel partners who can receive your sponsored search (PPC) ads based on the content of their website. So if a user is on a site talking about math curriculum and you are bidding on the term “elementary math curriculum” your ad can show up next to the content of that page.
- Other companies have opt-in newsletters which contain sections set aside for sponsors/advertisers. Finding a newsletter targeting your niche can be a great way to find new and highly qualified traffic.
- Blogs, message boards/forums and other online social communities are places where many people interested in the same topics can come to interact. There is a niche community out there for almost every interest, hobby or idea. Finding those communities that contain members of your target audience gives you access to active and highly loyal community members who you may be able to turn into advocates for your product.
- Affiliate marketing programs allow you to spread your ads across the web and pay only when someone clicks a link, comes to your website and makes a purchase.
- Rich Media allows you to interact with your audience inside the ad itself, including things like watching a video, or filling out a form or survey, and all without having to visit your site.
- For branding and awareness campaigns, there are still the standard skyscraper ads, banner ads and buttons on industry portals and search engines. As more and more people spend less and less time with newspapers, magazines and TV, it becomes increasingly important to get back in front of them during the time they spend surfing the web, shopping online and checking their email. While industry click-through rates are still very low on average, if you take advantage of geographic, demographic, psychographic and even behavioral targeting capabilities, online ad buys may be a successful part of an online marketing mix.