With the dawn of ecommerce, the focus of businesses is more on online
promotional activities than the traditional means of promotion. Though
the traditional means can never completely go out of need, their scope
has certainly become low as online means of marketing and advertising
have gained prominence. Online advertising is preferred over print
advertising due to various factors like economy, ease, and speedy work
done through the online mode. Another important advantage is the much
wider scope of masses which can be targeted through the online mode of
advertising. Advertising has always been an important part of marketing
strategy, and despite being expensive, it has a deep impact on consumers
and so should never be skipped when planning your marketing strategy.
State of Online Advertising
Online advertising mimics print advertising in structure, layout,
content, and messaging. People no longer refer to only the newspapers or
magazines for finding ads offering products or services of their
choice. The internet is flooded with millions of ads for various
products. It is not possible to miss these ads even if you want to.
Websites, blogs and search engines are all full with and surrounded by
ads relevant and irrelevant to them. And why online ads won’t be
encouraged! A large percentage of revenue generation comes from them.
However, whether you place your ads through print media or online, you
must make sure they have the potential to generate purchase interest in
viewers.
Call for Action – Motive of Ads
Merely placing an ad through print media or online won’t necessarily
fetch you buyers; you need to create an ad that leads viewers to enquire
further about it through phone, email, click on a link or reply to the
ad on website. This is called leading to ‘Call for action’- the actual
goal of placing an advertisement. If the ad looks unreliable or
uninteresting, viewers will ignore or forget about it and not take
further interest in it. Concrete success lies in the fact the product or
services are enquired about and bought. Merely viewing an online ad and
then leaving the page leads to an increase in bounce rate.
Ad Placement Don’ts
An ad may not be a very big one with too much text sprawled across a
blog or placed besides a search engine. In fact, this acts as a turn-off
or interference sometimes. So, an ad should be big, bright, and
prominent enough to be noticed, but at the same time, you should not
place an online ad in weird ways like one that follows the cursor or
prevents viewing other pages until clicked. These forcible or tricky
kinds of ads are found undesirable. Instead, place ads with interesting
and useful information like schemes, discounts, or special offers that
people can take advantage of.
Hiring Professional Advertising Agency
Many times, companies fall short of time, and so their in-house staff
creates a worthless ad just for the heck of it to finish off the
marketing activities. Such ads do not find any takers and are a huge
waste of money, time and efforts. So, contract with a professional
advertising agency for creating and placing ads. My friend Joseph did a
wonderful job at that. He heads the beverage section of his firm in
Australia and wanted to create print and online ads for their launch for
exotic coffee beans. They hired professional advertising agency Sydney
experts to help them with the marketing efforts for the launch. Joseph
just dictated the plan and budget, and they delivered such excellent
results within a short span of time.
The work that professionals
can do is very different from what internal staff can produce. By
contracting with the brilliant advertising agency Sydney staff, Joseph’s
team was able to produce the best ads ever that not just looked good
and were visited but that which generated real sales. Moreover, they
adhered to the budget required by Joseph’s company. Not just that,
through these efforts, the beverage launch was a huge success, and they
were awarded for being the best in the beverage category last year.
Ads cost a lot. When you are spending money, do it in the smartest way
so that a lot of enquiries and hence sales are generated. Make sure you
reap enough returns on your investment.