Digital Media News

Guest post by Charlotte Ahlin.

Everything from the shiny new Apple TV to the lowliest flashlight app on your phone has a brand. Branding is how companies stand out: it’s your name, your identity, your blueprint. But what happens when you change your look overnight? And we’re not talking about a little fluffing here - we’re talking a full fledged head-to-toe makeover. Well, then you pull an Uber and totally rebrand your image.

If you haven’t noticed already, Uber has completely revamped their look: out with the old black and white “U,” and in with a totally new icon in deep teal (if you’re in the U.S., anyway). So, good luck trying to find the Uber app this weekend at 4am.

At a basic level, advertising is a form of marketing communication that promotes and spreads awareness about an entity that could be a service, product, or even an ideology. In the same vein, mobile advertising reaches out to audiences from a similar promotional perspective. However, instead of approaching your market on the streets in the form of posters, or on the Internet in the form of banner advertisements, mobile advertising takes advantage of the quickly-growing popularity associated with mobile devices.

Although some people consider mobile advertising to be a close relative to online advertising, the truth is that its ability to reach out to potential customers is much greater than you might expect. According to reports, since 2014, there are officially almost as many cell phone subscriptions as there are people in the World, and more mobile devices in the mix than human beings. In other words, it'd be ridiculous to suggest that mobile advertising couldn't offer some significant gains to your advertising opportunities.

The online world of advertising as we used to know it has changed over the recent decades. Where banner ads used to earn about a 44% CTR, today, these ads have to work much harder if they want to get the attention of an audience, and convince that audience to progress into action. Although trying out new creative solutions and thinking outside of the box with your banner creations can help, one of the best solutions for developing successful banner ads lies within the welcoming arms of Google Analytics.

If you've been spending your advertising budget on just about any kind of advertising, then one of the most important things you'll need to ensure that you're not simply wasting your money, is follow and analyze the performance of those ads. Although you may not necessarily make your banner ads directly through Google analytics, you can use those analytics to improve the banner creatives you do create, and increase your chances of click-through and conversions.

One of the many reasons why businesses have begun to use Facebook as a method of promoting their brand, is the fact that it has so many useful advertising features. Facebook advertisements give businesses a fantastic opportunity to develop and deliver customizable and budget-friendly promotional campaigns targeted specifically for a certain demographic.

Although it may not be as popular as Google AdWords right now, the truth is that Facebook advertising offers a number of unique features that can be incredibly useful for marketing purposes, and the development of brand awareness. After all, Facebook is by far one of the most popular websites on the internet, with an average monthly income of around 1.39 billion active users. Failing to reach out to such a wide audience could be a huge mistake for your business.

The following discusses some of the biggest benefits of Facebook advertising - and why you should get started today.

Search retargeting (not to be confused with site retargeting) is an exciting and often effective way to grab your audience's attention, and keep it. If you've ever wondered, as a consumer, why sometimes you see advertisements for websites that you've visited in the past show up on other pages across the web, this is a targeting methodology called retargeting at work. Often, these ads will display as you surf around the Internet and serve as a frequent reminder about pages or products that you viewed at an earlier time. To some people, this can be the prompt they need to complete a purpose, or a reminder to simply check back on a purchase they had been considering.

If you're running creative ads online, opting for search retargeting can be a great way to get a target audience that has already expressed interest in your brand to visit your website again. In other words, instead of simply trying to get attention from anyone and everyone, (and paying for the privilege too) - you narrow your search parameters and target an audience that is more likely to actually convert - meaning you use your budget more wisely.

The simplest way to define behavioral targeting, is as a type of marketing technique that has been used online for a number of years now, as a way of allowing businesses to reach out to their target audience. As the name alone is capable of suggesting, behavioral targeting can allow for entrepreneurs to match their sales tactics to the common Internet activity and purchasing behavior shown by their prospective buyers. In other words, behavioral targeting allows marketers to create the advertisements and promotional opportunities that their audience is actually seeking.

Because behavioral targeting not only monitors user activity, but also takes the interests of any specific consumer into account, it has generated a great deal of appreciation within the media market. In fact, behavioral targeting isn't only preferred by business owners looking to increase their traffic - it's a preferable option to Internet users too. The statistics speak for themselves.

Following, we'll address three of the best benefits of behavioral targeting, so you can decide whether it's the right move for your business.

If you're a small to medium-sized business, the chances are that you've already learned the frustrations involved with finding advertisers to place advertisements on your website. It can be incredibly costly to maintain and hire a dedicated sales team that are there to organize your ads on your behalf, which is one of the reasons why the self-serve model has emerged into an effective and popular option. Self-serve advertising makes the process of finding advertisers easier, so that you don't have to worry about micro-managing or searching for marketing opportunities yourself. Instead of searching everywhere for opportunities to make money, the advertisers you need can simply serve themselves up to you once you've properly set up the self-service program.

What's more, a bonus of self-serve advertising is that business owners don't have to worry about offering every inch of their ad space to self-service ads. Depending on what works for your company, you can create a combination of self-service advertising solutions, and using your ad sales team for larger and more complex solutions.

Google AdWords is perhaps the most popular and commonly used advertising platform available. Not only is it incredibly flexible, but it is packed with features that are specifically designed to help you get more out of your marketing strategies. Unfortunately, most people fail to get the most out of their advertising platforms, simply because they don't know how to unlock the beneficial features it offers.

It's no surprise that marketers have trouble keeping up, however - Google is constantly updating, removing features that don't work, adding new ones, and even changing the way that existing concepts function. However, failing to check out some of the most underused features of AdWords could be having a significant impact on your PPC performance.

If you're looking for ways to bury the competition, the following five features on Google AdWords could help you to improve you platform success by a significant percentage.

As we move further into the age of Internet advertising, changes in the way that people utilize the Internet, and innovations in business tools have begun to influence the way that we attempt to communicate with our target market. While planning a unique and creative marketing scheme using interesting media can be an exciting experience, it's important that companies don't allow their enthusiasm to override their common sense. Sometimes, when this happens, a marketing campaign that seemed promising at first can turn out to be a complete disaster.

Failing to plan your media marketing campaigns properly, or dedicating little time to planning them in the first place could mean that you lose crucial customers, profits, and brand authority. The more that your customers come to associate your company with bad media, the more they're likely to avoid your business in favor of your competitors.