Promotional mix and promotional campaigns

The marketing mix is most commonly executed through the 4 P's of marketing:

•  Price,
•  Product, 
• Promotion,
• Place.

In marketing, the promotional mix describes a blend of promotional variables chosen by marketers to help a firm reach its goals.

 It has been identified as a subset of the marketing mix.

 It is believed that there is an optimal way of allocating budgets for the different elements within the promotional mix to achieve best marketing results, and the challenge for marketers is to find the right mix of them.

 Activities identified as elements of the promotional mix vary, but typically include the following:

• Advertising is the paid presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor in a mass medium. Examples include print ads, radio, television, billboard, direct mail, brochures and catalogs, signs, in-store displays, posters, mobile apps, motion pictures, web pages, banner ads, emails.
• 
  
• Personal selling is the process of helping and persuading one or more prospects to purchase a good or service or to act on any idea through the use of an oral presentation, often in a face-to-face manner or by telephone. Examples include sales presentations, sales meetings, sales training and incentive programs for intermediary salespeople, samples, and telemarketing.
• 
  
• Sales Promotion is media and non-media marketing communication used for a pre-determined limited time to increase consumer demand, stimulate market demand or improve product availability. Examples include coupons, sweepstakes, contests, product samples, rebates, tie-ins, self-liquidating premiums, trade shows, trade-ins, and exhibitions.
• 
  
• Public relations or publicity is information about a firm's products and services carried by a third party in an indirect way. This includes free publicity as well as paid efforts to stimulate discussion and interest. It can be accomplished by planting a significant news story indirectly in the media, or presenting it favorably through press releases or corporate anniversary parties. Examples include newspaper and magazine articles, TVs and radio presentations, charitable contributions, speeches, issue advertising, seminars.
• 
  
• Direct Marketing is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses and nonprofits to communicate directly to the customer, with methods such as mobile messaging, email, interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional letters, and outdoor advertising.
• 
  
• Corporate image campaigns have been considered as part of the promotional mix.
• 
  
• Sponsorship of an event or contest or race is a way to generate further positive publicity
• 
  
• Guerrilla marketing tactics are unconventional ways to bring attention to an idea or product or service, such as by using graffiti, sticker bombing, posting flyers, using flash mobs, doing viral marketing campaigns, or other methods using the Internet in unexpected ways.
• 
  
• Product placement is paying a movie studio or television show to include a product or service prominently in the show.

3.1 design a promotional campaign to establish a new brand

Here are seven steps that will get your campaign off to the right start.

1. Assess Marketing Communication Opportunities. ...
2. What Communication Channels Will You Use? ...
3. Determine Your Objectives. ...
4. Determine Your Promotion Mix. ...
5. Develop Your Promotional Message. ...
6. Develop the Promotion Budget. ...
7. Determine Campaign Effectiveness.

A promotional plan is an important marketing tool when it comes to launching a new service or product or expanding your market reach into new verticals or demographics. When planning a promotional campaign, keep in mind that a successful campaign achieves all of the following desired outcomes and goals:

1. Your promotional message reaches your intended and targeted audience.
2. Your message is understood by your audience.

1. Your message stimulates the recipients, and they take action.

The question is how do you achieve these outcomes with your campaign? The process is easy, but it takes "planning" time. Here are seven steps that will get your campaign off to the right start.

Assess Marketing Communication Opportunities

It's important in this first step to examine and understand the needs of your target market. Who is your message going out to? Current users, influencers among individuals, decision-makers, groups, or the general public?

What Communication Channels Will You Use?

In the first step of planning, you should have defined the markets, products, and environments. This information will assist you in deciding which communication channels will be most beneficial. Will you use personal communication channels such as face to face meeting, telephone contact, or perhaps a personal sales presentation? Or will the nonpersonal communication such as newspapers, magazines, or direct mail work better?

Determine Your Objectives

Keep in mind that your objectives in a promotional campaign are slightly different from your marketing campaign. Promotional objectives should be stated in terms of long or short-term behaviors by people who have been exposed to your promotional communication. These objectives must be clearly stated, measurable, and appropriate to the phase of market development.

Determine Your Promotion Mix

This is where you will need to allocate resources to sales promotion, advertising, publicity, and, of course, personal selling. Don't skimp on either of these areas. You must create awareness among your buyers for your promotional campaign to succeed. A well-rounded promotion will use all these methods in some capacity.

Develop Your Promotional Message

It is the time that you will need to sit down with your team and focus on the content, appeal, structure, format, and source of the message. Keep in mind in promotional campaigns appeal and execution always work together.

Develop the Promotion Budget

It is the exciting part. You must now determine the total promotion budget. It involves determining cost breakdowns per territory and promotional mix elements. Take some time to break down allocations and determine the affordability, percent of sales, and competitive parity. By breaking down these costs, you will get a better idea on gauging the success potential of your campaign.

Determine Campaign Effectiveness

After marketing communications are assigned, the promotional plan must be formally defined in a written document. In this document, you should include situation analysis, copy platform, timetables for effective integration of promotional elements with elements in your marketing mix.

You will also need to determine how you will measure the effectiveness once it is implemented. How did the actual performance measure up to planned objectives? You'll need to gather this information by asking your target market whether they recognized or recall specific advertising messages, what they remember about the message, how they felt about the message, and if their attitudes toward the company were affected by the message.

What Is a Marketing Campaign?

A marketing campaign is a variety of content assets centralized around one message. They often use many different marketing channels to get this idea across. The timing of these campaigns are also very clearly defined.

3.2 design a promotional campaign for a new product or service which utilises an existing brand.

see below successful branding campaigns for existing brands

Virgin – Seize the Holiday

Live video has quickly become a trend in the digital world, and this ad from Virgin Holidays jumped on that trend with great effect.

The video is brilliantly choreographed with amazing activities from several global destinations shown in quick succession.

The live aspect isn’t a gimmick either; it demonstrates that there is a whole world out there, just waiting for you to “Seize the Holiday”. It also quickly shows off all the possibilities in the destinations serviced by Virgin Holidays.

Pret A Manger – Little Veggie Shop

This ad might not seem as exciting and flashy as some of the others listed here, but I’ve chosen it for a very sound reason. Pret asked their customers for insight and acted on the answer.

The campaign started with an online poll asking if customers would support vegan stores. The results encouraged them to turn a central London store into a Little Veggie Pop-up.

“A lot of brands say vote for a change, when they’ve already made up their mind. It is just lazy. If customers are good enough to give you their time, you need to listen.

“Marketers find it hard to listen, they usually have their minds already made up. That is a mistake because if customers want to be part of you brand, you need to take them seriously.”

MARK PALMER, MARKETING DIRECTOR, PRET A MANGER

The store ended up increasing profits and delivering on an idea that their customers wanted. In fact, it was so popular it went from a temporary to a permanent store, with popular recipes making their way into other Pret stores.

Image: Pret a Manger

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Under Armour – Rule Yourself

This ad focuses on its star rather than the brand. That’s easily done when you have Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time.

It’s beautifully shot, with only occasional flashes of the Under Armour logo as Phelps trains. It highlights the hard work and determination needed to be successful, with the implication being that if Under Armour is good enough for someone that puts this much effort into their training, it’s probably good enough for little old you.

Airbnb/Art Institute of Chicago

Another visually stunning ad, this time a collaboration between Airbnb and The Art Institute of Chicago. They recreated Van Gogh’s famous bedroom to highlight an exhibition of all three versions of the painting.

It’s an innovative collaboration that saw great publicity for both the art gallery and the homestay network.

OK Go & Morton Salt – One Moment

You may be familiar with Chicago-based indie-rock band OK Go. Their music videos are invariably brilliant concepts, designed for the digital, sharing age.

With 2016’s One Moment, the band released a 4.2-second music video, presented by Morton Salt. The seasoning sellers have decided to embrace cause marketing under the Walk Her Walk banner.

Once the video is replayed in super-slow-mo, the video lasts the entire length of the song and reflects the message that Morton wanted to portray.

“We want to show that a single moment can contain so much wonder, so much beauty, and so much change,” said OK Go vocalist Damian Kulash.

Nike – Margot vs. Lily

In January, Nike released a series of ‘branded content’. Margot vs. Lily was an original series from Nike following the stories of competitive sisters Margot and Lily.

The long form ads were aimed at the millennial audience, and while it was a risk for the clothing giant to take, the data suggests the series was a big success.

H&M – Come Together

In a crowded space, my favorite holiday ad was directed by Wes Anderson, echoing the style of his film The Darjeeling Limited.

It also features one of the stars of that movie, Adrian Brody. If you are familiar with Wes Anderson’s work you can instantly tell he is the director on this.

Product placement is also completely lacking, instead focusing on the beautiful visuals and heartwarming Christmas story.

Hotels.com – Skippable Ads

The best marketing campaigns often play with the format, and this effort from Hotels.com has an amusing take on the ‘Skip Ad’ button found on YouTube videos.

When you hit the button on this ad, the same video is played, but every character in the video is now skipping. It’s in keeping with the tone of previous ads featuring Captain Obvious – we featured one in our Best Facebook Marketing Campaigns post which played with the silent video format.

The video below demonstrates the concept by flicking between the two versions of the ad.

Spotify – Thanks 2016, It’s been weird.

One of the best marketing campaigns of 2016 was saved until the end. Spotify used the mountains of data they hold to produce a series of lighthearted ads that also played on the annus horribilis that was 2016.

The campaign, which will be rolled out across 14 markets, features localized messages that merge listener data and pop-culture references. It’s a lighthearted way to highlight the way Spotify has been able to harness data to deliver a better experience.

Image: Spotify

Google – Year In Search 2016

How do you sum up a year like 2016? This video takes an emotional look at the year just gone, covering a wide range of events. Google’s end of year review is a fitting way to wrap up our review of the best marketing campaigns of the year.

Tugs on the heart strings that one. I’m a fan of the design too, with the simple search bar seeming to say that Google is now our window to the world.

3.3 create a plan for implementing and reviewing a promotional campaign.

What are the steps in developing a promotional plan?

• Step 1: Begin with a snapshot of your company's current situation, called a “situation analysis.”
• Step 2: Describe your target audience. 
• Step 3: List your marketing goals. 
• Step 4: Develop the marketing communications strategies and tactics you'll use. ...
• Step 5: Set your marketing budget.

How to review the campaign by using analytic tools

see below

What is Social Media Analytics?

Instead of thinking about social media analytics as a noun, think of it as a verb. Specifically, it’s gathering data from social platforms to help guide your marketing strategy.

This process begins by prioritizing business goals. For example, your focus may be to double the number of new visitors to your website.

The second step is determining key performance indicators (KPIs). In this case, your chief social media KPI would likely be based on engagement stats. These can be broken down into:

• likes and shares your posts receive
• replies and comments
• (most importantly) clicks your links and content earn

By collecting this data, you can figure out how social media factors into meeting your business goal. From there, you can keep going in the direction you’re headed or adjust your approach.

Now that the definition is clear, here’s our list of the top social media analytics tools:

1. Keyhole

Use Keyhole to measure, in precise detail, a brand or trend’s impact on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Giving you access to an intuitive and shareable dashboard, it tracks hashtag, keyword and campaign metrics in real-time. These include reach, impressions, periods of high activity and more.

You can also leverage its data to lead your influencer outreach efforts. Clicking the dashboard’s Influencers tab will reveal information surrounding accounts that have the highest reach and interaction numbers. To boost your engagement, identify important accounts in your niche and re-share their most popular content.

Give it a shot:

Price: $89 – $3,000+ USD per month

2. AgoraPulse

This image was taken from the AgoraPulse homepage.

Operating in multiple languages, you can use AgoraPulse to track enhanced engagement analytics across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Along with standard metrics, the platform ranks users who frequently share your content and notifies you when your pages and profiles have been mentioned. This information, combined with community management stats such as message response rate, will help guide your social outreach efforts. Plus, you can export analytics graphs onto a PowerPoint file.

Price: $29 – $199 USD per month

3. Brandwatch

Offering a suite of tools that work across major social media platforms, Brandwatch is perhaps best used as a research suite. It provides information about the markets you own and want to enter, such as demographic data about gender and occupation. You can even monitor your brand’s reputation in real-time, seeing if users are posting positive or negative messages about you. Best of all, the data is accurate – Brandwatch filters spam and duplicate mentions.

Price: Contact Brandwatch to discuss a unique plan

4. Buffer

As a comprehensive social media scheduling tool, you can log in to Buffer to see the engagement numbers for your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn posts. Based on these metrics, it also identifies your top post of the day. But keep in mind, Buffer only tracks the posts you make through its platform.

Price: Free – $2,550 USD per year

5. BuzzSumo

You can depend on BuzzSumo to track the top social content in your niche. Simply plug in a URL, phrase or keyword into the search bar to see who’s sharing relevant content on each major social platform. You can then use the tool to promote your material, as it identifies the most influential sharers to reach out to.

Price: $99 – $999 USD per month

6. Crowdbooster

For a quick and simple Twitter and Facebook analytics tool, many marketers choose Crowdbooster. Through an intuitive and customizable dashboard, you have access to real-time engagement data that exports to Excel. The tool also makes recommendations about when to post, who to engage and how to improve your interaction efforts in a weekly performance summary.

Price: $9 – $119 USD per month

7. Edgar

Edgar automates social scheduling, storing content you collect in a library based on categories such as tips and blog posts. As you make a schedule based on these categories, Edgar creates a never-ending queue that automatically cycles through your library week after week.

But the tool also tracks your engagement metrics, helping you optimize your schedule based which types of content generate the most interaction and when they should be shared.

Price: $49 – $99 USD per month

8. Google Analytics

What’s there to say about Google Analytics that hasn’t already been said? As the clear top choice for analyzing website traffic, it’s also ideal for evaluating certain social media metrics. You can use it to measure the value of traffic coming from social sites, determining how visitors behave and if they convert.

Price: Free – $150,000 USD per month

9. Hootsuite

Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite is a social media management dashboard. On top of scheduling posts and aggregating content, you can use its analytics tools. The platform not only tracks standard engagement numbers, but measures your team’s performance. For example, it records resolution times for customer service issues.

Price: Free; advanced plans vary

10. Klout

Test out Klout to quantify your influence on each major social platform. Giving you a mark out of 100, it grades you based on your ability to engage and drive action. You can see on which platforms you’re most influential, giving you an idea about how to successfully interact with your audience.

Price: Contact Klout to discuss a unique plan

11. Little Bird

For an intricate influencer analytics tool, use Little Bird. Its goal is to eliminate the need for influencer research and instead let you focus on outreach. The tool tracks metrics detailing the most prominent people who interact in your space and with your brand. It discovers the most engaging topics and content for you to share or base ideas on, too. And the influencer list feature helps target qualified individuals throughout your social campaigns.

Price: Contact Little Bird to discuss a unique plan

12. NetBase

Specifically targeting enterprise-scale brands and agencies, NetBaseadvertises that it processes posts nine-times faster and 50 to 70% more accurately than other comprehensive social media analytics platforms. Community managers can use it to quickly make decisions on large accounts they manage. NetBase can read millions of social posts in 42 languages and determines user sentiment regarding trends.

Price: Contact NetBase to discuss a unique plan

13. Oktopost

Historically, digital marketers have struggled to measure the financial impact of social media. Oktopost addresses that painpoint. The tool tracks conversions, identifying channels and messages that drive financial actions on your website. For example, it allows you to confidently say “this new customer came from our latest Facebook post.”

Price: Starts at $65 USD per month; advanced plans vary

14. quintly

This image was taken from the quintly homepage.

Use quintly to measure your profiles against competitors. Visualizing stats on standard engagement metrics through graphs, it tracks and compares your performance on the major social platforms. This makes it a go-to tool for competitive goal setting.

Price: Starts at $129 USD per month; advanced plans vary

15. Rival IQ

Another analytics tool to monitor competitors, use Rival IQ to track how opposing brands perform on major social media platforms. Prioritizing growth, the tool records how audiences develop or shrink on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis. By giving you access to historical data, you can compare growth rates to major events and business cycles to determine when rivals are expanding their fan bases.

Price: $199 – $439 USD per month

16. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

There isn’t much you can’t use the Marketing Cloud for – it has tools for email, mobile and content marketing, as well as an intuitive social media analytics suite. Through a clean dashboard, you can see metrics on which types of content are yielding the most engagement, where the most influential conversations are happening and what the general user sentiment is about your brand. You have the option of paying for the full cloud or picking the suites you want.

Price: Starts at $400 USD per month; combination packs vary

17. Simply Measured

Give Simply Measured a shot if you’re after a comprehensive social media reporting platform. By connecting to Google Analytics, you can see information about how visitors from social sites are acting and converting on your website. It also has features to analyze competitors and compare accounts across major channels. Plus, you can schedule Simply Measured to automatically send reports with all of this information and more.

Price: Starts at $500 USD per month; agency plans vary

18. Socialbakers

Capturing data across all major social platforms, use the Socialbakersanalytics suite to leverage its comprehensive dataset. The features include custom benchmarking and competitive analysis, allowing you to create groups to track yourself against. For companies with locations across the globe, Socialbakers can segment data by individual brand and country. This lets you see where your efforts are most successful and where there’s room to grow.

Price: $120 – $480 USD per month

19. Social Mention

Use this tool as a social search engine with a complementary analytics suite. Just by typing in a keyword, you’ll have access to a long results page of user-generated content from more than 100 platforms. Based on that content, Social Mention tracks traditional metrics along with unique ones, including user sentiment.

Price: Free

20. SumAll

Use SumAll to guide your long-term social media strategy. Along with e-commerce data, you can track information from your major social channels in a single interactive chart. As well as standard metrics, it includes features such as goal tracking and performance graphs. You can also set SumAll to send emails summarizing this data.

Price: Free – $99 USD per month

Platform-Specific Tools

21. Followerwonk (Twitter)

This image was taken from the Follwerwonk homepage.

Moz’s Twitter tool provides a detailed look at Twitter analytics, giving you insights about your activity and audience. You can see statistics about when your followers log in, and generate demographic data such as their locations. Use it to identify and connect with influencers – Followerwonk measures social authority to track which accounts have the biggest impact on their followers.

Price: Free – $79 per month

22. Iconosquare (Instagram)

Although it’s a platform-management tool, Iconosquare comes equipped with a thorough Instagram analytics suite. The dashboard has everything from engagement stats to optimization suggestions, such as the best times to post and which filters to use. You can also choose to receive emails that summarize your main metrics.

Price: Free; advanced plans vary

23. SocialBro (Twitter)

Offering price tiers depending on how many followers you have, try SocialBro as an all-in-one Twitter business platform. It tracks a bevy of content and audience metrics, offering tools to improve engagement and build segmented lists for campaigns. You can also use SocialBro to better understand your ads, as it tracks ROI for paid and earned media.

Price: Contact SocialBro to discuss a unique plan

24. Tailwind (Pinterest)

This platform-exclusive tool is designed to optimize your Pinterest strategy. Use it to track engagement metrics, as well as how your posts perform based on boards, keywords, hashtags and categories. Using these stats, Tailwind will find and recommend content for you to share. There’s even Google Analytics integration, so you can analyze website traffic and revenue from Pinterest.

Price: Starts at $9.99 USD per month; advanced plans vary

25. TweetReach (Twitter)

A search engine-like platform, just type in a keyword, hashtag or username to get a look at the analytics behind your term. Useful for checking trends, it illustrates engagement data such as reach and impressions. TweetReach also gives you a long timeline of tweets to inspect.

Online display advertising

Online display advertising

Search & Display Advertising: What’s the Difference?

What is Search Engine Advertising?

Search engine advertising is a type of paid advertising, also known as pay-per-click advertising or PPC, that gets your business found on search engines. Search advertising is a great way to compete in the online space and directly target folks in your area who are using a search engine to look for your products or services.

The way it works is simple. Say you have a shoe shop. You were smart and placed a huge order of red, white and blue sandals just in time for the 4th of July, and you want to advertise on Google. When someone searches for a keyword you’ve bid on, like “red, white, and blue sandals,” their search term will trigger your text ad, which shows up in the sponsored section of the search results page. This gives you visibility on the page quickly and cost-effectively. Then, if your text ad is compelling enough, the searcher will click your ad, visit your website, and ultimately contact you.

The beauty of search advertising is that you have a chance to compete with the bigger competitors in your local market without spending an arm and a leg in advertising costs. It also gives small business owners like you a way to directly target searchers based on their geography so your ads only show to people who are around your store or service area. Search advertising is like having a billboard online, but your targeting is much more effective because it is only being shown to people in your local area who are actually looking for your products or services.

What is Display Advertising & How Does It Work?

Speaking of billboards, let’s talk about display advertising. Digital display advertising is a way to grow your brand’s awareness online. Display ads, also known as banner ads, are shown to your target audience whenever they are surfing online, but not searching for your product or service.

When your customer is online, it’s important to keep your brand in front of them as much as possible. Think of your own online behavior. How much time are you spending doing real, honest research for a specific service, and how much time are you spending just piddling around reading sports stats and barbecue recipes? We all spend much more time consuming information on our favorite websites than we do searching for something specific. So, it’s important to put your business in front of consumers when they are surfing the web because that’s where they spend the majority of their time.

Have you ever ordered a sandwich from Jimmy John’s? They make my other favorite kind of sandwich – and they’re also my favorite example of successful display advertising. Throughout my day at work, it seems like every website I visit has a Jimmy John’s banner ad somewhere on the site. That’s because Jimmy John’s wants me to remember their brand when I get a craving for a fast, yet delicious, lunch. And that’s display advertising.

Search Advertising vs. Display Advertising: How Do They Work Together?

We’ve all heard that saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” and it’s true in in advertising, too. The most successful advertising campaigns are the ones that utilize multiple forms of media. Small businesses should mimic that same strategy when implementing their advertising online to make the most of their advertising dollars.

When Sally searches for the perfect pair of red, white and blue sandals, she might see and even click on your text ad, but she may not make a decision right away. So you still need a way to reach her when she isn’t searching— with display advertising. The truth is, both of these tactics work to help you get more sales.

Harvard Business School’s Sunil Gupta says that because clicks lead to purchases, search advertising usually gets the credit for the sale because you can track the exact behavior of the customer from the impression, to the click, to the purchase. What gets lost is the awareness you have created by running your display campaign and helping that consumer remember your business in the first place. In fact, studies have shown that 27% of consumers conduct a search for a business after seeing their display ad, and there’s a 59% lift in conversion when users conducted a search related to a display ad.

Peanut butter is complemented by jelly and vice versa, which is the same with search and display advertising. You can be successful using just one or the other; however, when search engine advertising and display advertising are used together, they help you get even better results by targeting your customer from multiple angles rather than just one, making it easier for the customer to remember your business when it’s time to make a purchasing decision.

You may have recently heard that Google bought Admeld, which has created a lot of discussion about how the display story is starting to look a lot like the search story. You remember how it goes – Overture is ruling the search world and then all of a sudden AdWords launched in 2000. Then, seemingly overnight, Google becomes the owner of the majority of search market share with everyone else fighting over the scraps.

Many are now worrying that the display story may have a similar plotline, as Google clearly has its eyes fixed on display as the new frontier that it is.

The display story will not be the same as search. The market dynamics are just too different.

Consider the seven primary differences between search and display:

1. One is pull marketing. The other is push. Search customers are coming to you. In most cases, they’re saying, “I’m in the market for your product and I’m considering buying it from you.” Frequently, they are even saying, “I want to buy your product right now.” The consumer is pushing and the marketer is pulling. In display, users are rarely in that frame of mind at the time a marketer places an ad in front of them. They are usually doing something else – watching a video, checking in on one of their favorite social networking sites, surfing the web, researching, or something else. In this case, the marketer is pushing. The marketer is effectively saying, “I’d like you to consider my product” or, “I’d like to change the conversation a little (or a lot) and talk about my product.”

2. Where are we in the funnel? Search and display have their own centers of gravity in two different locations. Search is as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible for an entire channel. Display is near the top. It is perhaps best suited for creating brand and product awareness, though lots of direct response marketers have found performance success in display. More often the objective of display is and should be to widen the funnel – getting more consumers considering your product.

3. There is not much branding in paid search. This is very closely related to number 2. However, it is important to point out that display has pictures, video (sometimes), and sound (sometimes). These are the usual mediums for creating a brand, and creating a brand is almost always done before customers come looking for you. And if all things are equal (especially price and perceived quality), the consumer will almost always choose the brand they’ve heard of or seen before versus the one they haven’t.

This is why display is so important to all marketers. Because branding and awareness are so important, it is where the majority of advertising dollars are spent. ComScore President Gian Fulgoni estimates that, “direct response advertising accounts for about 80 percent of all ad dollars spent online, while in traditional media the situation is reversed. There, branding dollars are estimated to make up about 75 percent of the market.” Think about TV: there are currently far more dollars spent on branding than on direct response. Online marketers should be targeting these dollars because display can often achieve the same objectives as TV spend and do it more efficiently.

4. A different type of auction. Perhaps the three biggest successes in online advertising have been Google, eBay, and Overture. All of them were built around an auction, so it is no wonder as display currently emerges to a winnable channel, its pricing mechanism is an auction. Except the auctions for impressions are different. Search is a cached or hosted auction. Marketers specify in advance what they are willing to pay for a given keyword and that bid sits on the search engine’s server. This means that Google (or other) controls the optimization via smart pricing and other means. In display and the emerging RTB auctions, the optimization is maintained by the buying technology. This gives buyers more control in display – although with more variables and more unknowns to manage, the channel needs it. The auction is better served as a market-clearing mechanism that lets buyers be in control; there are simply too many variables that fall outside of the actual media being bought for a complex market to try to do everything.

5. Supply and demand. There are only so many customers in the world that will go to a search engine and type, “I would like to buy product x.” And of course, every marketer and product seller in the world would like to have more of those. There is and always will be scarcity around those kinds of customers, which is largely why search is so competitive and the keywords are so valuable (whether measured on a CPC or CPM). To create new supply in display, one of millions of publishers merely needs to add another page. Because an impression requires so little action from the end user, there is an abundance of supply. (In fact, as display improves as a channel, consumers will all likely see more relevant ads, and less of them.)

6. Google’s part in the story. Arguably, Google currently plays the most influential role of any player for both search and display. That assertion is less controversial in search given that Google.com is the publisher of search 65 percent of the time. However, it is shaping display significantly, though it plays a very different kind of role. In display, Google.com or Google-owned sites are very rarely the publisher; instead, it’s trying to become the primary conduit for connecting advertisers and publishers. Google can’t control the display market with the same ease or margin that it did search. The medium and large publishers and the large advertisers keep Google honest and competition strong.

7. The role of data. With display, the data play has no limits. With search, the data play has the limits of Google’s legal team and its fear of regulators. Data is the center of the display game. Much more could be said about the role of data in both mediums, but as Martin Le Sauteur, CEO of Acquisio has said, “Data is the new creative.” This is especially true in display. Methodologies of retargeting and user-based targeting are staples in display. Display cannot be successful without user-based targeting. Outside of keywords, search doesn’t allow for much user targeting at all. In the future, using data across search and display – especially using the data from search to target display – is critical to success.

7 Types of Online Advertising

1. Display Ads

The original form of online advertising, these are visual ads that appear on third party websites (usually ones that are related to your content or service in some way).

Display ads have evolved from the basic form of banner ads. Nowadays, display ads come as:

• Static images - these are your basic banner or square ads that appear around the content.
• Text - these are text ads that are created by algorithms to make text ads relevant to the surrounding content.
• Floating banners - these move across the screen or float above the regular website’s content.
• Wallpaper - these appear and change the background of a website, filling the whole page.
• Popup ads - these are new windows that appear in front of the website content; newly opened window displays the full ad so visitors can see.
• Flash - these are moving ads that “flash” different content at the viewer.
• Video - these are small video ads that autoplay or wait for the video to be played by the visitor.

Display ads are usually very affordable. If you contact the third party site directly, their rates will vary from site to site. If you go through a marketing site, they will charge you a base rate.

Some third party sites, like the Google Display Network, allow for demographic, geographic, contextual and/or behavioral targeting - all of which help you target the audience that would be most likely to be interested in your product or service.

2. Social Media Ads

In 2015, Social Media commerce totaled $30 billion in the US. It’s a marketing arena that is not only efficient but effective. Very similar to Display Ads, Social Media ads can be anything from a simple banner or image to an auto-play video.

Social Media advertising is great because you can target your audience perfectly. For example, Facebook’s targeting options include age, region, interests, educational background and more.

Here are two types of Social Media advertisements:

• Organic - creates loyalty and gives you feedback from your target audience; new form of Word-of-Mouth
• Paid - leverage promoted posts and reach specific people

The best platforms to target are:

• LinkedIn for B2B sales
• Facebook for display and top of funnel marketing
• StumbleUpon for amazing, attention-grabbing content

Other platforms to hit up if you have the budget for it:

• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• Reddit

You can prepare your Social Media campaigns yourself or you can work with a marketing agency to prepare your campaign.

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The most dependable form of online paid advertising (and also the most common). SEM works based on keywords - you and other businesses like yours bid on keywords through search engines in an effort to get your website up higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

All SEM ads that appear in Google, Bing and other search engines are text ads. They’re listed at the top or sides of the SERP.

Paid ads can either be Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM).

• PPC
• You bid on keywords and your results appear at the top of the SERP based on bid value.
• This is the best value package because you’re only charged when people click on the ad.
• Also, it’s the easiest to track during the campaign.
• CPM 
• You’re billed a flat rate for 1,000 impressions.
  • This makes it easy to apply a budget and you’re guaranteed a number of “shows” on the SERP.
  • However, you risk overspending - if no one clicks through you’re paying for wasted results.
  • Also, you can’t assess or track the campaign until it’s over.

You can also use SEM in the unpaid form by optimizing your website for keywords (also known as SEO). Search engines list the unpaid results based on relevance so improving the SEO of your site means you’ll be able to get more hits for free if you improve your site’s SEO.

The best platforms for SEM are Google AdWords, which allow you to create highly targeted campaigns; to make the most of your Google AdWords campaigns. Another platform that’s great for SEM is Bing, which has less competition than AdWords.

4. Native Advertising

Native advertising is those sponsored listings at the end of blog posts, appearing on your Facebook feeds and posted to other Social Media.

These pieces of content are integrated and camouflaged into the platform on which they appear. You can promote and post your Native Advertising through networks like Adblade, Adsonar, Outbrain and Taboola.

There are several forms of Native Advertising:

• In-feed
• Search ads
• Recommendation widgets
• Promoted listings

5. Remarketing/Retargeting

The best way to market to people who already know about your product and service is to remarket to them. Or retarget. Depends on who you’re talking to.

When people visit your site, you drop a cookie on them so that, as they travel around the web, your ads will appear over and over to remind them about your product or service.

This form of advertising is inexpensive and, if done right, can be more effective than PPC. It increases conversions because it reminds people of you who already know who you are.

You can try to set this up yourself on Facebook Remarketing, Google Remarketing and more. Or, you can use a third-party platform or provider to set up your remarketing campaigns - read our Retargeting Cagematch for the 4-1-1 on all of the available platforms you could use… and which are best.

 6. Video Ads

While YouTube ads are the most popular and well known of video ads, there are actually several different formats, types and content options.

You can go the route of educational/informative. Or maybe you want to post a how-to. Try to pull on the emotional strings of your viewers by creating a visual story. Ideal for branding, especially if you have a product or service that is best demonstrated visually.

Whatever you choose, Video Ads are gaining in popularity because they avoid blatant advertising while also attracting the limited attention span of many YouTubers.

Once you’ve created your video, you can post to:

• YouTube/Google
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Brightroll
• YuMe
• Hulu
• Live Rail
• Adap.tv
• Specific Media
• Tube Mogul
• Tremor Video
• AOL
• Auditude

YouTube also have the fun little Pre-Roll ads (those short… sometimes long… ads that appear before the video you actually want to watch starts).

7. Email Marketing

Hanging out with Display Ads back near the start of online advertising, Email Marketing is a cheaper, faster and effective form of advertising.

It’s a great way to build customer loyalty and boost sales; when you use an email campaign manager (see the list below) to prepare and send your emails, you can easily track how well they do and monitor your ROI.

Email Campaign Managers:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• AWeber
• ConvertKit
• GetResponse
• Campaign Monitor
•  Active Campaign

In order to succeed at email marketing, you first need to build a list of email addresses. You can do so by using quizzes, or you can put a simple Newsletter sign-up on your site.

Then, you can send email campaigns that focus on promotions, discounts, features or content you’ve posted to your blog. Most emails are short, sweet and to the point. A concise message makes it easy to get your point across and increase conversions.

Just don’t forget to check your region/country’s spam rules.

explain the benefits to a business of online display advertising campaigns

When advertising your business, there are three important factors to consider: visual appeal to grab attention, location to maximize exposure, and relevancy to improve response. This is why display advertising has become a popular practice in digital marketing today. With its visual and targeting capabilities, display ads offer many benefits to a business, from visibility to brand awareness. This post goes over the basics of what display ads are and how they can benefit your business.

What Are Display Ads?

Display ads are the paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website pages in the form of graphics. Display ads are different from Search Engine Marketing/Pay Per Click/ Paid Searchads, which appear on search engine results pages. This means that PPC ads appear only when a person is searching, and display ads appear when a person is surfing. However, display ads technically do still appear when a person is searching, because people often visit the web pages that show up in their search results. Display ad are commonly referred to as banner ads, but they don’t always take exact banner form. They graphics that can be a smaller square or rectangle, and can appear on the top, middle, or side of a web page.

Benefits of Display Ads

Display Ads are Visually Appealing

One of the first benefits of display ads is that, because they are graphic content, they can be designed and styled. Regular SEM ads (Search Engine Marketing ads)are text only and with character counts, limiting how effectively and quickly you are able to capture attention and convey your message. With display ads, you can use graphics, video, audio, and your company’s branding to stand out to users and attract their attention.

Display Ads Support Brand Awareness

The visual component of display ads also benefits your business by facilitating brand awareness. With a PPC ad, users have to read the text on the ad and then click through to a landing page to learn about the business and its offer. Since display ads are branded and styled, often with an offer, a user can gather information on your brand simply by seeing your display ad, no click necessary.

Effectively Target with Display Ads

When online advertising, it is important to target the people most relevant to your business. Just as with SEM and Facebook Ad targeting, you can create specific parameters for your display ads: which sites they appear on, which geographic area they appear in, which demographic or niche market they appear to. For example, a car dealership can target people of driving age who live in their zip code and are visiting auto-related websites. The benefit of targeting your display ads is that you can maximize your spend.

Increase Your Visibility with Display Ads

Although display ads target specific audiences, this does not mean they limit the visibility of your business online. Display ads give you the ability to appear on websites that are not only highly trafficked, but which are also related to the offer of your ad. Display ads benefit your business by getting you in front of a high volume of the right people, even if they’re not searching.

Display Ads Provide Data

It is important to be able to measure your marketing activities, such as by using Google Analytics, to track their performance. Display advertising platforms offer this benefit to your business. With the data it provides, you can know exactly how many times your ad or ads have been clicked. Being able to track your investment allows you to ensure you are getting the most out of it.

Display Ads Support Retargeting

In addition to standard targeting capabilities, display advertising also allows for retargeting. With retargeting, you can put your ad in front of people who have previously visited your website. This is a way to reach out to people who have expressed interest in your business, and who could still be considering your business.

Display ads benefit your business by reaching more members of your target audience and in a more impactful manner. Start taking advantage of imagery and relevancy today with this effective advertising strategy!

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