Digital Marketing

You have LOST social media marketing without these 5 online advertising strategies

5 types of online advertising brands can benefit from

1. Video Ads: Did you know that advertisers serve approximately 15-18 million impressions per night across sites through video ads.

• They have an average of around 12-14% CTR across mobile and similar handheld devices
• Use video ads with great caution and planning. You need to capture and pass on the “tagline” or punch-line message of your brand in the first 8-12 seconds, or you have already lost that customer to the “skip video” button!

For eg. This particular company, “Extreme Bike Tours” of Zander Combe that specializes in Adventure tours across exotic locations on amazing motorcycles, focuses their tours around three core aspects: The Bike, the biker and the location.

Motorcycle tours

Which in turn results into a truly once in a lifetime experience for their bikers too. So when Extreme Bike Tours created a video and their web technology partner Episkope Infotech contacted our digital agency to promote this video across social media as a video ad and a video based contest, we too ensured that the first 10-12 seconds of the video keeps the attention of the viewers towards all of the three key aspects as discussed above. Not only did the video gain great views during that week, but received over 350 mentions from targeted users interested in that video having engaging conversations with the brand, plus around 30,000 impressions via their twitter handle www.twitter.com/extremebiketour and wonderful engagement on their Facebook page that day https://www.facebook.com/extremebiketours similarly across other social media channels.

Video ads promoted across the right target audience during specific time frames and to the right demographics always does wonders for the brand, especially when the content is adventurous and exciting for the viewers too.

You can check out the video here:

https://youtu.be/O1jazHqJhOc?list=PLNkOvFmBU5Q6pKAV3vN3jadWmZ5WC4jJ5

Few others:

• Amazing Video ad from Always: Launched July 7, the Always “#LikeAGirl – Unstoppable” spot generated more than 30 million views:

Jul 7 2015: 30 Million PLUS Views: Always #LikeAGirl – Unstoppable – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhB3l1gCz2E

•  Jul 2 2015: 8 Million Plus views: Vivo Smart Phone – Minions (TVC) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcGYHU8WBo

According to YouTube, the top 10 ads from July’s leaderboard earned a combined 80.9 million views and more than 139 million minutes of watch time.

2. Interstitial Ads: These are ads that cover up your entire screen when you visit certain websites. They are not advisable much, to a great extent, unless they are truly creative and extremely well planned since they have the tendency to forcibly occupy the larger real-estate of your screen to show the ad for “x no of seconds”only after which the user gets to click on the skip or close option and view the content of the site. So ensure to choose it wisely.

I love the HBR interstitial ads on their website https://hbr.org because they are simple text based static creative which loads quickly and can be immediately skipped too in case you don’t find it relevant. Though these types of ads on the Forbes website sometimes stay for a time longer time than I would want to welcome it although they do try to keep it refreshing by adding a new “quote for the day” each time you load the site.

Also, these types of ads can be a great visual treat in specific types of products like for eg. Gourmet ads, Automobile ads, etc wherein the visuals are bright, colourful and very appealing.

Another important aspect that brands need to keep in mind when they use interstitial ads on their websites is that, they need to ensure and keep the display of these ads restricted to once per user based on the ip address from which they visit the site or it could be very repetitive and annoying for site visitors in case they visit the site frequently in a single day itself.

3. Native advertising is a form of advertising which cleverly blends with the content on that site. For eg. promoted videos and or articles across blog posts etc or using music and other media with search advertising tools, Twitter’s promoted Tweets, Facebook’s promoted stories, placing sponsored content alongside your editorial content with content marketing etc. They can be very effective too, for eg, the extremely popular Spotify’s native ad on Buzzfeed titled “20 Things That Affirm Led Zeppelin Is The Greatest Band To Ever Exist’ in which the readers shared the post over 8,500+ times across social media channels.

Myself, being a digital marketing professional, social media influencer, professional blogger and the Founder of Techdivine Creative Services, a digital marketing agency, have researched and tested over the years that sincerely sharing valuable content and placing “native advertising” in the form of a video or a link etc in a way that it blends in with the content, has a much better conversion rate than many other formats For eg. Check out this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/empowering-shopping-multimodality-omni-channel-approach-v in which I have added a link to one my workshops. And I even got good conversions and bookings to my event from the post.

The New York Times and Netflix ADS – : “Women Inmates:

The New York Times and Netflix ADS – “Women Inmates”

Separate But Not Equal,” published in August 2014, is a paid post to promoting the release of the second season of the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black.” The in-depth article discussed the many problems women face in prison, the effect of incarceration on their family, and prison reform — issues that are also highlighted in the popular show.

NYTIMESPAIDPOST

74% of consumers trust brands that provide useful info without trying to sell them something. (Source: The Trust Factor, About.com, 2014)

It’s always advisable to add the words “Sponsored” whenever you are adding links to promote third party client sites. Add them anywhere in the post or the posts category section and mention in the “About Me”section of your site to readers that your site may contain articles with links to sponsored content categorized as such. It’s a basic etiquette and professional obligation by social influencers to do so.

You could use images, links, videos or text. Also, native advertising gives the benefit to brands and clients because of the fact that the users who are reading your content are already those interested in the said subject or topic in discussion. But yes, the focus and priority should be to provide content that is really resourceful for users and ensure that your ads placed in between such content are completely in sync and relevant to the topic that is being discussed.

4. Gratification ads: Incentive based rewards as ads: These are very powerful in the case of games, retail stores, hospitality services, applications on mobile devices etc. In this a user is asked to may be view a video as a bonus for completing a level or they win an additional incentive which is followed on completion of another task awarded to the user just after they win something unexpectedly. These types of ads make use of “the positive state of mind” of users to showcase the content by placing the ads at the times when the user has been rewarded with an incentive as part of the gaming or app experience in the case of mobile gratification ads.

An awesome example of placing perfectly timed gratification ads which I personally loved is from Rovio and games from Glu. When you finish a bonus level in their game and get additional points or may be a free upgrade or power-ups, the game suddenly brings up an ad. Here the player is already in a nice mood due to winning the unexpected bonus, so they usually do not mind monetizing few bucks for their favorite game designers.

ACTUAL CASE STUDY EXAMPLE done for another Client of ours which won us great accolades in Social media marketing and Digital marketing integrating Mobile marketing for brands: This integrates both the offline user into the online model is something which we did for one of our clients from the restaurant and hospitality industry in Chicago. We added two offers for their visitors each time they checked in at the restaurant to dine. One was, they could win top “Leader board” points when they check-in, become a mayor of the place and get a free drink on their meal and once they enjoyed their free drink, tagging the restaurant with a picture of their free drink on social media would unlock additional discounts on their next immediate meal coupons.

These not only increased footfalls in their restaurant but also increased their brand boost, brand mentions, loyalty percentage of customers, brand awareness by over 35% in a span of 90 business days.

These type of ads empower both, the brands and their users with instant gratification for the brand ambassadors online.

5. Adsense: Adsense from Google is a tool and process using which brands or content publishers can monetize. But as a brand, it’s very important to keep track of these ads since they showcase these online ads based on your site’s content.

So, if your site is a KRC, as in a knowledge resource of articles and posts, then it may so happen that your content is next to an advertisement showcased through adsense which displays an AD of your competitor or worst, your client’s competitor. But if you play your cards right, you could may be use adsense to include ads of books or lifestyle brands which would make sense since millions of users shop for these online and if you or your clients do not belong to the publication or lifestyle industry, then you could safely monetize your site’s content as a brand or as a content / podcast publisher.

There are a lot more ways in which brands can advertise and or monetize with ads online, but to begin with, these would be some of the most effective and popular ones we love using for our clients at our digital agency.

Few other strategies that we use across our digital campaigns are – Influencermarketing, Blogging, Social media contests and Mobile check-in application through gamification.

Most recent example is the Blog promotion SOCIAL CAUSE _ SHARING IS CARING campaign from our Digital agency powered by #GoBlogYourSelfTD which saw 17 LAKH Plus impressions in a span of 8-10 hours.

#GoBlogYourSelfTD

Do feel free to share your views, comments, feedback on the same, would love to hear from all of you.

If you have come across wonderful ads that belong to any of these categories, do share it in the comments area below.