Advertising

What is digital advertising?

Digital advertising is paid advertising or promotion of your brand or product online. If you are one of the 4.65 billion social media users worldwide, you've probably experienced a form of digital advertising today on your mobile,in an email, alongside a blog on a website, or on social media.

Why digital advertising is important for small businesses and SMEs

Due to a push for advertising revenue, organic reach has declined on social platforms, which means engagement of all that trust and brand building is suffering.

Engagement and connection to a brand, online or on the shop floor, is how your window shoppers turn into customers. You need organic content for brand success online, but you also need the reach, and digital advertising is how you will achieve it.

Before digital marketing came to online town in 1994, advertising was a well-considered (mostly expensive) investment. For contemporary SMEs, your most cost-efficient investment will be the time you spend on audience or competitor research.

Here's how to minimize ad spending for maximum results.

What is ROI in digital marketing, and why is it important?

What is digital marketing ROI? It’s the measurement of your online campaign's successes - organic and paid, positive or negative. Return on investment or ROI tells you what is working and what is not and helps determine the next step forward to attracting, engaging, and converting your perfect customer.

Types of digital ads

There are many different types of digital ads. For the most part, we experience them via social media or as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and display advertising.

To give you an idea of the ad options available on social media, we'll show you what Facebook and Instagram have to offer, and for SEM and display advertising will use Google Ads.

Primary Social Media Ads types - Facebook, Instagram

If you are considering social media advertising, Facebook and Instagram are great platforms to dip your marketing toe. Campaigns for either platform are easy to set up and manage through Facebook's Ads Manager. You can even test A/B versions of ad campaigns, duplicate and keep an eye on what is working and what is not (yep, ROI) with unique, shareable, and downloadable metrics.

Instagram and Facebook offer similar and complimentary ad types. For brand awareness, you can use the same photos or videos across each or test different variants with different imagery. It's up to you.

Social Media Ads types

What are carousel ads?

Carousel ads allow you to showcase up to 10 images or videos within a single ad, each with its own link. These are a great option if you want to show off your entire range of products in one post.

What are collection ads?

Collections ads display products like an online shop and convert them into sales. They are different from carousel ads because they allow the user to follow a link to purchase the product either on the platform or on your website. A great option if you sell physical products through an online shop.

What are image ads?

Image Ads are single photo ads with an optional footer allowing you to link to your social media account or your website. they are the most common type of ad and a really useful when you want to focus on a single call to action for your audience.

What are boosted posts?

When you boost a post on Facebook, you pay to promote that content, like an ad. Facebook's algorithm will promote your content to a larger audience because you’ve paid for it. You can select who you want to target in a variety of different ways including interests, demographics and even on location.

What are reels?

With short videos gaining popularity for reaching an audience, Facebook has added a monetization feature to Facebook Reels. At present, this feature is only available for the US, Canada, and Mexico users, but it will soon be available for Facebook Reels creators across the world - as will be clickable banner ads!

What are dark posts?

Here's something that needs a little more underground. You can create what is known as a "Dark Post" in Metigy. That’s a post that publishes to your Facebook page, but your audience will not see it, because you run it as a "boosted" ad on Facebook and Instagram instead. You do this because it allows you to target the ad precisely while running different content on your page. Because your page followers won't see it – unless you set the audience to target fans – it won't impact your organic data. This means you can test new content and ideas and promote and test new audiences. Here's the whole deal on dark posts.

To start with Instagram or Facebook advertising, you will need a Facebook Ad account set up with a valid credit card. Read this for a step-by-step on how to create your Facebook Business Account.

Search Engine Marketing / Display ads /Google Ads

Google Ads is a cost-effective, streamlined way to get your brand noticed online - and is a type of SEM or display advertising. Ads appear above the first result on a search page using this magic combination: Google's algorithms, the data you input for your ad, and the user's search terms.

Google Ads is one of the leading campaign tools for pro marketers. But you don't need to be a marketing pro. Google Ads provides tools that help you connect to your audiences in a meaningful way and measure the campaign's success.

Popular ad campaign types include:

What are search ads?

Search ads are completely texted-based, they have the closest appearance to a regular search result. Search ads are a powerful choice when you want to display a website listing that hasn't ranked high organically yet. It's one of the simplest ads to set up and a great way to get started if you want to run a simple lead generation campaign. You can use Metigy to set up and run your search ads.

What are video ads?

Even though these ads must be hosted on YouTube, video ads can be displayed on any site registered as a Google video partner. While the other ad formats appear predominantly on the search engine results page, most video campaigns appear as YouTube ads. YouTube, by the way, holds the second biggest social media audience after Facebook and shares the same parenting company as Google, making it a powerful advertising form.

Get tailor-made video content to suit your business needs.

What are display ads?

Display ads are ads that mostly appear like pop-ups on a site (YouTube, Google advertising, and website partners) and are positioned as organically as possible next to the site's main content. Again, Metigy can help you create and manage your display ad campaigns and the handy preview pane in our guided setup helps you see how everything will look.

What are shopping and app ads?

Shopping and app ads are created solely from google's search. Shopping ads typically appear as a carousel at the top of a search engine result's page. They usually feature a product image, title, a site link, and the price converted to the currency in the user's domain.

App advertising is a little different from the other formats. Rather than creating the ad yourself, Google asks you to input information, and then Google Ads designs ads on your behalf across a few formats and networks.

Here is a full overview of Ads, extensions and landing pages.

How to create a Google ad

Setting up a Google Ad campaign is easy. Go to the Google Ads homepage and click on the 'Start now' button, which will take you through a series of questions and offer suggestions for ads. Better yet, you can create your Google Ads here with our AI tool.

Keywords

The goal of keywords is to create meaningful content. Keywords tell your target audience that your ad is relevant to their search and provides Google's algorithm with the data to rank its relevance.

Keywords can appear in the body of your ad and even in the headline. If your brand or website name has a keyword, it will appear in the green hyperlink text just under the headline so focus on finding 2 to 5 high-impact keywords to build your copy around.

Don't keyword stuff. It may seem like a smart strategy to rank highly, but it's not and will ultimately hurt your ad quality and engagement. Find the most used and relevant keywords your audience uses and add those meaningfully to your ad copy. Every audience orbits around keywords that connect their interests.

One of the best ways to find your audience's most used and relevant keywords and get up top in search engine results (SERPs) is to peek at what your competition is doing online. Don't worry; everyone does it.

Check out the tools below to perform a competitive analysis.

We also cover a lot of ground when it comes to keywords for your Google ad campaigns in our online masterclass: Project G. It’s where you learn to master Google Ads with Metigy and was created for beginners.

Investment

Google Ads are pay-per-click (PPC), a most attractive feature for small businesses looking to invest in paid advertising while minimizing the risk of wasted ad spending.

With PPCyou only pay when conversions happen, which is helpful on a smaller budget and provides a much higher return on investment (ROI) because pay-per-click ads don't charge until the viewer clicks on your ad.

If you are ready to establish a more substantial online presence or drive more traffic to your website, Google Ads makes it an easy and cost-effective way to do it. Your budget can be as small as $5.

Audience

Along with being clear on the product or service and the content style of your ad, understanding your audience is key to running an effective, optimized Google Ads campaign.

Unlike social media advertising, Google Ads works on search engine results, and using the platform's excellent analytics capabilities has created audience targeting tools.

For example, you can segment your audience between people who have engaged with your business and people who haven't. Then you can craft different messages, one for those familiar with your brand and one for "cold" leads who need an introduction.

Tools for running Google Ads

Thanks to Google Ads’ advertising tools, any size business can target leads, prospects, and customers across platforms like Google search, YouTube, maps, and publisher websites.