Putting Digital Advertising Into Action

You’re reading this article means you use the internet, and if you use the internet, you’ve almost certainly seen or been a part of digital advertisement, even if you don’t realize it.

According to Statista, as of January 2021, 4.66 billion people, 59.5 % of the total population use the internet and the global digital advertising spend is projected to reach 398 billion US dollars by 2021.

Now those are some pretty big numbers but What (Really) Goes Into Digital Advertising and why is it so important now? Let’s find out.

What is digital advertising?

To put it simply, digital advertising basically is promotion conducted over the internet. It is advertising that are put digitally on social media, the internet, applications, or anywhere else on the internet.

Advertisers may target their advertisements to specific audiences using digital advertising based on demographics, preferences, and web activities. Digital advertising is internet advertising that is driven by data, data that the internet gathers from users and then uses to display ads on the internet.

Example:  suppose you search for a product you like on the internet for comparison among prices, the internet collects your data as a potential buyer and the next time you use the internet , you get ads related to the product because you had shown buying intent for that specific product previously. That’s a type of digital advertising.

Digital Advertising: The Context

For someone who uses the internet on a daily basis, seeing digital ads is nothing new. Scroll through your facebook news feed for a few minutes, view your instagram/linkedin feed for a few minutes, watch a youtube video, do a google search,  watch instagram/facebook stories or tiktok videos – you’ll see an ad no matter how you use the internet.

The world is going digital at a rapid pace, and people are following suit.

As people go digital, marketing and ads must follow suit, or else how will your audience and consumers see you and your messages?

Digital ads refers to advertising on the internet, but it is more than that.  it’s not like you make an ad and put it on the internet and it’ll be shown to everyone & everywhere. The idea of digital advertising is based on three key ideas:

  1. How do you want to use it ? (ad type)
  2. Where do you want to use it ? (platform)
  3. Whom do you want to use it on ? ( audience)

It can be done in various ways, on various platforms, fulfilling various objectives.

You can run an ads to,

  • Raise awareness of your presence in the market, 
  • Turn prospects into customers
  • Demonstrate how pleased your customers are after choosing you.

You can run an ads on, 

  • Social media 
  • Youtube 
  • Search engines and websites

You can set the ad shown to everyone or  just people in your city or people who have visited your website before. So, how you use digital ads is up to you, and as new avenues for internet access emerge, new ways to advertise will emerge as well.

Who needs Digital Advertising?

It’s a simple question right, who would need digital advertising … of course businesses, they need to reach out to their prospective audience and customers and promote their products and services.

But Digital advertising isn’t just for businesses now, with people going digital all the entities who need to send their messages out to others should move to advertising digitally. So from whom can we expect to publish digital ads in the coming times:

  1. Businesses
  2. Government Agencies
  3. Social Organizations
  4. Freelancers/Content Creators/Influencers

Businesses

Business sector will always be the main enablers for marketing and advertising because they need to reach an audience, make themselves visible and then attract customers towards them. And as digitalization is increasing, getting organic reach on most platforms is getting extremely challenging so digital advertising offers an effective path to reach to customers better (if done rightly).

Government Agencies

Digital ads from government agencies may feel somewhat weird but it’s relevant and slowly going to happen. Why? Because government agencies need to publish important information to the public time and again and in this age the best mediums are digital platforms because most of the public uses it & thus giving greater visibility through it.

Social Organizations

I recently saw an ad from a global social organization on facebook which was creating awareness around a certain social issue.  It shows that social organizations have also started to leverage the power of digital ads to promote their messages and campaigns to specific audiences, this way they can run targeted campaigns to specific audiences delivering specific messages and create better awareness campaigns. 

Freelancers/Content Creators/Influencers

Digital Advertising is a must for everyone who needs to reach out, be seen on the internet. It shouldn’t be just organizations but individual creators, freelancers and influencers also need to work along with digital ads. Freelancers need to reach out to prospective audiences through ads to promote their services – generate awareness about their presence in the market, content creators and influencers won’t get organic reach equally over all their content so they can attract new audiences to expand their reach with ads.

Why is Digital Advertising so important?

According to statista, digital ad spending is projected to reach 398 billion US dollars in 2021.  Let’s discuss why this is so essential that organizations are willing to spend 398 billion US dollars in just a single year.

  1. Public is going to the internet.
  2. Personalized marketing is on the trend.
  3. Digital advertising is affordable and scalable.
  4. Greater control in measurement & analysis.
  5. Various options for various goals.
  6. Organic reach is getting even more challenging.

Public is going to the internet

Let’s get to know a crazy fact: 4.66 billion people use the internet and about 875000 new users are getting added to it everyday. More than half of the population is going digital and it’s ever increasing.  If anyone wants to get their message across in public to audiences digital advertising becomes an absolute necessity today because 

the internet gives you accessibility to promote your offerings to a lot and a lot of people (more than half of the world population).

Personalized marketing is on the trend

The Internet uses data to make decisions as it collects data from each of our activities we perform on the internet and through that data it sends us personalized advertisements for things that interest us. 

Facebook reportedly has around 58000 data points, so facebook can track and create a behaviour from your activity and send the best ads which will be most valuable for you.  Websites have pixels & tags, they track your activity on the website and are used to retarget you in a different time later. Search engines analyze each user’s search and engagement behaviour with different websites and platforms and based on those analysis allow advertisers to target ads to you.

So personalized form of marketing is rising and digital advertising helps give the best value to the audience through personalized marketing experience.

Digital advertising is affordable & scalable

Digital advertising depends on how you run them but in comparison to traditional advertising platforms it is quite affordable and gives you a great value with controllable scalability that traditional advertising doesn’t.

 For example if one of your digital ads is running great and you have got the required number of leads from the ad you can close the ad when you want or if you want to get more leads you can create a bigger audience to show your ad too. In a lot of cases you can even control and set the amount you want to spend on per person viewing or clicking your ad, this provides greater affordability over advertising.

Greater control in measurement & analysis

If you place a big visible billboard ad for your product on a busy highway or put an ad on TV, can you know the exact number of people that saw the billboard ad or TV ad, the exact number of people that made an inquiry or purchase seeing that ad….

No.. but you can know these insights very easily with digital ads. Digital ads being internet based can collect data on how many times the ad is viewed, clicked and how many times it has led to conversions. You can also easily analyse the various parts of your advertisements like whats the return on investment, what should be optimized to improve, how does your different ads compare and make better decisions from them for your goals.

Various options for various goals & objectives

There is not just one way to advertise in digital advertising and that makes it simply the best platform to advertise in. There are different variations of ads you can run based on what goals you want to achieve and on which platforms to which audiences. 

With digital ads you can run different types of ads on different platforms. If you want to bid and advertise on keywords specific to your industry you can run search ads. If you want to increase brand awareness for your organization you can run video ads on social media platforms or youtube. If you want to generate leads for your sales team to convert you can run lead ads on social media platforms. If you want to 

Organic reach is getting even more challenging 

As users and consumers of the internet platforms grow, so does the content as more people will publish content and that is leading to a problem ; a problem of decline in the organic reach. Why? Simply because more content is being created than it can be shown in the platforms. 

By 2020 the average organic reach of a facebook page was just around 5.20 %. And it’s not just facebook, more competition and more content means less possibility for greater reach. 

But digital advertising solves this problem for you, you can combine your organic content strategy with digital ad campaigns and get needed visibility with your audience at required times.

Digital advertising has become a crucial part for businesses in this digital age, it has already brought great changes and success to a lot & lot of organizations around the world and now not only businesses but all the institutions and people who want to make their messages heard to the public should must keep digital advertising as a part of their strategy to be heard by their audiences. 

In the context of Nepal, digital advertising is rising and has great prospects but it’s still bound by shackles of chains from lack of international payment systems for Nepal as digital ads enablement needs payment in terms of USD/Pound Sterling. The sad truth is due to this a lot of digital advertisements in Nepal are being run by using card services of friends or family abroad, which also reduces a legal source of taxation for the Government of Nepal.

Genese Solution addressed this problem and with the aim to lend support in the growth of Nepalese business market, we have created a system to make international payments for digital advertising in 100% compliance with Nepal Rastra Bank & Inland Revenue Department.

If you want to make yourself visible through digital ads in Nepal, reach out to us. We are happy to help.

Digital Advertising is the future of marketing & you should push your growth through it too.