Nucleus - Marketing and Design Newsletter
Online advertising in your marketing mix
Last month we talked about the value of Pinterest and the opportunities it provides to expand your marketing strategy. This month we’d like to discuss another possible addition—online advertising.
You’ve seen the ads—in the sidebar of your favorite websites, search engines and social networks. Your organization can utilize that screen real estate to expand your reach to potential customers. Online advertising networks allow you to put your brand—with targeted, highly relevant messaging—in front of prospects using specific keywords and demographic information. Once you’ve identified keywords and demographics, the next step is to choose a delivery method.
Here are a few:
- Display Ads – The oh-so-familiar banner ads that populate web pages, IM applications and email can include text, logos, pictures, videos, animations, and more, depending on where they appear.
- Text Ads – Advertisements displayed as simple but descriptive text-based hyperlinks.
- Interstitial Ads – Ads that appear in a pop-up window while a webpage is loading or between the contents of the page. Media-rich interstitials can garner engagement rates as high as 10%!¹
- Social Ads – Rather than relying on assumptions about user demographics from a website’s media kit, social ads capitalize on data mined from the user’s social network to increase relevance. According to Brian Solis, author of The End of Business as Usual, “Twitter’s Promoted Products suite, Facebook’s contextual, friend-based banners and ‘Sponsored Stories’ program, and YouTube’s Promoted Videos … help brands extend their reach by tapping into the social and interest graphs of consumers.”²
Are effective online ads a missing piece of your marketing puzzle? With online advertising spending projected to grow to nearly 28% of total US major media ad spending by 2015, this is one resource you need to get to know.³