Introduction
Advertising is important if you want to bring visitors to your website. It’s particularly important if you own an e-commerce store and want to sell some products. There are numerous advertising tools today. They might overlap and be used for different purposes. I’ve created a list of some best online advertising methods that will help you promote your business, inform or entertain your audience and increase conversions and sales.
Facebook is the most widely used social media network. Almost 2.5 billion people around the world use Facebook. That’s more than 30% of the world’s population.
With so many people using Facebook, you’re almost guaranteed to be able to reach an audience that’s relevant to any type of business. That’s where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.
There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:
- Core audiences: An audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
- Custom audiences: Get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.
- Lookalike audiences: Reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.
Facebook’s advanced targeting can be used to target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.
Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:
- Photo ads
- Video ads
- Story ads
- Lead ads
Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding. Story ads allow you to use a combination of photo and short-form video content. If you want to learn more about the different ad types, here’s a great course from HubSpot Academy all about Facebook Advertising.
Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads all at the same time. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.
No matter your business’ size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services. With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.
Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.
Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Across the world, 20 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.
There are a few different ways you can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy.
- Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action to send a message.
- Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.
- Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users’ Facebook Messenger chats.
All of these ad types come together to encourage your audience to kick off conversations with your business. They can be used to get in contact with a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.
My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.
Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.
Facebook’s Audience Network
With Facebook’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.
Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.
This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.
Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.
YouTube
YouTube offers a host of resources such as “how to” Guides and advertisers playbooks that will show you exactly how to set up and run your first successful marketing campaign with it.
Twitter also recently announced that it allows users to place self serve ads. You can find out more about Twitter Advertising here
Tip: Any Advertising on social media networks should only be undertaken as part of a coordinated social media strategy. if you are still unsure read this: 13 Reasons Using Social Media for Business is Non Negotiable.
Digital advertising is less common on Twitter because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on Twitter. This is very unique to Twitter – but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. Twitter has over 330 million monthly users globally. The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.
Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on Twitter: B2B and e-commerce. Many B2B companies are using Twitter as a digital marketing tool, and Twitter users are known to spend a lot of money online. This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.
Twitter breaks down its ads into five goals:
- Awareness: Promote your tweets and maximize your reach.
- Tweet engagement: Promote your tweets and get more retweets, likes, and replies.
- Follows: Promote your account and grow your Twitter following.
- Website clicks: Promote your website and get more traffic.
- App downloads: Promote your app and get more downloads.
All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.
The LinkedIn platform has over 660 million monthly active members worldwide. Users on the platform are largely made up of working professionals which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers a large audience pool to reach.
Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that isn’t available on other platforms.
You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry. Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.
Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to not only reach a very specific audience but drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.
The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action.
How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:
- Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
- Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
- Measure the impact of your messages.
But a word of warning: Don’t send too many Message Ads to the same people or it will come off like spam. And, make sure the messages sound authentic – if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?
If your Message Ads are too stiff, they’ll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation. Direct messages are sacred spaces – if you’re going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end-users. Make sure you’re delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.
You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users globally. That’s a little less than half of the number of users on Facebook. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.
There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:
- Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
- Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
- Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.
I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.
Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:
- Photo ads
- Video ads
- Story ads
- Ads in Explore
- Shopping Post ads
By far, the most interesting ad types right now are ads in the Explore Tab and Shopping Post ads. People using Instagram Explore are exploring their interests and discovering new content creators. Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of a new audience.
Shopping Post ads allow you to include a tag that shows the product’s name and price within your image. Clicking on the tag takes your prospects directly to a product page where they can purchase the item — all without leaving the Instagram app.
Google Display Network
When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.
You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.
If you don’t want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.
Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that’s already familiar with your brand.
Conclusion
Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.
The best online advertising methods can and will only be the best if you in fact have a sound, well thought out plan for your advertising campaign; whether that is SEO or social media. The simple fact is if you go running ahead online without due care and attention you could end up with a whopping great investment of time and or money for little to no return.