Internet Advertising: Attracting an Online Audience to Your Business

Almost every modern person is an Internet user. According to recent studies, the average screen time of an adult in developed countries is 7-8 hours a day. This means that we spend almost half of our active lives online. This can be studying materials on thematic sites, news portals, watching videos on video hosting sites, communicating with friends, relatives, like-minded people on social platforms and more. For many people, the Internet has become a place for professional activities. And almost everywhere, no matter what sites we visit, we are highly likely to see advertising. It literally surrounds us everywhere, attracting attention not only with its content, but also with its formats.

Modern business actively uses online advertising, since its effectiveness in practice is many times greater than any offline methods that exist today. And many have already realized the fact that it is worth using it in the course of scaling a company, ensuring its stable and effective development in the market. But, in any case, online advertising will require detailed development and an integrated approach from you. But it is also important to understand what solutions should be used in a particular case in order to get the maximum result in practice.

In today's review, we will get acquainted in detail with what online advertising is, in which cases it should be used. We will highlight the main advantages and disadvantages, which will allow you to assess the prospects of its use in your business. Here are the main types of online advertising that each of you can take into service.

Online advertising: what is it?

By such a term as online advertising, we mean a set of activities that business owners launch to promote the company itself, the brand, individual products, services, their popularization among the audience, increasing sales figures and, as a result, income. By and large, we can compare it with those classic solutions that we see on TV screens, billboards, in various printed publications. The only significant difference in this case is that it is placed on online platforms. This means that your ad will become available to an even wider segment of the consumer audience, which will increase its effectiveness many times over.

Thought-out and professionally composed online advertising is this is what will help bring a new audience to your site, expand your customer base, and help present your products and the company as a whole in the most favorable light. It is noteworthy that in this case you can use various formats, select solutions that will specifically affect a certain segment of the audience, ensuring the maximum result from interaction.

Unlike classic offline advertising, which attracts the attention of the audience only for a limited period of time, Internet ads, if configured correctly, will constantly catch people's eyes, literally following them across all the pages they visit online. Due to the fact that it is easy to adjust it to the individual needs of a particular person: a business will be able to find new clients for itself who are obviously interested in this product. As a result, you will be able to not only achieve your goals, but also do it within a limited budget.

By and large, you can advertise absolutely any product or service online, except for those that are prohibited in your country at the legislative level. In civilized countries of the world, such prohibitions apply to narcotics, alcohol, tobacco products, weapons, explosives, and anything related to violence. Most other product categories can be advertised without any restrictions. This means that the Internet opens up unlimited opportunities for businesses that supply clothing, footwear, accessories, equipment, cosmetics, textiles, and much more to the market. A wide range of service advertising is also available: dentistry and medicine, beauty salons, legal advice, equipment and car repair services, hotels, cafes, restaurants, and more.

This area has expanded significantly recently. Modern online advertising is often focused not only on demonstrating products and services, but also on popularizing the brand, increasing its recognition in the market, and the level of loyalty to it from the audience. All these features allow us to confidently assert that we are talking about a tool that can give impressive results in practice and fully justify the funds invested in it. But in any case, online advertising will require a competent and comprehensive approach. And it is worth starting work here by defining its goals and key objectives.

Defining the goals and objectives of online advertising

Despite all the variety of possible tools and techniques that modern business uses in online advertising, most of it will be used to solve one of three key tasks:

1. Informing the audience about products, services, promotional offers. Thanks to this, you can demonstrate your product, talk about the brand, highlight the main advantages, demonstrate the benefit that can be obtained when making such a purchase.
2. Mentioning the product. This is what will allow you to constantly maintain the audience's interest in certain products, services, brand by regularly reminding them. This is what will stimulate repeat orders, leaving reviews, recommendations, making new purchases in addition to what has already been purchased.
3. Convincing the need to buy. Such advertisements will emphasize the benefits of purchasing a particular product or service. If they are directed at an audience interested in this product, you can get quite decent results.

But each business may have its own goal for launching online advertising. Some will want to stand out from the competition with its help, others - to increase their own recognition, others - to build audience loyalty, others - to increase coverage, others - to increase sales, etc.

Pros and cons of online advertising

As in many other areas, online advertising has both strengths and weaknesses. And before proceeding to the direct implementation of such ideas, it is important to weigh all the pros and cons. So, from the main advantages here we will highlight the following:

• Ensuring the widest possible coverage of the target audience. You will be able to direct your advertising to where buyers of your goods and services are widely represented, talk about your advantages, offer the most favorable conditions for cooperation and take a number of other measures that can interest if not millions, then thousands of potential buyers. Connect any social networks, instant messengers for work, interact with buyers through search results - there are really many options.
• The ability to use interactivity to ensure quick returns. You will have an extremely wide variety of available methods, tools, and technologies at your disposal. You will be able to easily select those solutions that will give the best results with certain audience segments, and you will be able to make personalized offers. The more you manage to interest people, the more likely you are to receive new orders. In addition, the process of audience interaction with your ads will be as fast and simple as possible. A person will just need to click on your ad, see what you offer, and then – go to the site and place an order if this offer interests them.
• Setting up advertisements taking into account the interests of the target audience. You will prepare your ads based on a pre-compiled buyer profile. Regular outdoor advertising, ads in printed materials, on TV – they are all faceless. It is aimed at absolutely all people who will see it. As a result, its effectiveness is lost too much, the person does not understand that you are addressing him specifically. A completely different matter — this is advertising that takes into account the interests and wishes of the buyer, his gender, age, place of residence and a number of other parameters. In addition, such precise settings allow you to save your advertising budget: ads will not be broadcast to people who are not interested in your products.
• Increased efficiency of interaction with the target audience. Through online services, it is much easier to find common ground with potential buyers, choose those platforms for launching ads that will give the best results in practice. Alternatively, if you want to launch a product presentation, it would be better to do this through TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest. If you want to establish the most friendly relations, then use email newsletters. It is thanks to the combination of different advertising formats that you will be able to create a mass effect of presence, showing buyers your responsibility, reliability, professionalism in every detail.
• Using retargeting. This technique involves the repeated return of a client who never completed a purchase to the official website of your business or another online representative office. To where he had previously been and even added a product to the cart, but for some reason never completed the order. Thanks to retargeting, those products or services that a given person viewed will periodically appear in social networks, when browsing websites, in search results and in many other places where this person appears. With a high degree of probability, such reminders will lead to the fact that he will still decide to complete his purchase.
• The ability to receive fairly clear statistics on launched advertising campaigns. Many experts agree that this is the most significant advantage of online advertising in general. The fact is that you can connect various tools here that will automatically collect all the information, structure it and provide visual reports that allow you to assess how much the advertising you launched did not meet your expectations and invested funds. Moreover, it is possible to launch A/B testing of various ad formats in advance to understand what the result will be before they are published.

If we analyze these advantages, we can confidently say that we are talking about a technology that will be indispensable in the work of any business. With its help, you will be able to deliver promotional offers to your target audience, regardless of what city or country they are located in. In addition, online advertising gives you access to a multi-million audience, among which your clients will definitely be found.

But still, there are some negative aspects. In particular, you should understand that the level of competition here will be quite high, regardless of what niche you work in. This is due to the fact that modern businesses have already appreciated all the advantages that online advertising guarantees and would like to take advantage of such opportunities. This means that you will have to put in a lot of effort to stand out from the competition, launch ads that will not get lost in the crowd and will attract people.

Many marketers also consider serious financial risks to be disadvantages. There is always a chance that the strategy you have launched will not work in practice, and the advertising budget will be spent. This most often occurs when online advertising is launched without preliminary development and testing. You have the opportunity to prevent those mistakes that can entail significant monetary expenses. Therefore, it is still worth showing a little diligence, painstakingness, and then your advertising will give excellent results even with a minimal budget.

But what is really worth paying attention to is the so-called "banner blindness". This term is the result of the modern consumer's excessive fatigue from advertising. It surrounds us absolutely everywhere: on the street, at home, in public transport, at work. Such an abundance of ads has led to the fact that people have learned to simply not notice advertising, not to react to it. That is, all your efforts can be reduced to a minimum. But even this problem has several modern solutions. In particular, you need to learn to stand out from the crowd, move from aggressive to native advertising, add more interactivity to your publications and do everything so that the audience perceives your content not as ordinary advertising, but as useful information.

There will probably be those marketers who claim that one of the disadvantages of online advertising will be the complexity of analytics. To some extent, they will be right. We have already said that there is a wide variety of analytical services on the modern market. But in order to learn how to use them, you need to have certain knowledge and skills. This will take time and effort. But it is impossible to do without it, since only by analyzing the results will you be able to identify weaknesses in launched strategies and eliminate wasted budget, increasing the effectiveness of your idea.

Now let's move on directly to getting acquainted with the main types of online advertising. The information presented will allow you to navigate the available solutions and choose those that will be effective specifically within the framework of your business.

Main types of online advertising

Modern Internet marketers use a huge variety of advertising types in their daily work. Their choice stops at one or another option depending on what business they are working with at the moment, what goals and objectives they set, what results they want to achieve.

We would like to immediately draw your attention to the fact that the list turned out to be quite impressive and diverse. This means that each of you can choose the best option for online advertising specifically for your company and your audience.

Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising is not in vain that we put it in the first position of our list, since it is very effective and has been used on the market en masse for many years. At the same time, its effectiveness and demand are not declining. So, we are talking about launching ads directly through the Google Ads Internet service. The distinctive feature will be that such advertising necessarily contains the main keywords by which companies operating in your niche are promoted in search results. Thanks to this, ads will be shown only to the audience that is looking for your products or services.

The ad itself will be published on the search results page directly above the main results or at the bottom of the page. Externally, it can be presented as a regular text, a colorful banner or even a video. The "Advertisement" mark will be present here without fail. By this, the target audience understands that these are the results of paid, not organic promotion.

If you launch contextual advertising through the Google Ads service, you should know that it uses a payment format such as Pay Per Click, that is, payment per click. It turns out that money will be debited from your balance only if a person clicks on your ad and follows the corresponding link. Yes, the competition in this niche is quite high today, but you have every chance to bypass other companies. True, you will have to pay a large sum for this: today the auction principle is used here. That is, the one who pays more is displayed in higher positions in the search results.

To increase the effectiveness of contextual advertising launched through Google Ads, additionally use the Google Analytics service. Thanks to this, you can automatically collect various statistical data and, based on them, make adjustments to your strategies, increasing their effectiveness.

Experts recommend using contextual advertising when working with fairly young brands, sites. Then, when the audience needs to present a new name or product. But, we repeat, the costs here will be quite significant. In most cases, contextual advertising is closed after the site achieves good results in organic search results.

If we are talking about a local business, then a more appropriate solution would be to use contextual advertising linked to geolocation. In this case, you will need to configure not only the desktop version, but also mobile devices. Thanks to this, you will be able to launch the most accurate targeting of your audience within the framework of your business and provide yourself with the largest possible audience of loyal customers. Moreover, such advertising can improve your brand's position in search results.

Banners

Banner advertising is mostly placed on partner sites. It is designed to generate traffic from third-party sites to the official representative office of the business and the presentation of goods and services for the purpose of their sale. One of the most significant advantages of this solution is that such advertising helps to increase brand awareness and improves the overall perception of the product among the target audience.

The effectiveness of banner ads directly depends on how original and colorful you design them. Here it is important to think through the design and text component down to the smallest detail. Particular attention should be paid to the choice of the site where your advertisement will be published. Payment in this case will be charged exclusively for impressions, mostly for every thousand. Control over the effectiveness of advertising and making changes here will be more difficult than when working through Google Ads. But even a little practice will be enough to navigate all the nuances.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a format of online advertising that is aimed at repeated interaction with those representatives of the target audience who have already ordered goods or services from you. This is a kind of identical technology with retargeting. It turns out that in this case, all attention is focused on people who have already interacted with the business. Here we include those who made a purchase and those who, for some reason, never completed it.

Let's say that among your clients there is a person who bought a camping tent for himself. From this, you can conclude that with a high degree of probability he is fond of hiking, loves outdoor recreation. This means that you can send him a mailing list with a selection of picnic utensils, barbecue, folding chairs. There is a high probability that such a reminder will arouse the interest of your buyer, will lead to the fact that he will want to go to the site and get acquainted with the full range of goods and even place a new order if he finds something interesting for himself.

The Google Ads service is also used to set up such online advertising. Many experts agree that remarketing is one of the most profitable investments today in the field of online ads.

Advertisements in Google Shopping

A tool such as Google Shopping has existed for quite a long time, but has only recently become widely used. Today, many online stores use it to advertise individual products. In this case, it is assumed that the settings are made, after which the corresponding product item will be displayed in the "Shopping" tab in the Google search engine. This solution opens up wide opportunities for sales of even retail products.

Users will see the data in the ad that the system will automatically extract from the file that you uploaded to your Google Merchant Center account. It is recommended to provide for its linking to your Google Ads account in advance. It is convenient that you will not be required to make any payments initially. The system will withdraw the required amount only after buyers start clicking on your ad to go to the site.

Compared to classic text advertising, such ads give an average of 30% more conversion and are considered more reliable. It turns out that the person who comes from them already knows your product, has seen its photo, price, description. As a result, the likelihood of placing an order significantly increases.

Targeted advertising in social networks

Modern social networks can rightfully be considered advanced marketing tools. In particular, the most popular platforms among the audience are Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, TikTok, Twitter. With their help, you can advertise your products and services as clearly and unobtrusively as possible, present your brand in the most favorable light, increase its recognition in the market, expand your customer base, and more.

And one of the most significant advantages here is that you have the opportunity to use targeting. This means that your advertising will be directed exclusively at those people who are highly likely to be interested in your products. Initially, you can easily choose the platform where your audience is represented en masse. Then you can set the optimal age of your buyer, their gender, preferences, and many other parameters, which will allow advertising to quickly achieve its goal.

Video Hosting Advertising

In this case, we are talking directly about advertising on the video hosting YouTube. Many marketers agree that video ads published here give the best results in practice. And this opinion is quite reasonable, since people who want to learn more information about products and services go to YouTube and look for relevant content. In this case, you can set up the following types of advertising:

• TrueView In-Stream. It involves withdrawing payment after the user watches the video for at least 30 seconds or clicks on the link.
• Video Discovery. Such advertising will be published on all main pages of the platform, in the “related videos” section, as well as on the home page.
• In-Stream. Advertising is embedded directly into the video stream, does not allow skipping. Maximum duration is 6 sec.
• Overlay. Such advertising will be displayed below the main content and will not interfere with its viewing.

One of the most significant advantages of video advertising on YouTube is that it can be launched literally in a matter of minutes without any particular difficulties or errors.

Teaser advertising

In this case, we are talking about an ad format in which marketers manage to announce the launch of a new product or any other new products in the most unusual, original, and impressive way. The main secret here is the clickbait title. That is, an ad title is created that will initially arouse increased interest and a desire to click on the link. It is complemented by a bright picture containing a touch of originality.

But in this case, it will also be necessary to configure the targeting as correctly as possible in order to attract exactly the audience that will be interested in your products and services. The prepared ad is launched in special teaser networks. After you register on them, you will need to set a suitable advertising budget for yourself, specify the time when the ad will be displayed, as well as the number of clicks. After that, the system itself will give you a special code. It will need to be implemented on the selected sites for display. Also, you, as a business representative, will pay the owners of these sites for each click or other target action performed by users, depending on which pricing model you initially chose.

Mobile Internet advertising

The effectiveness of such advertising is primarily due to the extreme popularity and demand for mobile devices. Almost every modern person uses a smartphone or tablet in their daily life. This means that they will constantly be in contact with advertising, which automatically increases its effectiveness and ensures good results. Here you can use targeting, taking into account the user's location. But you should be prepared for the need to perform additional settings: advertising should be adapted to mobile devices.

In order not to irritate users and get truly impressive results, you will need to do the following:

• implement the adaptation of your website for mobile gadgets;
• test different options of contextual advertising configured to work with smartphones, tablets;
• create your own mobile application and advertise it;
• make adjustments to the voice search, as modern users increasingly use it in their daily work;
• launch chat bots on the site controlled by artificial intelligence, which will help ensure fast and effective communication with the target audience literally around the clock.

We would like to draw special attention to mobile advertising: this is the technology of the future. Don't miss the chance to use it in your work, getting the most out of your invested time, effort, and money.

Advertising in CPA networks

If you initially include CPA networks in your marketing strategy, you will be able to launch advertising here, the fee for which will be charged based on the results of completed target actions. This is a kind of affiliate program that involves interaction between you, as an advertiser, and your partner, who, among other things, is also interested in the success of your strategy, because his income will depend on this: he will receive profit in the form of a certain commission from advertising, in particular from those target actions that the client will perform.

In this case, the CPA network is used as an intermediary, helping you find each other and ensure effective interaction. But it is important to understand here that the stability of your interaction directly depends on the reliability of this network. This means that you need to put a lot of effort into finding the most reliable platform.

Viral advertising

In this case, we are talking about such ads that can generate mass interest among the audience, and encourage people to share it on their own. But getting it is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. Here you will have to do painstaking work, brainstorm ideas. It can be presented in the form of a picture, a photo, a tweet or any other material that can be easily distributed through social networks.

This solution is one of the few that allows you to organize completely free advertising: people will share it on their own and voluntarily. But still, initially you will need to choose a suitable social network for yourself and set up paid promotion in it. This is necessary so that a large audience sees your material, and then scale the effect without additional material costs.

Pop-up windows

Pop-up windows are small pop-up ads that will appear after users perform a particular action on the site, encouraging them to place an order, go to a particular page. If desired, you can add the following data to such windows:

• a coupon or promotional code for a discount;
• a small survey;
• a countdown timer, as an option with the number of days remaining until the end of the promotion, until the release of a new product;
• a no-lose lottery, etc.

One of the most significant advantages here is that such ads attract the attention of the audience, but at the same time do not cause serious negativity, like classic advertising.

Email advertising

Despite the fact that many experts agree that email advertising is losing its position and relevance, it still continues to work. And it has a number of fairly significant advantages. In particular, in terms of price, it is one of the most affordable options. It will also require a minimum of time and effort from you during the launch and subsequent monitoring. In addition, its profitability indicators are still higher than those of many other Internet advertising options.

To launch it in practice, you will need to initially prepare catchy content, collect your customer base. Initially, we recommend creating a whole series of letters based on your marketing strategy so that in the end you get a whole chain of sequential mailings that gradually captivates a potential client, simulating him to contact you.

Push messages

Push messages are a modern replacement for classic SMS or email newsletters. In order for a person to receive them, he must give the appropriate permission. And this means that in the end there will be no irritation. Such notifications will be sent to the phone in real time, stimulating the audience to perform the target action you need. It is optimal to use them when you need to inform the audience about special offers, the validity period of which is literally expiring.

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is also one of the types of online advertising, as it is aimed at re-attracting customers to the business. This is implemented by providing customers with additional discounts on subsequent purchases, gifts, other rewards, and by creating a selection of additional products to those that this person has already purchased.

Such a solution will give good results only if you know your audience well and understand what exactly can interest them. This means that you will have to work hard to create a portrait of the target audience, as well as to develop personal offers.

SEO website promotion

SEO is also a kind of Internet advertising, as it allows you to move the site to the top of search results, that is, to where a huge number of clients will see it. Such promotion is carried out on the basis of key queries. Among the main advantages of such a solution we will highlight:

• gradual and systematic traffic accumulation, attraction of interested clients;
• increased conversion on the site;
• maintaining a stable and long-term result with minimal investment of time, effort, money.

But here we want to draw attention to the fact that it will take several months, or even more, to achieve the desired position of the site.

Press release

A press release is an official document of the media, a press service. Most often it is presented in the form of news, an announcement of an interesting event, the release of a new product. This way you can create a good image among a mass audience, ensure increased brand awareness, and attract interested clients.

The secret to the high effectiveness of press releases is interesting content. It is necessary to put as much useful information as possible into a very concise review. It is also important to ensure that the advertising content here is minimal, and everything looks as unobtrusive as possible.

Native advertising

Now we are talking about unobtrusive advertising, which will be hidden in ordinary content. That is, it is not aimed at direct sales, but at interesting a potential person, forcing him to contact the business, to learn more useful and valuable things for himself. And the fact that an order will be placed as a result is a kind of bonus. Due to the lack of aggressiveness, native advertising has a positive impact on the audience and gives the desired effect. In most cases, it is presented as a light mention of a brand, a product, highlighting its advantages against the background of analogues.

Advertising with bloggers

This advertising format involves interaction with the target audience through social networks, namely with the involvement of opinion leaders. Here it is important to find an influencer who works in your niche and can present your product to their subscribers in an original but unobtrusive way. Most often, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube are used to launch such campaigns. The advertising itself can be direct, that is, involve a regular story about a product or service, or integrated into the content. The second option looks more unobtrusive.

You negotiate the terms of interaction with the blogger yourself. Here you can set up affiliate marketing, pay for his services, or fully involve him in managing your page under certain conditions.

Let's sum it up

Now that you know what types of online advertising exist today, you can easily choose the combination of solutions that will be most effective for promoting your business. And here mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service will provide significant assistance. You can study more detailed information about this product here. But we want to draw your attention to the fact that with its help you can ensure the highest possible levels of confidentiality of work on the Internet, protection from any unauthorized access and hacker attacks. You will also be able to bypass regional blocking and access restrictions, use multi-accounting when working with social networks and more.

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