What Social and Digital Advertising Platforms Offer For Businesses
Digital advertising platforms and particularly social advertising platforms are becoming more and more powerful, yet not all businesses are taking advantage of social or digital advertising or are failing to employ their full potential. Thus, social marketing or digital marketing remains a channel of unrealized potential. For businesses looking to start advertising on social channels or to increase their digital advertising potential, below we have an overview of various channels and their advertising capacities.
Pinterest is known for its magazine type atmosphere and its beautiful, informative and actionable ads. Pinterest has become one of the leading digital platforms on which more and more businesses choose to advertise their products and grow their clientele or audience base. Pinterest ads are ideal for executing certain campaigns, particularly those aimed at engagement, traffic, and awareness. Awareness campaigns work to bring businesses new audiences; engagement campaigns encourage interactions by allowing repinning or clicking on Promotion Pins, while traffic campaigns direct individuals from the Pinterest ads directly to the business’s website. One of the advertising methods on Pinterest entails “rich pins”, which display metadata (i.e. price, product title) from designated pages from the business’s own website right on the Pin itself. This means Pinners receive enhanced experience, thus increasing engagement. Pinterest also offers “buyable pins” that allow users to browse and make purchases directly via Pinterest, on the spot by using Apple pay. Pinterest also works with ad groups with various perks that include: assigning budgets and targeting to ad groups; matching budgets with marketing initiatives; and streamlining campaigns, all to ease management of campaigns and increase their effectiveness.
Pinterest’s strength also lies in targeting, with a few options including: targeting based on keywords or interests. Targeting based on keywords targets people as they search for specific items or topics, while targeting through interests reaches people based on their liking of certain items or topics, like recipes, pet clothes and so on. Furthermore, advertisers can also target based on locations (state & city level), devices, languages, and gender. Pinterest also allows for retargeting options by offering businesses to combine the information they already have about their clientele base with data acquired from Pinterest on its user base. Another method is known as Look-A-Like Targeting, which enables businesses to reach a larger group of people who look and act similar to your current audiences.
Facebook, one of biggest social media channels, takes lead for digital advertising for businesses. Businesses can create campaigns with specific objectives unique to the Facebook platform to drive advertising. These objectives can be aimed to raise awareness, increase likes, drive traffic, generate leads and so on. Advertisement can be conducted on Facebook through various methods including: Right-Hand Rail Ads, Multi-Product Ads, Lead Ads, to name a few. Facebook also offers a platform, Facebook’s Power Editor, through which a business can create and maintain its ads. It also sustains targeting options to filter through age, location, gender, and language and even custom audience options or interest, and audience behavior. The custom audience option is quite unique and most valuable targeting option on Facebook. Through this option, businesses can track how visitors explore their site, including which pages are visited, what type of searches are made, items added to cart, and other actions. Through such information, businesses can locate audiences with similar interests and behavior.
Facebook retargeting is one of the best options for digital social advertising as it allows businesses to display their ads to users who have already visiting their website or have clicked on their products. By locating users in the right stage of the sales funnel and by maintaining their products in front of the right audience, businesses increase their sales potential.
Instagram offers Instagram Stories Ads, which allow businesses to publish picture or short video ads, with a perk that they can also be shared on Facebook. Instagram Stories Ads can be targeted in a completely customizable way. The unique aspect of Instagram Stories is the idea of advertising to an audience without the audience being aware that they are being advertised to, done by playing off of current events, trends and fads. Another aspect of Instagram that is unique is the idea of showcasing photos that customers have shared on Instagram. This provides a customer directed advertising that’s hard to beat. Furthermore, Instagram’s “shop now”, “install now” or “sign up” options make advertising seamless while visitors browse their favorite interests, brands and pictures.
Google Adwords and remarketing
Google’s remarketing feature offers businesses the capability to advertise ads to visitors who have previously visited the website or used the mobile app. Google adwords and remarketing are great tools to bring back visitors and encourage them to complete the steps that they had previously taken, thus helping businesses build leads and sales. In other words, Google adwords helps to remarket product specific ads to visitors and users. With data stored regarding user behaviour and interest, businesses can retarget even individuals who have made a purchase a number of months prior. This is known as Customer Match and Remarketing Audiences, done through “Google cookie”, which tracks user searches,views and so on for up to 180 days. Moreover, Google’s Customer Match, allows advertisers to upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords, developing enhanced campaigns and ads that are specifically designed to reach a certain audience.
Custom digital advertising platforms
Besides the common social media platforms onto which advertising can be done, businesses can always opt for development of their own custom digital advertising platform. Such custom platforms will meet business’ digital advertising needs, locate the clientele base based on common interests and preferences collected throughout various channels; including email, social and mobile and on on web in general to develop custom ads for a targeted audience. Custom advertising mimics the one-on-one conversations that clients often desire and provides the right advertising at the right time, in the right form, to the right audience.
