When it comes to online advertising, there never was a better time for it. If only a few years back most of internet publicity consisted on pay per click or display ads, current conditions allow for a very wide array of venues and possibilities.
Continuous technological advancements make it easier than ever to connect with customers. At the same time, ads are becoming increasingly customizable and trackable, providing even more value to all those who have something they are looking to market to mobile devices.
Let’s look at some of the most innovative online advertising options available to you today to market your product.
Social Media ads
It’s impossible to completely ignore the right-hand side of your Facebook page and all the sponsored ads that appear there, immediately after you have used a search engine to look for some product, service or information. This social network supports multiple advertising types including, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger.
Apart from Facebook, Twitter and LikedIn also offer the opportunity to target your audience by advertising on them.
Social media ads are a great option when it comes to restrictive budgets, because you can spend under 10$ to test them. If the initial investment pays off you can then increase the sum you spend.
Google ads
Google AdWords Express is Google’s way of responding to Facebook Ads. The lower cost version of Google AdWords allows small businesses to run an advertising campaign for little money. It works on a pay per click pricing model but a bidding strategy can also be used to automatically reach a predefined cost-per-acquisition.
According to Wikipedia, as of June 2018, Google derives 86% of its total revenues through trading advertising inventory through AdWords, DoubleClick AdExchange, and DoubleClick Bid Manager. That’s a lot of potential customers clicking.
Display advertising
This type of advertising is probably the one you’re most familiar (and as an internet user most annoyed) with. Display ads are those banners and sidebar ads that show up whenever you access a site to read the news, look at some pictures or find an easy pie recipe.
While current technologies have influenced them too and made them more dynamic, the fact that they have been around for some time and tend to feel a little invasive makes them less successful in reaching an audience. The fact that many internet users install ad blocking software also does not help.
Video advertising
These days video seems to be more popular than ever before so it makes for a fantastic advertising channel. There are three types of video ads that YouTube, the most popular streaming platform, offers:
- TrueView ads, which show up across the bottom of the video, in the search results pages or as related videos
- Preroll ads, which can play before, mid-roll, or after the main video and
- Bumper ads, which are perfect for mobile ads.
Since you are selling an online course, you could target your ad so it would appear linked to tutorials or videos related to the subject of the learning material.
Retargeted ads
These are the ads that seem to follow the user around (in the online environment). If they conduct a search for a certain product or service, various ads to that product or service will appear on other sites assessed by said user following that search.
It’s a great way to drive sales since the target is obviously already interested so constantly seeing the ad has great chance of convincing them to make the purchase.
Since this is a common practice, it will probably follow in the footsteps of display advertising and become too much, but at the moment it still works.
Native advertising
Also very successful at the present time is the native ad. This type of advertising is usually placed within potential customers’ social media streams. It looks and feels like a blog post or article, but it’s actually a paid ad.
You might write an article on the subject of your course and pay to have it posted, making sure you include a link to the landing page of your course. This sort of ads are less invasive and feel somewhat friendlier.
Chatbot advertising
Chatbots are the most recent big thing in online advertising. This type of publicity harnesses the potential of messaging apps like Facebook Messaging or WhatsApp and employs artificial intelligence to anticipate what a customer might be interested in.
It is a bit like retargeted advertising because it looks at what was previously searched and generates pop-up small windows with recommendations, usually paired with at least a small discount.
All in all
Considering the rapid pace that the online environment is evolving at, there might be other innovative and refreshing advertising methods by next week. The digital revolution calls for constant updates and only those who can ride the technological advancement wave will be truly successful.
