Digital Marketing Simplified – Advertising Options

Digital Marketing Simplified – Advertising Options

By Rakesh Raman

Rakesh Raman

This is the fifth article in the 7-part Digital Marketing Simplified series that RMN Digital has started.

When your website is ready with sufficient information about your products and services, digital advertising is one of the options to bring Web traffic to your site.

There are a number of ways and pricing models that you can use for digital / online advertising. Among them are search engine ads that fall under the search engine marketing category of product promotions, social media advertising, portal / display ads, mobile ads, and so on.

However, digital or online advertising should not be the first option for companies to inform others about their offerings. Rather, it should be the last option when you’re convinced that your website has attained a good standing in the online space. Online advertising is not only expensive, but it can also be quite complicated with little impact.

Research shows that a significant number of consumers and marketers feel online advertising is still not effective. And traditional media such as print and TV receive higher scores for credibility and effectiveness among consumers and marketers in all markets. (Read: Click Here: The State of Online Advertising)

Marketers, however, cannot afford to ignore the online advertising options particularly after reaching an advanced stage of their marketing exercise or for running special ad campaigns for new product launches, sales schemes, etc.

As a marketer, you can buy space on search engines so that when a user searches for a particular word related to your products, your ad appears at the top or on the side of search results.

Similarly, you can buy banner space on popular online publishers’ content sites or social media sites. These banners, which are standard-sized rectangles or squares, appear as images, videos, or animations on sites displaying these banners.

When a user clicks on your search engine text ads or banner ads, they are connected to your site to get more information about that product. But since click frauds are rampant in the online ad world, you should avoid all those options that are based on user clicks called cost-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Click frauds are part of the unfair business practices in which shady publishers and ad agencies secretly hire armies of people who work at different locations (mainly from their homes) and keep clicking on your ads for which you have to pay to these publishers. These dishonest people are actually not interested in your products. Similarly, your rivals can also click on these ads to hit you financially.

Besides click-based payments, there are many other pricing models in the online ad business. They include cost per mille (CPM) where you have to pay a certain amount to the publisher for every 1,000 impressions, cost per period (CPP) is based on the time for which your ad is displayed on a publisher’s website.

But CPC, CPM, and CPP are not the right pricing models for advertisers because they are not the true indicators of the impact of ads while unfair trade practices are used frequently in these models.

Online advertisers can, however, explore performance-based ad models such as cost per lead (CPL) or cost per acquisition (CPA) in which you have to pay when your ad gives you a sales lead or actually generates business for you. Here it’s much easier for you to estimate your return on investment (RoI) from ads.

Mobile ads is another option. But most mobile marketers are using mobile spam to deliver unsolicited brand messages on users’ mobile phones. That’s among the main reasons that mobile advertising has failed to gain momentum. You can either use the ethical mobile advertising options or ignore mobile ads completely for the time being.

All these digital ad options are mainly for large companies that have surplus ad budgets. Small- and medium-sized companies should avoid using digital advertising because of factors such as cost, complexity, and cheating. They can, instead, use cost-effective forms of promotional methods such as e-mail marketing, social media messaging, digital public relations, and so on.

To be continued… in the next part of our Digital Marketing Simplified series.

By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Digital.

This article is a part of our initiative: Tech-Wise Knowledge Center for SMBs