Types of Ads
Display Ads – Paid advertising in this form is usually comprised of an image and text ad. These consist of banners, landing pages and pop-ups.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Every time a user clicks on an ad leading to a website the advertiser is charged. This method is used by businesses to gain insight into specific information about their customers.
Social Media – There are two types of paid and organic. Organic advertising on social media is a word-of-mouth technique and is most effective if you have a lot of active followers who share and like a good deal of your posts. Paid advertising on social media involves video or static ads, promoted posts or sponsored stories.
Pay Per Click (PPC) – Advertisers are only charged per user click on their ad. Therefore, if 200 people see an ad and only 2 people click on the ad, then the advertiser only is charged for those two clicks.
Remarketing – This type of advertising uses cookie-based technology. People who have visited your website are then followed around the internet and ads are positioned in front of this audience in order to remarket to them.
Native Advertising – Consisting of ads that appear when users are surfing the net and show up as a suggested similar product or service or as a recommendation to the user. When the user clicks on the ad, they are taken to a website or landing page associated with the advertised product or service.
Affiliate Marketing – This is a performance-based approach in which one business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer attracted by the affiliate’s efforts. It’s essentially third-party advertising between an advertiser, publisher and a consumer.
Types of Social Media Marketing
Google AdWords - Were created by Google essentially for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising network. Paid ads appear on the top of a search page, and the advertiser only pays when people click on the ads. This type of paid advertisement relies on keywords. Once you become a paying customer, Google will provide you with a list of keywords relevant to your business. These keywords are part of a bidding system whereby highly sort after keywords will cost more per click than less popular ones.
Facebook and Instagram Ads - Firstly you require a Facebook business manager account and to set up your ad account. These are relatively easy to set up. Running ads on them can be a little tricky with regards to photo sizes, word content on photo and audience appropriateness. The ads run with a pay per click component. There are various blogs and YouTube videos on how to get set up Facebook and Instagram ads.
Stories - There has been a lot of hype about Facebook and Instagram stories and how they are going to rock the social media world in 2019. You may well be thinking what are these? They are essentially a slide show of images and/or video about a topic. Stories could be created about a product, service or event. Buffer released a really simple guide on how to build stories for advertising.
Twitter Ads - To access Twitter ads, you don’t even need an account; you just need to set up an ads account. Ads on Twitter need to be succinct and use visual aids to bring your points across as they only allow 140-character limit. Targeting your audience can be easier on Twitter as allows you to target not only the people who saw your tweet ad but also people who actually engaged with it. Also, you don’t require anyone’s email or phone number to tailor your audience, just their twitter handle. This means that you can target your ad to seek out every Twitter user who follows specific accounts.1 Twitter is a smaller platform and doesn’t have numbers of users that Facebook or YouTube have, but this means that it is cheaper as there is less competition in their advertising pool.
YouTube Ads – Now, this is a social media force to be reckoned with. It is the second most popular social media platform, rivalling Facebook for first place. YouTube’s cost per click average is significantly cheaper than Google’s so it is currently more cost effective to advertise on it.2 YouTube is a purely video-based advertising platform to advertise on this platform a video needs to be created. Depending on the type of ad being developed there are a few different software programs that can be used to create videos from a group of selected pics or to edit a pre-recorded video. The HubSpot blog ‘YouTube Ads for Beginners’ provides an in-depth account of the types of YouTube ads, setting up an ad campaign, tips on how to create a video ad, linking to Google AdWords and optimising AdWords for video ads.
LinkedIn – Like Facebook, LinkedIn has a broad range of advertising options for businesses wanting to increase brand awareness, followers and links to your website or a landing page. As it is a business to business platform make sure you have thought through your target audience to ensure this is the correct platform for your product or service.
Caroline Leigh
Marketing & Sales – ThinkSmart Software
1. 5 Really Good Reasons to Use Twitter Ads, The WordStream Blog
2. YouTube Ads for Beginners: How to Launch & Optimize a YouTube Video Advertising Campaign, HubSpot Blog