Paid advertising online is perhaps the single biggest innovation to advertising in history. Companies can put their advertisements in front of clients who are likely to be interested in their product or service, all while they are going about their online activities.
So what are the main components of online paid advertising?
In this article, we’ll talk you through the essentials of online marketing. Keep reading to find out everything you need to know.
Table of Contents
1. Search Engine Management
One of the predominant forms of advertising online is search engine management. This is not to be confused with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which determines the order of organic search results.
Meanwhile, SEM refers to the ads that come up at the top of the page of your search results. It is possible to have SEM campaigns with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu, amongst others. $24.6 billion dollars was spent on SEM marketing campaigns in the US in 2014.
With SEM you select the keywords that someone might search for when browsing for a product or service similar to yours. It’s possible to place different bids on keywords depending on how much value you place on them.
The key difference between SEM marketing and traditional offline advertising is the means of payment. Traditionally, a business would pay to display their advert in a newspaper or on a billboard, and it would be a set price regardless of how many people saw your advert.
With SEM, a pay-per-click system operates, so you are only charged for the potential customers who make their way to your website.
2. Social Media Advertising
Our next form of online marketing to explore is social media advertising. This consists of paying for ads that can be displayed on different social media platforms. The available platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn ads.
Social media advertising allows you to place ads featuring photos or videos within social media news feeds, but also among messages, or even as a side column.
There are several important features your social media advertising needs to include. For example, a call to action, a link to your website, and engaging visual content and copy.
3. Display Advertising
The final type of paid advertising to cover in this article is display advertising. The two major platforms for display advertising are Facebook and Google Ads. Display adverts appear in the side columns or along the top of different websites.
Display ads are typically the cheapest form the paid online advertising. With the help of experts such as this company, it is possible to get a great ROI on display adverts.
Now You Know the Essentials of Paid Advertising Online
We’ve now covered the crucial elements of paid advertising online to give you an idea of how you can implement these methods to grow your business. We’ve also seen the way that online advertising differs from traditional advertising strategies.
If you found this introduction to online paid advertising helpful, be sure to check out our other digital articles!