“Digital advertising is a toolkit with all these exciting possibilities.”

Did you miss this month’s episode? Or maybe you’re just looking for a short memory refresher? Either way, welcome to the Spark Compass Blog! A place where we summarize the key takeaways from every episode and share some memorable behind the scenes moments.

This month’s episode featured Laura Kittner, a professor in Digital Marketing Communications and Advertising Marketing Communications programs here at St. Lawrence College. She also runs her own agency and is very passionate about her field of work. In this month’s episode, Laura helped us explore all things digital advertising.

What is digital advertising?Initial impressions of digital advertising is that it’s a wild, crazy, and harried world. Despite that (or maybe because of it) digital advertising is also incredibly exciting and rewarding to participate in.

When asked to describe digital advertising, Laura called it a “pay to play” experience. In short, digital advertising typically involves paying to have your message put in front of a particular audience. What sets digital advertising apart from traditional marketing is that it occurs entirely on screen. Websites, social media, email, podcasting, and more all fall into the category of digital advertising.

It’s an accessible and iterative platform that allows you to experiment, pivot, and mold your approach however you’d please. Everyone has an opportunity to participate in digital advertising and see varying forms of success, regardless of budget or experience. Most digital advertising platforms have removed the learning curve by adding intuitive step-by-step guides for its users. By identifying your goals or objectives, these platforms can auto-generate and suggest what your next steps should be.

Digital advertising can be intimidating for people running a small business or who aren’t technologically savvy. Hiring someone in the industry can help make the experience seamless but it isn’t necessary. Fortunately, digital advertising campaigns can always be modified and changed, so you’re never locked into a single decision or approach.

First steps when starting a digital advertising campaignThis is a common theme we’ve been seeing among our guest speakers but once again, a key aspect of starting a digital advertising campaign is knowing about your customers. If you missed it, one of our earliest episodes covers meeting your ideal customer. You can access that episode by clicking here. If you’re in a rush, here’s a summary of the things you should know about your customers to create a successful digital advertising campaign.

• Who are your customers?
• Where are they spending their time online?
• What social media platforms are they using?
• What are they doing while using these platforms?

Understanding your customers, their habits, and their behaviours will also allow you to target which platforms you should be using. One of the worst things you can do is to stretch your efforts across all social media platforms using the same generic content. This isn’t an efficient strategy and it’s also a waste of precious resources, including your time.

So, get to know your audience and you can take things from there.

Types of digital advertisingThere are dozens of different ways a business can use digital advertising. The ones mentioned during our podcast episode include:

Email Marketing

• This method has a low barrier to entry, lets you cultivate your audience, and build brand loyalty with existing customers over time.

Retargeting Ads

• Laura used Patagonia as an example to explain how this type of digital advertising works. Let's say you were on the Patagonia website to look at a fleece jacket. You might have even added it to your cart but never finished making a purchase. Patagonia could launch a retargeting campaign by using digital cookies to have ads for that particular jacket pop up every time you visit a new site or platform. Retargeting ads allow you to subtly nudge your customers into taking a specific action, which is most often making a sale on a product or service.

Video Advertising

• Video is quickly becoming one of the most popular forms of advertising available. They can be run on virtually any device, across nearly every platform, and tend to outperform advertisements that are strictly image or text-based.

Search Engine Marketing

• This type relies on search engine queries. Organic search results are free and based on your SEO ranking to display your business in front of a searching customer. There’s also sponsored results which are displayed at the very top of search results. These are paid ads but are reliably shown above organic search results each time.

Choosing the right platform for digital advertisingWhen asking Laura to describe how businesses can choose the right platforms, her immediate response was to be selfish. Consider yourself first to set a base-level understanding of how you can better position your business. For this step, consider things like:

• Your product or service
• How do they help?
• Why do they matter to your customer?

It’s a noisy, crowded, and competitive landscape so you need to be clear about what you’re offering and how it will benefit your customer. This circles back to the importance of knowing your customers, and knowing them well. Again, things to consider include:

• Knowing who your customers are
• Knowing where they spend their time online
• Knowing what they do while online
• What do they value?
• What motivates them?

Fortunately, most platforms are predictive and can generate expected results for your digital advertising campaign but the more information you have about your customers, the more accurate those predictions should be.

A/B TestingThis was a quick topic that came up in conversation with Laura, but we think it’s important to anyone’s understanding of digital advertising and will be covering it in a bit more detail.

A/B Testing is the process of creating an advertisement based on interpretations of what your customers want to see. Then you make small tweaks to the original advertisement to make a second, nearly identical version. Common tweaks for the second ad include:

• Colour
• Imagery
• Wording
• Call to action

Then you run them both and see which performs the best. If they both perform the same, consider taking the best parts of both to create an entirely new ad! If one clearly outperforms the other, then keep the best one running and shut down the other. The possibilities are endless and the results usually speak for themselves.

How to implement digital advertising into marketingThis is broken down into a few key components. They are largely revolved around knowing why your business does what it does, and also knowing who your customers are:

• As a business, what are your goals and objectives?
• What do you want to accomplish with your digital advertising?
• Who are your customers and what do they expect from you?

Digital advertising can be a viable part of any marketing strategy. Depending on how you answered the above questions, digital advertising could play a big or small role in that strategy. Consider what makes the most sense for your business and whether a digital advertising approach will allow you to engage with your audience.

At the end of the day, everything a business does is focused on its consumers. Digital advertising is no different, it just has a clearer focus on the behaviour, activities, and interactions of your customers than other aspects of your business.

Echo ChambersThis was another quick but interesting topic that came up in conversation. Echo Chambers occur when platforms analyze your online behaviour and start showing content that’s similar to what you’ve previously interacted with. They’ll also start showing you paid content based on these analyzed behaviours to increase the odds of you interacting with an ad.

Echo Chambers are aptly named for their tendency to echo back whatever you interact with on social platforms. This creates a content feedback loop intentionally designed to make you stay and use their platform for longer periods of time.

To summarize digital advertising into three points or lessAccessibility

• Digital advertising has a low barrier to entry and can also be low cost to operate.

Noisy

• Anyone can use digital advertising, so it can be a crowded and competitive landscape that makes landing in front of your ideal customer challenging.

Exciting

• It’s a creative, forgiving, and viable tool to advertise your brand in a more humanized fashion.

Final words of wisdom on digital advertisingAs we wrapped up our conversation, Laura left us with three final words of advice for anyone who wants to start implementing digital advertising into their marketing strategy.

• Just start and don’t overthink it
• Start small and expand from there
• Remember why you believed in your product/service in the first place

We’re Spark!Thanks for tuning into yet another episode of Spark Compass!

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