Marketing is divided into two branches, traditional and digital. Traditional marketing is essentially everything consumers witnessed before the dawn of the internet. Focusing marketing efforts on television, radio, print and billboards; this was the marketing of your Mad Men and sharp dressers. Fast-forward to today, and you’ve got tech geniuses working in offices with headphones in, concentrated on creating an interactive platform for your business to market on. With digital marketing you’ve got Price-Per-Click (PPC), Social Media, SEO, websites and more to reach your consumer.

The most important difference between traditional and digital marketing is that with digital marketing an agency can directly track your return-on-investment. With tools under PPC advertising, an advertiser can tell how many times your video was watched or how many times your ad clicked on. You can even tell if a purchase was made on your website from a click made through Google AdWords. The ability to track ROI is a great tool to understand and learn from. For example, a conversion (essentially known as ROI) might be that you’re looking to gain more phone calls, because you spent “x” amount in Google AdWords, you got 300 calls through consumers clicking on your phone number in said ad.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click advertising breaks down into three different categories: social, retargeting, and SEM. Each of these categories have their own unique spin on how they entice a consumer to click the ad and return to your website. With PPC, you can have thousands of views for free, but the client only has to pay for the action of the click. Usually, in all PPC advertising, the client has the ability to zero-in on a target location for their advertisements to reach. This way a person in Arkansas isn’t getting an ad for a cookie store in Chicago.

The most important aspect of PPC advertising is that the performance depends on how much money a client is willing to put into it. For a local campaign to make an impact, the budget may not need to be as large as a client who is wanting to target an entire state. The agency a client is working with will be able to give predictions as to “if you spend x, you should receive around y impressions and z clicks.”

Social

Through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more, there is always a way for a brand to advertise using social media. With social media platforms, the client can identify a target location along with selecting who they want to target based off of gender, age, interests (usually these are connected to what a person puts on their own Facebook, such as “I’m interested in cars, racing and NASCAR”). There is also an option to connect the advertisement to Instagram. A tricky part of advertising socially is that you have to be conscious of the text inside the photo. For example, Facebook only allows an advertisement 20% or less of the image to contain text, more than the 20% and the advertisement “won’t show as frequently”.

Retargeting

Retargeting is the spooky way advertisements follow a user after they visit a webpage. After a pixel code is placed inside a website, it collects pages you’ve visited, time, frequency and other data from that website (no personally identifiable information). This code is then read by Google and other websites who sell advertising space for advertisers, including Facebook. Then the different ads an agency has created for your campaign are pushed through the different advertising venues. Again, a client is able to identify where the ad was placed, how many people viewed it, how many clicked on the ad, and if it returned a conversion for them.

Search Engine Marketing

The most frequently used SEM tool is Google AdWords. These ads are identifiable by the word “AD” being placed next to the text advertisement during a Google Search. The great advantage of using AdWords is that Google can do a lot of the work for you (if you let them). Google helps you understand keywords through their Keyword Planner that will help your campaign, as well as identifying which ads are working the best and potential new ones that can replace ads that aren’t getting as much attention. The client can see how many times their search ads are viewed or clicked.

Another aspect of Google AdWords is that you can do text advertising as well as display ads through their network. The display advertising also has detailed demographics of who clicks on the advertisement. Google AdWords is constantly updating and including new tools to advertise with, so an agency has to stay on-top of the application to ensure that their clients are getting the best out of the tool.

Search Engine Optimization

The goal for many companies is “to be at the top of Google.” To do that a brand needs to implement a Search Engine Optimization strategy to ensure that they reach that coveted top position. Many agencies are working on including SEO in their advertising profiles so they can reach out to bigger and better clients.

When looking at SEO management, an agency’s top priority is to understand why you are ranking where you are, and how this can be improved. This is done by adding in keywords to your website, into blogs, and into your daily online activity. SEO marketing takes keywords that are associated with your brand and optimizes them to enhance visibility on search engines. SEO tracks total visits to your website, along with your domain authority, and countless other metrics. Domain Authority is a score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. Agency’s should always be pushing for clients Domain Authority to get closer and closer to 100. Brands such as Amazon, Ebay, and YouTube are some of the top domain authority websites out there with their numbers being above 95.

Overview

With so many angles on digital marketing, one important factor is that a brand needs to have a website that attracts consumers in the first place. With every click on an ad, or search from Google to rank a website, if the website isn’t attractive, easily navigable, or just not enough, the consumer and Google will click the “X” in the corner and move on. Many digital agencies help build, critique, and manage a client’s website so that the effort of advertising is streamlined to ensure success.

Digital marketing is becoming a larger component of budgets for businesses across the board. Many companies realize it doesn’t haven’t to be all one way or the other and include a combination of digital and traditional in their marketing strategy. A marketing agency should look at a brand’s target market and identify from there what form of marketing that client should pursue.

We hope this overview of different advertising techniques will help you understand the importance of the emerging digital advertising space. Here at Red Shark Digital we have experts in every aspect of digital marketing that are constantly learning and striving to be the best. Please feel free to comment below with questions, or use our contact us page to get a quote for your digital advertising.