What Are the 11 Different Types of Digital Advertising and Why Should You Know Them?
Marketing & Advertising

What Are the 11 Different Types of Digital Advertising and Why Should You Know Them?

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Digital advertising has reached such a level of maturity that today there are many different ways to promote a product, brand, person, or service online.  Discover with us the different types of digital ads, their advantages, and above all how to use them well to make a profit!

Advertising Strategies You Should Know

Advertising is all about choosing the right channel to reach your target. In this section, we discover the different types of digital (also known as online) advertisements you can use. 

Paid Online Advertising

SEA (paid referencing)

At Google and Bing, with Google Ads and Bing Ads, paying for different keywords will put you at the top of the search results if the user types the words you choose. This will give you more visibility quickly, especially if you work with an online ads specialized agency.

Sponsored posts & online ads on social media

This is a post in which you invest money to highlight it in your audience’s news feed. Whether it’s on Instagram, Facebook Ads or sponsored links on Linkedin, this kind of digital advertising that is very successful these days will make you big money!

Sponsored links

The idea is to place a link, which redirects to your site, on a page that generates a lot of traffic. In this way, your site has the opportunity to capture some of the traffic of the page concerned. The price to pay for a sponsored link can depend on the number of clicks expected, but it can also be a fixed amount. 

Affiliation

Similar to the sponsored link, the affiliation takes the form of a link on a page that generates a lot of traffic. Unlike sponsored links, affiliation is a contract between the advertiser (the one who wants customers) and the affiliate (the one who has a website with traffic) that gives compensation to the affiliate for each sale from the contract in question.

Paid advertorials

The idea is to finance a report on the products and/or services your company offers. This can take the form of a written publication on a specialized site, which would give credibility to your brand. 

Email marketing

This is a very common promotional technique that consists of sending messages directly to the mailboxes of your audience. Many tools such as Outlook or Gmail allow you to conduct emailing campaigns, but we advise you to work with an agency specialized in email marketing.

The display or purchase of advertising space

It is a banner, a video, or a space dedicated to the display of online advertisements. For this kind of space, you can pay by the number of clicks (CPC) or the number of impressions (CPM). 

Video ads

It is a practice that is mostly found on YouTube. Your ad is played before the video starts (pre-roll) or during the video (mid-roll). Some ads cannot be played, others can be played after 5 seconds, and some can be closed immediately.

Beware of Ad Blockers and Users

Depending on the approach you choose, you will need to consider advertising blockers and targeting of your customers.
Ad blockers are extensions that remove ads from web pages. Thus, banner ads and promotional videos on YouTube are no longer visible to those who use these blockers. On the other hand, infomercials and affiliate links are not affected, since they are integrated into the editorial content.

To measure the impact of your campaigns, you will need to know as much as possible about the users who have interacted with your ads. Social networks offer these kinds of indicators by informing you about the specifics of the users who see your ads and interact with them. 

Free Online Advertising

If you don’t pay for advertising, it is also possible to use free techniques. You won’t get the same results as with paid advertising, but it will already give you the keys to make yourself known.

Social networks

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, or LinkedIn are all platforms you can use without spending a single penny. By posting quality content and animating your networks, you can gradually build a community around your products and services. Contact a social media agency to build your strategy.

SEO (natural referencing)

If you have a website, SEO will help you make it more visible. Many optimization techniques exist to improve your SEO, there is no shortage of articles on the subject, and many specialized agencies will be able to advise you. 

Guest blogging

It is a technique that consists of proposing to an expert on a given subject to post content on your site. This will allow you to generate quality content for free. On the contrary, if you post to someone else as an expert, your article may contain backlinks and thus attract visitors to your site. 

Targeting the Right Channel

Not all of your users are likely to be affected by all of the methods presented above. Before choosing one of them, it is important to identify your users’ habits and the platforms on which they are located.

Keep in mind that some forms of promotion are less well perceived than others. In this case, integrated YouTube ads that cannot be disabled are often poorly received by users, who end up having a bad image of the advertiser. 

On the other hand, using an influencer, integrating a product in the middle of informative content, and more generally, conducting a meaningful promotional action that brings value to the user is often well perceived. Users are already confronted with a large number of advertising messages and are more inclined to pay attention to content that may be of personal interest to them.

Therefore, choose editorial content in the form of articles, posts, or videos whenever possible, to go beyond the single advertising action. You will thus develop a relationship of trust with your users while promoting your product or service.

The Evolution of Online Advertising

Originally, various types of digital advertising took the form of ribbons displayed on the web pages you visited. Horizontal or vertical, these banners promoted a product or service. It was quite basic and the idea was to reproduce the “classic” advertising display without fully exploiting the specificities of digital.

Since then, the situation has evolved. Online advertising now has a lot of different media and is much smarter. The very notion of advertising has changed and can be considered as any action taken to promote something. 

The question is no longer whether it is private, public, for-profit, or not-for-profit: NGOs, public services and individuals all promote their activities on the Internet, thanks to advertising agencies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat.

Moreover, only the notion of investment distinguishes communication from promotion. An unsponsored message on a social network, which would promote a website, would therefore be communication. The same content, sponsored this time, would be an advertisement.

Conclusion

The means to advertise different types of digital advertising has continued to grow in recent years. The channels are more numerous and more varied than ever before. While it is not relevant to mobilize all of them simultaneously, many of them are complementary and will allow you to reach different targets.

You don’t have to pay to promote your products and services, but the competitive advantage is such that it will be difficult to escape it in the long term. If your competitors have been around for a long time, you should probably consider this solution quickly. In this case, we advise you to work with an advertising agency to improve your results. 

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