Fundamentals of digital advertising

In the midst of 2021, there are those who still opt for traditional advertising, which is not necessarily a mistake as each company has different marketing objectives and audiences.

However, knowing the possibilities offered by digital advertising could allow many businesses to take off thanks to its low costs, great reach, and a/b testing capabilities.

But now, what is really digital advertising? It is all the ways to disclose a brand and its products or services through digital devices or channels.

Knowing the basics of digital advertising will allow you to choose the right channels according to your objectives.

Differences between digital and traditional advertising

• Unlike traditional or physical advertising, digital advertising is interactive and bidirectional.
• The consumer is reached through searches, traditional media search for the consumer.
• It can be measured and analyzed in real-time, traditional cannot be measured.
• Low modification costs, traditional high costs.

Key elements in an advertising strategy

• Strategy: It is the plan I am going to execute to achieve the objective, the path I am going to follow.
• From where the strategy arises: Combination between brand, target (definition and knowledge), and market (competition, referents).
• Tactical: Specific actions to execute the strategy.

Strategy is not about being on all the social networks, it is the master plan that will lead you to achieve your goal.

Difference between the target audience and buyer persona

When a brand carries out digital advertising, it must have a well-defined buyer persona and target audience.

These 2 terms are often confused, I will explain what each one refers to:

• Buyer persona: Ideal customer. Who buys, how they buy, what problem I solve, and who influences them to buy. Source of Inspiration
• Target audience: age, gender, socioeconomic level, location, consumption habits, educational level. Determine the channels in which to advertise and the source of segmentation.

Here is a tool to create buyer personas.

Know your brand’s digital environment

• Competitors: Do the same as you
• Substitutes: They are not the same as your brand. Ex. Coke and water
• Brands that speak to your target audience: They don’t make your services or products. Brands you may refer to at some point in time
• Trends: Being on the cutting edge helps innovation or meeting new needs.
• Same brands abroad
• Complementary brands: With which you can generate alliances.

How to stand out from the competition? How to connect with users?

Define objectives:

Always having a clear objective in mind will allow you to create a strategy where all efforts are focused on pursuing that objective.

With this information, we will define a criterion to identify which campaigns make sense to invest in and which ones we should turn off or simply not launch because they do not contribute to this objective, but only make our budget less efficient.

Determine metrics in each of our campaigns:

In addition to understanding the why of each campaign, it is essential to determine how we are going to measure these campaigns and find the right metrics to measure them. These metrics will tell us when we can tell if the campaign was successful or not.

Depending on the objective, metrics can vary from website visits to calls or form fills.

Creativity:

You may be very clear about your objective and you may have designed a perfect bulletproof strategy for the development of your campaign. However, remember that this guideline is aimed at a person who, due to the time we are in, receives too much information throughout the day.

For this reason, you should invest time and dedication in generating relevant content for your consumer, thinking in different and impactful formats so that when they see your ad they can’t resist and click on it.

Analyze your results on a regular basis:

One of the great advantages of digital advertising is that you can see the results of your campaigns almost immediately. Therefore, take advantage of this information to track the performance of your campaigns through the metrics defined in point number two.

Adjust and explore:

Immediacy is another of the benefits of digital advertising, so when we see that our campaigns are not achieving the desired results, we can make the necessary changes.

Evaluate what the possible problems are and make adjustments one at a time in order to arrive at the ideal ad. Lose the fear of doing things differently and change.

Iterate:

It’s all about experimenting, testing, and learning. Remember that the digital world has an advantage over the traditional one: we can measure and correct as we go along.

Make your digital advertising live: it can be modified according to the expected results and objectives, and record all changes. Plus you can do A/B or multivariate testing.

There, you know the basics of digital advertising. Now you have a clearer idea when planning an advertising campaign strategy in digital media and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg in the big world of digital advertising.

If you are interested in executing a digital media advertising strategy for your business, feel free to get in touch with me.