Advertising techniques have evolved a lot in the last century. And they will continue to evolve because of the ever-changing consumers and their media consumption.
From being straightforward in convincing a potential customer to buy a product, advertisements these days talk about empowering customers. And rightly so. Gone are the days when convincing consumers was easier through fancy advertising slogans and imagery. It still works, but we’re living in times of aware consumers.
And especially with the advent of digital media and the widespread adoption of the smartphone, advertising to consumers is a completely different ball game. The consumer is actively engaged in advertising messages, they accept information on their own terms and sometimes actively allow themselves to be marketed to.
So in a world full of digital devices, what advertising techniques should advertisers and marketers focus on to get their communication messages across effectively?
Things to Consider Before Building Your Advertising Techniques
The advertising techniques each brand or company needs to adopt will depend on a number of factors:
- What do you want to achieve out of your advertising investment?
- How popular your brand currently is?
- Where do you measure on brand saliency?
- Do people know about your brand / product?
- Are they active consumers within your category, or do you want them to adopt new buying behaviour?
- Does your product offering operate in a sensitive product category (for e.g. adult diapers)?
There can be a number of questions that need to be answered before deciding on which advertising techniques you need to achieve your business and marketing goals.
Advertising Technique #1: Appeal Emotionally
Building emotional appeal is one of the most important advertising techniques for building brand salience and brand equity. This is one of the most important approaches to start building a relationship with customers.
In the digital world, we’ve seen emotional videos, social media PR campaigns, and social media activations being used as vehicles to appeal to human emotions. But make sure whatever you do, needs to be relevant to your product and brand offering.
Advertising Technique #2: Start Focusing on Search Engine Optimization
Having a website in this day and age is a given. That’s not even up for question. But what you need to start focusing on is search engine optimization. Read about how to do your keyword research, and make sure you implement them in a SEO optimized copy on your website.
Even if you are uploading Youtube videos, make sure you title and tag them based on the keywords that you have identified.
Not only does this ensure that you are on track to building your organic traffic, but it also increases the opportunity of generating backlinks if your content is good.
Advertising Technique #3: Use Statistics Wisely
Before jumping in to looking for advertising techniques, start off by diving into audience statistics.
This helps to create an ideal customer profile you want to target, and also enables you to determine their media consumption behaviour: how they use and interact with media? Once you know who they are, and how they use media, you can be much more efficient and cost effective in reaching your audience.
This will help you avoid shooting arrows in the dark, and will help you embark upon a journey of testing and learning.
Advertising Technique #4: Presence on Relevant Social Media Channels
This is one of the main advertising techniques used in today’s fast paced environment.
In fact Facebook had become one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Find out and optimize which social channels and platforms your audience uses.
Whether it’s Snapchat or Twitter or Tumblr? Identify which platforms can get you maximum love and visibility from your audience. For example, don’t try to build an audience for B2B hospital products on Snapchat, a social network popular for teens and young adults.
Advertising Technique #5: Build Your Brand through Banner Advertising
Try to find websites and blogs that are relevant to your product category, and reach out to them for advertisement opportunities. Banner ads in relevant environments (in this case a relevant website) can help build brand relevance and affinity.
For example, if you are marketing pet food, a pet blog is a relevant environment for your product. But putting up pet food banners on an engineering website is not the right approach – unless you want to target engineers with pets.
Advertising Technique #6: Start a Blog
Having a company blog is essential. If you don’t have one yet, you can learn how to make a blog in our simple guide. We’re living in times where everyone is blogging. From your next door nosy neighbour to your dog walker.
But blogging to market a product can be challenging. Before you dive into the world of blogging, you need to understand that this advertising technique can only help you if you are helpful to others. Your blog should not be about blatantly marketing and shoving your product features in people’s faces.
It should genuinely be helpful and useful to people. Marketers need to think as publishers to be able to run a successful blog. Not only does a successful blog attract thousands of new readers every day, it would also increase the potential to boost sales.
Advertising Technique #7: Add to the Consumer Ecosystem through Indirect Advertising
Blogging is a great example of indirect advertising in action. You’re making people aware of the product through useful content.
Indirect advertising is a smart advertising technique where marketers support the eco-system by affiliating themselves with something, such as a sponsorship of a concert by PepsiCo. Or a product placement in a movie, i.e. Chrysler 300C as Walter White’s car in the infamous Breaking Bad TV show.
With respect to digital marketing, people can write guest posts, sponsor white papers, do webinars, or even distribute free e-books.
Advertising Technique #8: Video is King!
Video Marketing involves engaging customers with the help of useful and meaningful videos. Similar to blogging, marketers can create videos to inform people about new things and give them free tutorials.
Some marketers like Coca Cola, make nice feel good videos and promote them across a number of Global Blogs and marketing websites to get more views.
Videos can also be promoted on Youtube, Facebook, and other video marketing partners such as Teads TV.
Advertising Technique #9: Go Mobile!
This doesn’t mean you need a mobile app to go mobile. But it refers to ensuring your website is mobile responsive and accessible through a mobile device. Mobile growth of the digital world is increasing exponentially – even our 50% traffic is from mobile devices.
In addition to this essential, try to think of ways to engage people through the mobile device.
Many people hear podcasts, watch videos, use social media or play games on their mobile phones. How can you reach out them in moments when your brand is most relevant to them? You can use advance mobile advertising techniques like geo targeting (to reach people in a specific area within a specified radius), beacons, interest based targeting, based on apps that people have on their phone, and a lot more.
Mobile is personal, and mobile networks are able to reach out to specific people through a number of targeting options.
Advertising Technique #10: Utilize Contextual Marketing Opportunities
Contextual marketing refers to being present in environments and on pages that are contextually relevant to a product offering. Google Adwords is a very popular ad network that helps you target people contextually through banner and text based ads. Another form of contextual marketing is textlinks.
Textlinks are text hyperlinks in content that leads people to an advertisers landing page. Vigilink is an affiliate network that converts specific words in content ads to textlinks.
Verdict: Be Relevant & Useful
There were a few advertising techniques that you can keep in mind when planning your next digital campaign. Hopefully, this will be helpful for you. Do remember that the best form of advertising is to be relevant and useful to your customers.
