In digital advertising, standing out is the name of the game. Display ads offer an effective solution to raise the attention of your audience outside “tried and tested” social media and search channels. Read below what benefits display advertising can bring to your marketing strategy, and how to implement it in a few steps.
If you want your company’s products or services to be known online, you’ve got to advertise them. And if you work in digital marketing, you’re probably creating a lot of ads for social media or search.
The two channels above are especially popular with cost-savvy marketers. They historically yield the highest CTR and conversion rates - a.k.a. the golden metrics of advertising success.
But with these metrics inevitably decreasing due to increasing competition, smart marketers should aim for something different: namely, to have their ads stand out and be remembered by their audiences.
To that end, including display advertising in your marketing strategy is highly effective.
Display ads can not only complement your existing social media and search tactics, but they can also increase your ad frequency, readying your audience before they engage with your higher conversion ads.
You’ve probably read a lot of articles describing how cool display advertising can be. And while all of them are fine and dandy - heck, we even wrote one ourselves, none of them really take the time to flesh out the benefits of display advertising from an overall strategic point of view.
You’re going to discover that now.
Display advertising can help you increase consumer awareness by reaching a much bigger slice of your target demographic outside your social media and search channels. This will help you:
Access different channels. Display advertising gives you a foothold on every web page your average consumer visits. According to Google, with display ads, you can reach 90% of all users on the internet.
Slash your CPM. Display advertising contributes to the greatest source of impressions throughout your marketing campaign. With display ads, you can reach every member of your target audience multiple times per day for a CMP that’s 90% cheaper than traditional paid search and social media advertising. This makes display advertising one of the cheapest forms of online advertising as well.
Boost conversion efforts throughout the funnel. With more eyeballs on your products and a higher ad frequency, display ads nurture your audience across all stages of the funnel:
It widens the top of the funnel (TOFU) by making more prospects aware of your brand/offer.
It speeds up your middle of funnel (MOFU) by reminding your leads of your offer.
It strengthens the bottom of your funnel (BOFU) by familiarising your audience with your brand and offering when they are ready to buy.
Since display advertising is the most effective source of impressions, you can streamline your advertising strategy and make it more cost-effective.
For example, by focusing on CTR on your paid and search channels, you can leave the impression heavy-lifting to display advertising and save a lot of money by placing less frequent, more tactical high-conversion ads on your other channels.
With more eyeballs on your ads, display advertising increases the frequency at which your ads are seen by your target audience.
That means you can quickly scale ad frequency at a low cost. Still, you might want to put a cap on your frequency. You should not overbear your audience by displaying your ads repeatedly over the course of a day, or they’ll become disaffected and actively disengage with your offerings (and you REALLY don’t want that).
For reference, here’s how daily ad frequency impacts your CTR and CPC.
As we have established, the majority of your impressions should come from display advertising. Therefore, you can use display advertising as a cost-effective lever to reach your optimal ad frequency capping.
Display advertising will boost your CTR from your higher conversion channels (i.e. social media and search).
That’s because - and we’re going to be honest here - the CTR coming from display advertising is nothing to write home about. Historically, static display advertising has yielded a CTR of roughly .1%, about 10 times lower than the average CTR of social media ads.
Does that mean CTR from display advertising should be flat-out ignored? Of course not! According to our findings, by personalising the content of your ads and by inserting animation and video elements, you can increase your conversion rate by up to 300%.
Studies have shown that 92-98% of consumers don’t buy the first time they visit a website. To keep potential customers engaged, pros use display ads to remarket to customers who have already interacted with their brand or a competing brand.
Remarketing is a personal way to engage with customers that can yield fantastic results. Well-placed remarketing ads can keep your products top-of-mind for customers and can be the extra reminder they might need to complete a purchase.
Better yet, they can be used to spread awareness of your products, and offer better deals, to your competitors’ customers, which can help you win them over!