If one of your business objectives is to increase your sales and online awareness, you're in the right place! An excellent way to enhance your online business performance is through digital advertising. The internet is home to millions of daily users, which means that you're given an almost endless supply of users to target and convert from leads to dedicated clients.

With all the benefits online advertising has, many businesses still don’t invest in effective online advertising practices, and you might be one of them! This is a horrible revelation, especially if this applies to your business, because we have some heartbreaking news. Your business not developing and implementing online advertising practices could be costing you thousands in lost sales.

However, you shouldn’t throw a pity party just yet. Today, we’re taking a look at what digital advertising is and how you can make the most of it. There are many popular digital advertising strategies out in the world today that can work to spice up your business’s online performance. Continue reading to find out how you can successfully implement online advertising practices into your business today.

What is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising is also known as internet marketing or digital marketing. This is when a business uses creative advertising practices that advertise to potential customers. It's widely known that digital advertising is a broad term with numerous sub-topics. One of these sub-topics is the various types of advertising that you can implement to enhance your business's online performance.

What are the Different Types of Digital Advertising?

Several sub-categories make up the whole digital marketing industry. Each digital advertising practice is unique and works to help promote your online business. Here are some of the most popular advertising strategies that help increase your online business’s sales and brand awareness, which you can start using today.

PPC Marketing

If you've dipped your toe in digital advertising, then you know that one of the most popular advertising strategies that many local businesses invest in is pay-per-click marketing, which is also known as PPC. This marketing method has drastically exploded in recent years and is likely from Google and Facebook.

You might think that PPC marketing is overused and can’t be beneficial. However, you might want to know that Google gained a cool $116 billion from the search engine’s ad department. This accounted for 78 percent of US search ad revenues in 2018, which makes Google the go-to place if you want to invest in PPC advertising.

One of the benefits of PPC marketing is that you can instantly increase the number of leads to your local business’s website. When using this strategy, your local business’s online advertising campaigns are run on various platforms.

You’re then required to pay for each click these campaigns receive. In contrast to other online marketing strategies, PPC ads and the pricing for such advertisements can be incredibly volatile. Nonetheless, it’s an excellent way to reach your target market and boost your leads.

SEO Marketing

SEO marketing is seen as one of the most established online advertising methods currently available, which makes investing in it incredibly beneficial. This type of digital marketing is also known as search engine optimization and works to enhance your website’s visibility. When using SEO marketing, you’re given the opportunity to help your targeted audience find you.

One joke shared by digital marketers works as an excellent example that encourages local businesses to invest in this SEO advertising. The joke states that the second page of Google results is the best place to hide a dead body, which couldn't be truer. When was the last time you clicked on the second page of Google results? Customers aren't going to click on the second page of results to find your business if your competitor is conveniently placed at the top.

Due to this, SEO marketing helps you rank higher in search engine results. Many factors play a role in the search engine algorithm that ranks websites. However, effectively implementing a well-thought-out SEO advertising program can help you achieve these goals and rank at the top.

Content Marketing

In some cases, a single ad isn’t enough to convince consumers to purchase a specific product. When it comes to digital advertising, these customers often require convincing facts and evidence that can be communicated through storytelling. For this reason, content marketing can be incredibly beneficial in helping these customers decide to buy a specific product or service.

The concept behind this type of creative advertising is fairly straightforward. Its purpose is to use the art of storytelling to market and sell your business’s service or product to users. Sounds simple, right? Well, it really is and some of the best forms of this content marketing are blog posts and articles.

These unconventional advertising practices provide business owners with the ability to tackle most of the barriers potential customers have when purchasing a product. Using this content marketing, you have the opportunity to engage these readers and offer benefits that push the potential customer to ultimately request a quote or add to their shopping cart.

Adding to this, these articles and blogposts hold the potential to rank incredibly well in search engine results. This is due to the possibility of SEO tactics being included in these posts and articles. Due to this, you can use two excellent creative advertising practices in one shot. It’s like killing two birds with one stone.

Influencer Marketing

Another efficient advertising practice that’s widely used in the business world is influencer marketing. You might know what an influencer is and even follow a few on Instagram. Or, you might be totally unfamiliar with this new age of stardom. An influencer can be classified as an individual with a large social media following on a specific social media platform.

When looking at influencer marketing, you’re essentially providing your product or service to an influencer for them to promote on their social media platform. This promotion tactic delivers your product or service to an audience of millions of people, which can help you enhance your brand awareness and your business’s own social media following.

Video Marketing

All of the creative advertising practices we’ve mentioned above are known as static advertising. However, this type of advertising tactic isn’t classified as being static and has been around for ages. The majority of people can recall some advertising while watching movies, TV, series, and sports games. These ads have been around for a long time, but this type of marketing has found its way onto the web.

Due to the immense popularity surrounding online platforms like YouTube and Facebook, online video marketing has become more popular, as it helps local business owners reach a wider audience. This type of marketing is an excellent method of playing with people’s emotions. The reason behind this is because you can place these potential customers into a story, which offers tremendous engagement.

Viral Marketing

As digital marketers, we understand that technology is advancing at an exceptional rate and new practices are being formed. One of these new digital advertising strategies is viral marketing. Now, you might find this a little too progressive to add to your marketing strategy, but being innovative can help you innovate far beyond your competitors.

Viral marketing is known to come in various forms. However, videos are generally the most common form of viral marketing. This type of online advertising works by creating a peculiar or funny video. The goal of this type of marketing is for the video to go viral and spread across the internet. One benefit of using this viral marketing tactic is that you can significantly increase your brand awareness in a short period.

How Can You Create a Robust Digital Advertising Strategy?

Now that we have looked at the popular types of advertising practices you can include in your local business, we can move onto deciding which is the right path for your specific business. It’s likely that you have already created an online marketing strategy, but you need to ask if this is giving your business the best possible return.

We can help you identify how valuable your existing marketing strategy is and what would be the best course of action to enhance your local business online performance and brand awareness, ultimately increasing your sales.

Identify Your Target Audience

The most critical step of any successful online advertising strategy is to identify your ideal target audience. How can you locate where to find your customers online if you don’t know what audience you need to market to? Not defining your target audience can result in you wasting your marketing budget on practices that aren’t being used in the best way possible.

We suggest that you picture your ideal customer when you’re identifying your target audience. How old are these individuals? What is their income? What are the hobbies that they like partaking in? After you can answer these questions, you’re going to have the opportunity to build the persona of your ideal customer and target them with effective marketing strategies.

Decide Your Online Business’s Specific Platform

Now that you have a clear image of the type of person you wish to target, you can think about your target clients’ daily life. What websites are they likely going to visit and when do they generally use the internet? Are they active on social media?

These questions can help you find everything you need to know when developing your digital advertising strategy. Not to mention, you can also get a better idea of what advertising practices would be the best way to introduce your product or service to these targeted customers.

Online advertising practices that involve influencer marketing and social media would be the best choice if you’re targeting a younger audience. Many younger children are more active on social media platforms, like YouTube instead of watching TV, which means that social media would be your online marketing strategy’s best friend.

Invest in Creative Advertising

So, you’ve settled on your target audience and the best platforms to reach these potential customers. Now comes the fun part! It’s time for you to begin brainstorming some advertising ideas. You might want to invest in professional help if you find that you lack creative thinking and design skills.

However, you shouldn’t feel discouraged if you’re struggling to find some marketing ideas because sometimes the most basic ideas are the most effective. Don’t get in your head and overthink it because sometimes the best ads are simple and cut straight to the chase. One suggestion we have for you is to conduct some market research during this process to see what your competitors are doing to attract the same audience, as this can help you formulate better ideas.

Select Your Marketing Automation Tools

It’s no secret that digital marketing is complex and can be daunting to handle when you’re also managing your local business. Don’t worry, because there are automation marketing tools to help make your life easier.

These marketing automation tools help make the steps between marketing and sales more efficient and give your team more time to focus on your local business's overall strategy and nurture your leads that show promise in becoming loyal customers. This means you gain more prospects, which equates to the potential of having more customers.

Not to mention, the beauty behind using marketing automation tools is that these features can help provide you with a detailed image of your potential customer behavior. There are many different marketing automation tools that you can use. However, you should consider your budget and the features you would like to receive from these automation tools when settling on one.

Analyze Your Results from Implementing These Digital Marketing Practices

You’ve put everything together and implemented the marketing practices that best fit your target audience. Congratulations! All your hard work is about to pay off, but it’s still crucial to monitor these ads to understand the effect such advertisements are having on your online business’s performance.

This allows you to identify where you can improve and make sure you’re getting the best return. With that being said, most advertising campaigns don’t offer the best performance right away, but regularly tweaking your ads can help you see a significant impact on your numbers and ROI.

The sky is the limit with all the advertising practices you have up your sleeve. You have the opportunity to make your local business an international success. Now, start implementing these creative ad practices and enhance your business’s online performance!

‍