Spending your allocated marketing dollars on digital marketing ads can generate an immediate ROI for your business when done correctly. Many organizations dive into paid digital advertising and quit after frustrations of watching their budget disappear without a return on their investment. However, understanding how to effectively build out these digital ads can pay dividends, quickly.
In this post, we’ll break down why digital marketing ads are popular among organizations, and the three types of digital ads that you can expect to run regardless of the platform you choose to run them on.
What’s The Hype?
From a digital marketing perspective, you’re essentially leveraging organic, paid, or both to generate leads. Organic search is a great long-term strategy, but can’t be done overnight which often turns businesses to paid search as they’re looking for faster results.
Digital marketing ads, when built correctly, can start generating your desired results within a matter of days after launching your first campaign; Making it an attractive option if you’re choosing between paid and organic.
Goal of A Digital Campaign
There are a number of reasons to leverage digital marketing ads as part of your overall strategy. Goals include but aren’t limited:
- Promote a product or service
- Increase brand awareness (only recommended for those with a significant marketing budget)
- Drive website traffic
For simplification purposes, regardless of your desired outcome, you’ll typically have one goal in mind and that is to generate more revenue for your business. If you’re investing dollars into paid digital marketing, you’re expecting that you’ll receive a return that exceeds your investment.
Aspects of Your Digital Marketing Ads
When you think of digital advertising, you’ve probably encountered more of these ads than you realize.
We’re going to break down the types of ads you see into three categories: visual, text, and audio (hybrid)
- Visual
That pair of sunglasses that pop up on your screen after online shopping
The visual behind this digital ad is simple with a clear offer, get 20% off your next pair of sunglasses.
This digital advertisement appears after a user has searched or browsed for a pair of sunglasses and then leaves the site to continue browsing. The visual ads enable you to stay in front of potential customers after they’re no longer on your page and have moved on to something else.
- Text
The next piece that we’ll focus on is text. You’ll see this digital ad when you first search for a product within a search engine (predominantly Google). Here’s what it looks like after searching for ‘sunglasses:
Google has made significant updates so that their digital text ads are subtle. You may not have noticed that these were ads at all without the bright arrows pointing to the ‘Ad’ labeled for each brand.
This is an impactful form of digitally advertising your business and enables you to outbid competitors to ensure that you’re one of the first few lines of text that populates. The drawback is that this can become expensive depending on the terms that you’re going after.
A term such as ‘sunglasses’ will be highly competitive and will cost a lot. A more narrow term on the other hand such as ‘sunglass store in New Jersey’ might be much more cost effective.
- Audio
Now when we say audio, we’re referring to a combination of visual and text, video. You’ll typically see promoted videos on social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. As an example, here’s a promoted video from Microsoft that we recently saw on Twitter:
The red arrow highlights that Microsoft is promoting this video around Microsoft Build, their developer conference.
Because Microsoft is an enormous tech company with a much higher marketing budget, they’re shooting for visibility within this digital ad and not so much promoting a product (although you can argue that they’re highlighting the skill set of their developers).
Platforms to Leverage Digital Ads On
Your platform will differ depending on the audience that you’re trying to reach.
LinkedIn: great for B2B marketing as it’s largely a professional platform that businesses/individuals use.
Twitter/Instagram/YouTube: can be used for both B2B and B2C marketing as it will reach both the individual and professional buyers.
Facebook: predominately used for direct to consumer marketing.
Google: last but not least, Google is the most popular channel for both B2B and B2C digital ads.
Here’s a chart that gives a glance of each channel we listed and what target it is best for.
| Platform | B2B | B2C |
| X | ||
| X | X | |
| X | X | |
| YouTube | X | X |
| X | ||
| X | X |
Measuring Your Desired Outcomes
Now we’ve gone through why digital ad spend is popular, the types of digital ads you’ll see, and the platforms that you’ll see them on. Now let’s break down the top 3 things you can expect to gain/measure from the ads.
- Impressions
Impressions refer to the number of times that your digital ads are seen. Having a high number of impressions is a great start, but what you’re hoping for is a correlation between the number of impressions and amount of engagement (clicks/submissions) that those impressions lead to.
- Clicks
Clicks is self explanatory, the number of clicks that your ad receives. The clicks will usually take the user to your website and desired landing pages (best performed when landing pages are A/B tested to determine what resonates better with your audience).
- Conversions
Conversions are the ultimate goal of your campaign. Although some marketers will argue that a conversion can be a ‘click’ alone, we’d argue that a conversion falls into two actions:
- A user submits a contact form on your site
- A user purchases a product directly from your site
These two actions indicate that you have an interested prospect or even better, a new customer that just purchased directly for your site.
Ongoing Enhancements
Lastly, although a digital marketing ad campaign can generate immediate ROI, you increase your return even further when you learn from ongoing campaigns, enhance them, and use that knowledge for future campaigns.
Keywords – refine keywords that you rank well for, and that seem to provide the most clicks/conversions
Landing Pages – effective campaigns will A/B test their landing pages to determine which pages users spend more time on, engage with, and ultimately convert on.
Spend – whether you’re spending on keywords, competing for more impressions, or clicks, you’ll continue to refine where your dollars are spent so that you become more effective with your digital ad investment.
By using data insights from past and current campaigns, you’ll continue to see better results.
Reach out to learn more or get started on your digital marketing journey.
Gary McConnell Co-founded Rubicom Digital in 2019 with a goal of providing digital marketing consulting services in the B2B space.
Gary continues to serve as the Marketing Director of a Data Center-focused IT Provider, VirtuIT Systems.