What is Online Advertising: Definition and Types
Online advertising, or digital advertising, is a commonly used tool in digital marketing and is also one of the most developed advertising fields today. However, online advertising is not as easy as rumored. Let’s find out why with CleverAds!
1. What is online advertising?
A form of advertising that uses the internet environment as a foundation to bring the marketing message of a business/brand to a defined audience.
Usually, online advertising drives traffic to the website and increases public exposure to the brand. However, the ultimate purpose of online advertising is to persuade target customers to engage in a particular action, for example, clicking the buy button.
2. Types of online advertising
Many different forms of online advertising serve different purposes. In Vietnam, there are six main methods used as follows:
- Social media advertising
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- SEM (Search Engine Advertising) – advertising through search engines
- Display advertising
- Mobile app advertising
Social media advertising
Social media advertising is done on social network platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok or LinkedIn.
These ads are aimed at a specific target audience—usually, people likely to become potential business customers. After implementing digital marketing, this target group will become consumers of the business’s products.
Some advantages of social media advertising:
- Reach more public to receive news
- The conversion rate is also higher due to the integration of CTA (Call-to-action)
- Provide complete product details in one contact
- Reduce marketing costs
Content marketing and email marketing
Email marketing is a direct marketing technique that focuses on sending promotional messages to a group of people (email lists) via email. This form of advertising aims to strengthen the relationship between the business and its current and future customers. Email marketing is used to increase brand loyalty and repurchase intention.
Content marketing focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content to targeted audiences online. The primary purpose of content marketing is to help businesses gain brand loyalty and trust on an ongoing basis through content that resonates with the public, valuable and often free content instead of directly continuing to sell to them.
While email marketing is a “push” technique, directly contacting existing customers to promote the acquisition of goods or services, content marketing represents a “pull” technique, attracting new customers to increase the number of first-time purchases of goods and services.
SEM – advertising through search engines
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is a technique and strategy used to increase website traffic from search results through search engines. The purpose of SEM is to promote the appearance of a website using paid search results, contextual advertising, and organic search ranking.
SEM includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay per click).
The benefits of SEM are many, but two outstanding benefits can be mentioned here:
- SEM will help increase brand awareness, thereby increasing the number of online leads and contributing to sales activities;
- And provide information that customers need but cannot find on other websites.
Display advertising
Display advertising is often understood as a method by which a business can attract a website’s audience, a social networking platform or other digital media, motivating them to take a specific action. Display ads are typically designed as text-based, image or video ads to increase the chances of a person visiting a website and accepting the action the advertiser wants, for example, to buy an item.
Mobile advertising
“Mobile advertising” refers to all types of advertising that appear on electronic devices such as smartphones or tablets. With this form, businesses will advertise on devices via SMS or banner ads – the ads often appear on websites. In addition, mobile advertising can also occur in mobile applications, mainly online game applications.
3. Is online advertising as easy as rumoured?
Before answering the question, we come to a small example as follows.
Imagine you have to say something to everyone in a classroom. Conveying information, in this case, is not difficult because just raising your hand or clearing your throat is enough to attract everyone’s attention towards you.
Now imagine a bit further. You are standing in an outdoor hall among 30 times more people. You have something important to tell them. For example, it’s going to rain, or something bad happens.
Now, saying “Everyone” is no longer the right choice. Because maybe only about 20 people around you notice. Clearing the throat, too, is not a good idea. An outdoor hall is boisterous with various sounds; your clear throat will quickly drown in those sounds.
Or little further, hundreds of thousands of people voice their opinions, but they are still waiting to be willing to yield to anyone. The consequences are predictable. It was people constantly shouting at each other without any respect. That creates chaos. The people in that conversation will get tired and impatient.
The example above is a typical problem when businesses use online advertising tools inefficiently and gradually fall into the story of pouring much money but not getting many results.
And we also have the answer that online advertising is NOT as easy as people say.
4. Why is online advertising so difficult?
Online advertising faces stiff competition.
The myth of online advertising is quite common. Advertising is made but not targeted at a specific audience.
As the cost of online advertising is getting cheaper and cheaper, many businesses, artists and bloggers have the opportunity to participate and target the same audience.
The flood of irrelevant information will cause discomfort and impatience for customers.
Competition in the online advertising market is huge
On average, a person will scroll through about 5000 – 10,000 ads daily. With that said, once too many ads appear, consumers will ignore the ads they care about. This competition comes from businesses in the same industry, size, small businesses, micro and even influencers.
To sum it up, the biggest reason online advertising is so tricky lies in many news audiences and the wide range of professional and amateur advertisers. Since then, online advertising has become a fiercely competitive market and challenging to stand out without solid creativity.
5. Solutions for brands
However, fierce or saturated competition does not mean businesses cannot make their products stand out and convey the message they want to speak to those who care.
It is essential that before implementing online advertising, businesses need to prepare carefully about the content of the message, image and target audience. Businesses need a specific strategy before actually embarking on using online advertising tools.
In addition, without resources, businesses should consider using a digital marketing agency to optimize the effects of online advertising tools, avoiding the situation that advertising does not reach the right audience or is ineffective.
6. CONCLUSION
Online advertising is not difficult to use tools. Still, the most challenging thing when running online advertising lies in determining the audience to receive the message and creating content to reach the message to the target public.
Proud to be a leading agency in digital marketing with more than 15 years of operation, CleverAds provides various advertising services on social media platforms and Google, as well as creative and content design services.
