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Digital Ads

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Digital Advertising Marketing Agency

Many people know about search engine marketing and how optimizing for search engines can bring organic (free) traffic to your website, but what about paid, digital advertisements? Search engine marketing, or SEM, encompasses both paid and organic techniques for drawing in target audiences. Startups or businesses tight on money may not think paid ads are worth the time if they can just get their organic flow how they want. But if you think like that, you’re actually leaving money on the table when you completely skip over digital ads. According to HubSpot, PPC ads can boost awareness by a staggering 80%. Fortunately, our marketing team at Cork Tree Creative doubles as a digital advertising agency with locations in Edwardsville, IL. and St. Louis, MO. We know all about how to craft and execute the right digital advertising for your business.

Stand apart with the right digital advertisements.

Put simply, paid digital advertisements are just that. You pay money to place promotional content on various online or digital mediums your target audience may see. If you think about it, there are a few key variables you must assess about your target audience in order to make the biggest impact where it needs to be whether that's St. Louis County or Missouri as a whole. 

How to find key customer demographics:

To craft the best digital advertisements you’ll need to identify your target audience. Here are a few insightful questions that any quality digital advertising agency should help you be able to answer.
  1. Where does your audience get their information online? The St. Louis Regional Chamber?  The St. Louis Commerce Magazine? Some digital channels to consider might be local news and information outlets, search engines, and social media channels. A few of the most effective places to put digital ads are Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Especially because these platforms also provide customer data and metrics based on their interaction with your ads. For other platforms, you may need to attach a program that analyzes the data for you.
  2. What online content does your audience currently interact with on their own? You can place ads everywhere, but what is the right ad type for your specific audience? Do your customers love videos more than text? Download more memes? Images? Jokes? Puns? Does the information outlet they frequent serve banner ads best? Even if you reach your target audience, you still have to catch their attention with the media they resonate with best. Finding the right Google ads agency can help answer all of these questions.
  3. What benefits do you offer your customers? How does your product or service make a customer’s life easier or better? What separates you from other St. Louis based businesses? Communicate those benefits clearly in your digital ads to win a potential customer over.
  4. And then, the age-old question: what does your audience care about? What do they want? What problems can you solve for them? Okay, maybe that’s three age-old questions, but they all go together and are integral to any successful marketing campaign. Studies show that emotion is the primary decision-maker, rather than knowledge, for customers when it comes to choosing a brand. So, curate your messaging towards their wants and needs. Bonus points if you can weave that all into a story. You can send out ads in consecutive segments to do this. But it’s a kind of delicate art.

When are digital ads a good idea?

Paid advertisements aren’t a permanent solution to low traffic, they work best as mere boosts of visibility that provide a quick turnaround. PPC ads work best when you want to introduce a new thing, the message you’re sending is time-sensitive (holiday promotion), or you want to send your audience to a new sale or landing page.

Now it’s time to make a roadmap.

When you get involved with digital marketing ads, you must research and develop an ad plan or campaign. A roadmap to success. Without proper research and planning, money can be wasted. When done just right though? Digital ads can be the perfect boost of visibility for awareness, information, sales, or services to go over the top. They’re also great for branching out and roping in new audiences that fit the brand but haven’t heard of you just yet.

Here are a few ways we can aid digital advertising

Based on your businesses goals and needs, digital ads can help:
  • Raise awareness of your biz
  • Attract  new customers
  • Promote new and existing products or services
  • Introduce new products or services
  • Break into a new niche
  • Emphasize your value over competitors

Types of Digital Ads to Consider

There are multiple types of digital ads to choose from. Which one do you think works best for your message and clients?

Display Ads

Think: banners. Banners can be graphics, video, audio, text, or a combination. The goal of display ads is to get customers to click on them and visit a specific destination on your website. Display ads work best on websites that have content and are good for streamlining brand awareness.

Paid Search

When you put money towards paid search advertisements, you can have your product show up at the tippy top of results for search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Ever notice results that have the following words when you enter a search query: “Ad.” Or “Sponsored”? That’s a paid search advertisement. This type of ad is just text with a headline, description, and link.

Mobile

As the name implies, mobile ads are advertisements that appear on phones, tablets, or other portable devices. These ads can appear as SMS messaging, push notifications, in-app popups, and mobile banners. If your audience lives on their tablets, mobile ads may be the most logical step.

Retargeting/Remarketing

Have you ever visited a website, went to another website, and then saw an advertisement on the new site with images and products from the previous one? That’s retargeting. This form of advertising uses cookies to track your website visitors and then shows them related ads later in the future. This helps remind potential customers of your offerings and can potentially be the final push they need to make the purchase. Remarketing is similar but involves information marketers attain from email subscriptions. These ads are best for customers who are already interacting with your business.

Video

Great for YouTube, video ads can play on most streaming platforms. Naturally, this method works best with audiences that spend the majority of their time watching or streaming content versus reading it.

Audio

This option is best for businesses whose customer base spends a lot of time on audio streaming platforms like Spotify. Platforms that stream podcasts are also a good place for audio advertising.

Social Media

Consists of promotional ads on social media platforms. The top channels are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Twitter. Social media advertisements are good for collecting audience insight, as customers can interact with them. Analyze which posts are getting the most likes, shares, and comments, and work your way up from there.

Native

Advertisements that blend in like chameleons are native ads. They’re designed to match the platform they’re displayed on, and sometimes don’t even look like ads at all. The design, colors, and font may be exactly like the website it lives on. Some people don’t even notice they’re clicking on a native advertisement until they’re redirected to the next page. Native ads have a higher click-through rate because of how well they tend to blend in.

Cork Tree Creative can take your company's digital advertising to the next level.

Let us take on your next PPC project. Not to mention, we do so much more than just digital and paid ads, we can do the entire search engine marketing thing for you too! Let Cork Tree Creative plan your next campaign, right here in 
St. Louis Metro Area and beyond.
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