Display advertising was a flourishing activity during the early days of the Internet. It has since declined in popularity as Internet users have succumbed to banner blindness. Few merchants use display advertising as a form of performance marketing anymore. However, it still has an important role in the brand image.
If you're trying to create a branding campaign, you can not ignore the benefits of display advertising. You just need to create a well executed strategy.
Good and Bad Ways to Use Display Advertising
Around the turn of the century, some of the biggest brands have killed just banner ads on their sites. Even inexperienced affiliate marketers have been able to create campaigns making $ 50,000 a month or more by running simple banner ads on their partner sites.
These days are long gone, because customers have begun to settle them. A 2013 InfoLinks study found that 86% of customers suffer from blindness of banners.
Where do they do it? Banners may no longer work as well for performance marketing, but that does not mean that they do not have their place.
The reality is that customers do not completely ignore the banners. They are just not likely to engage with them. Their subconscious mind still notices them. If you choose the right distribution channels, negotiate competitive offers and create well-optimized banners, you can dramatically improve your brand through display advertising.
Here are some tips for brands that want to lose their audience and position themselves to customers through display advertising.
Selection of Highly Relevant Digital Magazines for Investment
Choosing the right web properties to advertise is incredibly important. I have found that digital magazines tend to give the best results for several reasons:
- People are very involved in reading content from digital magazines. They will be more focused on your ads than people who read generic news sites or browse social media.
- You can reach a much more targeted audience. If you find an online magazine with the same demographics as your customers, you'll do it well.
You must use Alexa or another demographic analysis tool to ensure that the site addresses your target customers before bidding on the sites. It is also important to ensure that the site is well designed, as this tends to reflect the level of engagement of its readers. I find that ezines that use grouping design elements tend to have higher engagement.
Highlight the benefits of your call to action
When using ads in a marketing performance campaign, you need a call for action very clear. You need to make sure that the ad matches your conversion goal for the campaign to pay.
Your call for action is not as important when you create a branding campaign. Instead of focusing on this topic, you should use your ads to highlight the main selling points of your product. Viewers will pay attention to them and remember them on the road.
Go easy on flashy creations
When ban banners became a real problem, marketers had to find more creative ways to make sure their ads stood out. They used animated GIFs to attract more attention.
These flashy creations can modestly improve the return on investment of your performance marketing campaigns, but they will not help much in branding. They can actually hurt your brand because customers may feel that your brand is more aggressive.
You do not need your ad to attract attention. Just stand out enough so that customers remember the basic message on the road.
Choosing Prestigious Real Estate Investments
You do not need your ads to be visible enough to be clicked. However, they can not be so invisible that the customer never sees them at all.
To make sure your ads are showing, it's usually more important to find the right spots than to choose the right ads. Try to ensure that your ads appear in the foreground and that they are not grouped near many competing ads. The 125×125 pixel ads that appear in the sidebar with half a dozen ads will not have much visibility. Using a 728 × 90 pixel ad at the top of the site will usually be much better.
The use of a large standalone ad at the bottom of the site can also work, provided that the CPM is sufficiently low. However, keep in mind that it is much harder to test the ROI of a banner advertising campaign unless you also measure conversions. Since conversions will probably be limited, it is usually best to test the most exposed ads possible.
Banner advertising still plays an important role in the brand image
Digital advertising is constantly evolving. Some strategies have declined in popularity, but few have disappeared. Display advertising is an excellent example. It has not lost relevance, but you should adopt it as a branding strategy instead of using it for performance marketing.