Location Base Marketing & Geofencing
Digital Advertising, ROI & the future of engagement
Digital advertising is the practice of delivering promotional, educational and awareness content to users through various online and digital channels.
Digital advertising uses outlets such as social media, email, search engines, mobile apps, affiliate programs and websites to show advertisements and messages to audiences.
Traditional (non-digital) advertising widely followed the “spray-and-pray” approach. It reached out to the masses, but the ROI (return over investment) was largely undeterminable. Digital advertising, as we know it today, is heavily data-driven and can give you minute details of your campaigns and outcomes. The availability of user data and rich targeting capabilities makes digital advertising an important tool for businesses and services to connect with their audience.
It is useful to remember that while the connected world offers many ways to reach and engage with customers, there is a distinction between ways that are free or ‘organic’ and paid or ‘inorganic’. Digital advertising is an ‘inorganic’ or “paid” way to reach and engage with customers and prospects while “organic” or free digital reach is considered publicity.
With the release of Google AdWords in 2000, and Facebook ads in 2007, the digital advertising industry evolved intensively. Tracking, optimizing and controlling ads became possible for small- and medium-sized business owners, nonprofit organizations and individuals. Advertising was a luxury reserved for big companies and big budgets, now the field is full of small initiatives, sole proprietorship ventures, individual professionals that use it to acquire followers and become influencers and causes and social initiatives that communicate their services for client acquisition and for fundraising purposes.
Today, digital advertising is used to drive traffic to websites, generate leads, build brand awareness, establish thought leadership, build engaged communities and generate sales.
Digital Advertising Formats
Since its inception digital advertising has been steadily innovated upon. Today, the diverse digital advertising landscape consists of various ad formats. You could even use a combination of two ad categories to create a new one. These are the lists of the most commonly used digital ad formats.
Search Engine Marketing
When searching for something on Google or Bing, a few search results with the tag “AD” appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Page. These ads are the result of search engine marketing.
Display Ads
Ads, as we know them. Ads primarily use text and images and appear on third-party websites, which are usually affiliated with search engines or other ad networks. Many websites self-host display ads as well. The most common types of display ads are images, mobile, text, banners, pop-ups and video ads.
Social Media Ads
Your audience spends a lot of time on social media, and this presents a huge opportunity to advertise your services. You can use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Grindr, A4A, Reddit, etc. to promote your organization and services. Social media ads can help you right from building a community, generating leads and increasing event attendees, to boosting website conversions, app installations and growing footfalls to your healthcare site or service location.
Native Advertising
Native ads can appear on social media sites or other web pages, and they don’t look like typical ads. They appear under ‘Recommended Reading’, ‘Related Stories’ or ‘Promoted Stories’ that visually match the content you’re currently reading, only upon clicking, you’re redirected to the advertiser’s website.
Remarketing
Have you ever checked a product or story on Google or Amazon and later while scrolling through your social media feed come across an ad for that exact product? That’s remarketing. Also known as retargeting, remarketing uses cookies to follow you on the web. Almost every major social media platform as well as Google currently offer the remarketing feature.
Return over investment (ROI)
ROI is a measurement on how cost effective the advertising campaign is or how much profit you’ve made from your ads compared to how much you’ve spent on those ads. Is very important to understand that even in the nonprofit industry where we are not necessarily looking to sale a product or service, we need to make sure the money invested in campaigns are bringing worth it results, and we shall stablish these goals before we spend the money.
When we are not looking to sell a product online or at a store, we can’t compare the investment against sales, so we need to use the term “Conversions” as the measurable objective for the advertising. In HIV, prevention examples of conversions could be:
- Amount of people engage by clicking on the ad to get more information
- Amount of people who watch a video for more than 10 seconds in the landing page
- Amount of people who fill a form to get more information or to get tested for HIV
- Appointments to get tested or to see a health navigator
- Amount of people downloading a PDF with sexual health education etc.
To calculate ROI, in a retail or consumer goods company we take the revenue that resulted from your ads, subtract your overall costs, then divide by your overall costs:
ROI = (Revenue – Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold.
Example:
Let’s say you have a product that costs $100 to produce and sells for $200. You sell 6 of these products as a result of advertising them on Google Ads. Your total sales is $1200, and your Google Ads cost $200. Your ROI is ($1200-($600+$200))/($600+$200), or 50%.
But in general, and especially for our work in HIV prevention, to help measure your campaign Ads ROI, you’ll need to track conversions, actions that you want your audience to take on your website or landing page after clicking your ad such as a form sign-up, a subscription, an appointment or download.
ROI is typically the most important measurement for advertisers because it shows the real effect that Ads has on your business. While it’s helpful to know the number of clicks and impressions you get, it’s even better to know how your ads are contributing to the success of your campaigns depending on which your specific goals are.
The future of engagement
Technology is changing the face of how we relate to others and how we conduct business nowadays. In a complex, competitive and fragmented market, building long term loyalty is becoming more and more difficult for organizations, companies and brands. At the heart of great customer engagement is a new Marketing mix of data, creativity, and technology.
But technology is driving changes in consumer behavior and in order to adapt and thrive, organizations and companies need access to the right data in order to know and understand their audience as individuals and to drive their creative decisions.
What is clear, today, is that consumers will continue to engage with brands in many different ways. And at the heart of making customer engagement succeed is data: the more we know about an individual, the better their marketing will be.
