In the digital age, there are many marketing solutions to choose from. Few, however, integrate creative strategy and data to engage more consumers while they search the web than display advertising. By aligning ads with content consumers like and appearing across multiple channels, display advertising maximizes the impact of marketing messages. This is done through targeted and customized ads that use image, audio, and video to communicate a message and spur an action. Let’s break down what exactly this means for marketers, and how you can use it to your advantage.
Getting You To All Parts of the Marketing Journey
It is important to get your information in front of consumers at all stages of their consumer journey. Display advertising can be done across devices, where audiences will see your ads on their desktop, laptop, mobile, and tablet devices. This puts more of your engaging ads in more places; making them more available at all stages of a consumer’s path to purchase. Lets take a look at how you can use display advertising to make an impact during each stage.
Awareness Stage
Say you need to make a purchase. You just read a magazine that has you convinced skiing is the new winter hobby you need to take up. Here is the catch: you don’t have skis, and you have no idea where to find some. This is where display advertising comes in.
The moment you put down that magazine and knew you wanted to ski was your Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), or the second long point where a consumer first knows they want to make a purchase. This is where having a display campaign already running comes in. In order for an advertiser to have successfully gotten their brand out during the awareness stage, you would have to already know about their brand pre-skiing decision. This way, the moment you put that magazine down, that advertiser’s brand comes to mind as a contender.
Consideration Stage
At this point of the consumer journey, you know you want to purchase skis but aren’t ready to take the plunge yet. This is the stage where the most research happens. By already having a ski brand in mind from ads seen in the awareness stage- and having supplemental reminders from more ads seen now- that advertiser’s brand is going to be one of the few that make it through this stage of the funnel.
You have made your ski purchase and booked a trip to the mountains. Hurray! This isn’t where the power of display advertising stops for marketers, though. Data can give advertisers great insights about how their ads performed. Say you clicked on one of their display ads all the way back in the awareness stage; with Google Analytics data, marketers can track whether a person makes a purchase after clicking on that ad. With this data, they don’t have to guess what part of the marketing campaign pushed that purchase. They know exactly how many people saw their ad, clicked on it, and then made a purchase at that time or in the future.
Display Advertising Best Practices
To optimize ads and track campaign data, it is important to work with a digital partner that uses the Google Display Network to run ads. For an even more affective campaign, look for digital partners that are a Premium Publisher. These digital experts have a curated websites to host ad campaigns, creating a better consumer experience and providing more data for you.
Want help putting together a display campaign so you can reach consumers on the go, on any screen? Contact the digital experts at MassLive Media Group to start making an impression on consumers wherever and however they’re spending time online.