The holiday season is quickly approaching and you need to consider how you will be spending your advertising dollars. Will you hold an event promoted with post cards and phone calls? Will you have a Black Friday sale promoted in the local newspaper? What medium will you use for your weekly ads for the holiday season?
There are a lot more choices now than just newspapers, post cards, billboards, TV, and radio. Digital ads allow for extreme targeting of customers through social media, video, and email. You should consider using one of the digital ad formats during this season, at least Facebook because it's easy to set up.
The rise in mobile usefulness for everyday life opens a lot of new opportunities for mobile ads, that is, if you know how to target your customers.
Since 2013 Google AdWords changed the way their ad bidding works in such a way that they force you to always have mobile versions of your ads. With Facebook ads, you can choose to have ads appear in the right margin of the desktop version of their site, or as a sponsored ad that appears in the feed on the desktop and the mobile app.
Speaking of mobile apps, have you ever wondered why so many of them are free? Those apps make their money through advertising. Most apps have a rotating banner at the bottom of the screen, but some offer popup ads that force messages in front of people. These messages can be text, image, video, and even force the user to jump into the Apple Store or Google Play to suggest another app to install. If you know your audience well enough, you can pay for ads in the specific apps they use.
Shift In Ad Spending
I have to stress upon you that this new digital medium isn't something you should simply think about and hope to get involved with at some point in the future. That future is here now. Utilizing digital ads may very well make or break your upcoming holiday season.
According to eMarketer.com mobile is expected to account for more than half of the digital ad spending in 2015. The following table comes from the September 2015 eMarketer report and it shows digital ad spending at an expected 31.6% of total media spending for the year, mobile ads account for 16.6% of that.
That table shows the measured figures from 2014, the expected 2015 figure, and projections for 2016 through 2019. They estimate that digital advertising will take over as the primary media by 2017, finally surpassing TV.
My personal spin on these numbers is that that we're seeing a shift in money from the other mediums to digital. But this doesn't mean that the other mediums are dead. I've seen a lot of money spent on unwise, okay maybe even outright stupid, advertising. Many businesses switching their ad budgets to digital are just transferring where they are unwisely spending their money.
Specific customer targeting will always improve the results of your ads, regardless of the method you use. Any of these mediums can perform well for you if you correctly target your audience.
That said, the new digital ad methods are making it a lot easier for businesses to lessen the unwise waste of ad budgets. The ability to target customers with Facebook audience insights and with Google AdWords demographics are just two examples of this built in better targeting.
Targeting Specifics
While I do recommend the transfer of your ad budget from traditional media to digital, I don't want you to simply change your tactics without a plan... that's where you will waste your money. There are a lot of online resources to help you develop a target marketing list. Find those resources with a simple Google search for the phrase "how to develop a target market."
I recommend talking to an ad agency that knows how to help you build this target list and how to apply it to the various online advertising methods.
The future of digital advertising we've talked about for a few years is here. It's time to think differently and target more accurately with your ad spending.
