Are you advertising on the right digital channels?

Digital marketing plays an integral role in the work we do at Vendi. Digital is no longer the shiny new tactic in marketing—it is a necessity in successfully reaching and connecting with your audience. When our clients ask us which digital marketing channel they should use, we start with one important question—what are your goals? 

Awareness

If generating interest in your brand is your main objective, choose a mix of digital marketing channels that deliver your message to a broad audience, wherever they may be. 

Your target audience is surfing the web. As we speak. Display advertising puts your brand in front of them as they click from site to site. Demographic, geographic and topic targeting will allow you to refine your audience, but the vast reach of the display network will allow you to cast a greater net to extend your message. While there are a variety of display networks available to advertisers, Google display advertising reaches 80% of global internet users—making it a great place to start your online awareness campaign.

YouTube is currently the second largest search engine after Google, with more than 1.5 billion logged in users per month and over 1 billion hours of video watched each day. Another powerful channel for your awareness campaign.

Paid social ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. are another way to extend your reach to users on their favorite apps and websites. Paid social ads are also becoming a necessity as Facebook organic reach continues to decline—by the start of 2018, 55% of marketers saw a decrease in their page’s organic reach—requiring brands to pay for placement in the newsfeed. Both Facebook and Twitter offer the option to extend the reach of your ads outside of their native platform, with ads appearing on apps and websites across the internet. Advertising on Facebook’s audience network can reach up to 16% percent more people than on Facebook alone.

While paid social ads are an asset in awareness building, their power lies in their targeting capabilities which can be used to influence consideration and action.

Consideration

If you are looking to influence consideration and engage with people most likely to be interested in your brand—focus on channels that allow for deeper targeting and the ability to provide richer, more relevant content. 

Today, nearly seven-in-ten Americans use at least one social media network and 68% of U.S. adults are on Facebook alone, making it an effective tool for influencing consideration. Facebook and Twitter offer a variety of interest and behavior targeting to find people based on their hobbies, favorite entertainment, purchase behaviors, device usage, etc. If your ideal customer likes to travel to the beach, own cats and loves to bake—you can target them. And with ad formats designed to drive traffic to your website, increase engagement with your content, generate leads—these channels are key in influencing consideration. 

Often when consumers are considering new products or services, they take to search engines (with Google holding nearly 80% of global search engine market share). A search campaign will put you in front of potential customers when they are actively searching for a brand, product or service like yours. 

When your potential customers are ready to commit, a mix of digital marketing channels will be needed to drive them to action.

Action

When you want to convert your prospects into customers, remarketing should lead the way in your digital marketing strategy.

If you’ve ever visited a website and noticed ads for that brand following you around online… you’ve experienced remarketing. Remarketing allows you to target people who have visited your website with highly relevant content designed to convert. Are you selling a product and want to offer a deal to users who have looked at that product but didn’t make a purchase? Do users frequent your blog, but haven’t signed up for your enewsletter? Do you have a list of enewsletter subscribers who haven’t converted into customers? Then your digital campaign needs to include remarketing.

Ad platforms from Google to Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat (Snap Pixel coming soon) allow you to drop a pixel on your site designed to track users and market to them based on their activity on your site. While this requires some minimal effort to add the pixels to your site, the value it brings in data and marketing is unparalleled.

Converting prospects through remarketing will also require a strong landing page experience. The quality of your landing page will not only help in converting leads, it will also influence the quality score and relevancy of your ads in the digital platforms. 

For many of our clients, digital campaigns include multiple goals and multiple channels. As with any marketing campaign, there isn’t one channel that will deliver on every goal for every audience. So, when our clients ask us which digital marketing channel they should use, the answer isn’t one channel. But by outlining their goals, we can find a strategic mix that delivers results.