For this first post, let’s talk a little bit about some popular methods found in online advertising and discuss a bit of shift in the ways in which these advertisements are viewed. In a follow-up post we can elaborate on these methods, their pros/cons and their respective effectiveness.
So, in my head at least, I organize methods of online advertising in terms of these categories: Traditional; and Social. I will admit that these are pretty broad categories so I’ll elaborate a little below.
Traditional Online Advertising Methods
Since the dawn of time…well, the dawn of the Internet anyway, entrepreneurs have been looking for new and improved ways to access and draw in a new and targeted audience and make more money online. As a result, there have been many methods tried and developed of promoting products or services (legitimate or not) online. These types of online advertisements are built to catch the user’s eye in the hopes that the content/imagery is enticing enough for the reader to click through to further information, pulling them deeper into the sales funnel. Sometimes, the goal of the methods employed to serve the ad is to increase the ad reach and other times it’s to increase the depth of reach, or in other words, to create a more targeted ad. Some of these seasoned and proven methods of online advertising include:
- Affiliate Programs
- Ad-exchanges
- E-zine Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Pop-up advertising
- Sponsored Articles/Websites, Sponsored Website Preview Pages
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Banner Advertisements; In-text Advertisements
All of these methods have their pros and cons, not to mention some of these methods proved to be greatly effective for a period of time but have seen their popularity decrease due simply to the evolution of Web usage. These techniques eventually became more intelligent (and at times, controversial) by employing behavioral and/or contextual targeting to help foster a greater ROI through access to a more targeted audience. However in recent years, we’ve seen an emergence of new and/or evolved online advertising methods that have one main difference than that of the Traditional type; interactivity. Read on.
Social Online Advertisement Methods
As the ways in which Internet users navigated the Web and interacted online shifted to a more social practice, thus spawned the emergence of Social Online Advertising. The goal of these new and improved social advertising methods is to provide the viewer with an ad experience that encourages them to want to share it with their own network of connections. Some of the ways in which this is done include:
- Social Online Network Advertising, i.e.:
- Directly: Facebook Ads, MySpace Ads, Sponsored Tweets, etc.
- Indirectly: Branded Facebook Groups, Branded Facebook Fan Pages (a.k.a. “Likes”), Corporate/Brand Twitter Account
- Corporate Blogs
- YouTube Videos
- Social, Interactive Banner Advertisements
Should the advertisement and channel with which is used to disseminate the ad is effective, enticing and engaging, then the ad reach takes care of itself aiding in the overall effectiveness of this method. However, the fact that a new group of educated consumers have emerged who enjoy voicing their satisfaction or a distaste for a particular product or service online – sometimes termed “Brand Ambassadors” when the message is positive, the ability for a company/individual to direct their own brand image online has proven to be more difficult than in previous years where open consumer engagement was non-existent. Now, online advertising also must employ a sort of “brand management” wherein much of the actual “advertising”, if meant in the sense of growth of brand awareness, is out of the control of the companies/individual themselves. Therefore an active presence in social networks is in almost all cases prudent for the company or individual as part of an effective online advertising strategy as they can employ proactive advertising measures to help with brand management and awareness, and when necessary, PR issues.
What remains to be seen, although already begun, is ways in which the Traditional methods of Advertising adapt to include a more Social component to continue to fit in with how users/consumers are playing online. How many of those methods on the Traditional list will soon be able to fit under the Social list in…let’s say…a year’s time? Any thoughts?
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