Advertising enables businesses to reach out to their target audience to increase sales. It also helps a company persuade customers to buy other related services or products.
But, all the types of advertising are not suitable for all businesses, and you need to choose wisely.
Advertising has been here since ancient times. Its primary purpose is to publicize messages related to sales or other crucial events. Modern businesses have access to advanced forms of product/service promotion systems like television, mobile app, YouTube, websites, and email.
However, smart organizations use an efficient advertising strategy by researching their product’s/service’s market, consumers, and competitors. You can only create an effective tactic when you know the various forms of advertising.
Continue reading as we introduce you to the most popular forms of advertising that businesses use today.
What Is Advertising?
Advertising is a major marketing tool used by commercial entities to sell products or services to new and existing consumers. Primarily, it is a marketing communication that conveys a non-personal message to the masses to spread the reach of an idea, service, or product. Commercial advertising often comes with open sponsorship from the beneficiary organization.
Advertising focuses on increasing the brand value. It utilizes several perception tactics like color, visuals, celebrities, food, illustrations, and music to excite the customer’s mind. Thus, the next day when a consumer visits a local shop will feel attracted to the product advertised the previous day on TV or radio.
The Differences Between Advertising and Marketing
#1. Advertising is simply a part of the marketing strategy of any business. This is the primary distinction between these two business practices.
#2. Marketing controls how will your business engage with the three main types of communication media: paid media, owned media, and earned media. On the contrary, advertising is a component of paid media.
#3. You can successfully promote your products and services to the target audience only using a marketing strategy. Investment-hungry advertisements are not essential for service/product promotion.
#4. Companies have to set up a separate department to handle marketing. On the other hand, they do not need to create an independent team for advertising. The marketing team can handle that.
Differences Between Traditional and Digital Advertising
#1. The traditional advertising system does not rely on advanced technology like the internet, smartphone, and websites. Hence, if the internet is down, you can still reach out to your consumers through traditional TV and radio ads.
#2. Digital advertising is fully dependent on the internet. Therefore, your marketing strategy could take a hit if the internet is unavailable.
#3. Traditional advertising, like direct mail, has a higher conversion rate than marketing emails. Because most promotional emails, a digital advertising component, go to the spam or promotions folder of audiences’ email. On the contrary, a postcard will reach the customers’ mailbox, and they’ll for sure read it because they always keep an eye on mailboxes for bills.
Types of Advertising: Traditional
While print advertisement can refer to brochures and leaflets, it primarily signifies advertising in newspapers or magazines. Depending on the target audience, companies can advertise in local, national, or state-level newspapers.
Besides, most newspapers offer an online version to the audience. Thus, putting advertisements there means you can reach a larger audience. When it comes to placing an ad in a newspaper, organizations can opt for the classified section, or they may put it on regular pages so that everyone can see it.
Businesses often put advertisements in magazines for a more targeted audience. For example, a company selling cosmetics will find it more beneficial to put their ads in lifestyle magazines.
Mail is another type of advertising that is direct and mostly used by small businesses to reach consumers successfully. In this traditional advertising, you select a potential audience group and send catchy pamphlets to them using snail mail.
In order to start such advertisements, companies have to locate the audience and then mail them leaflets containing the lucrative offers. Moreover, they can check what kind of response they receive in return from the audience.
Sadly, this advertising is not commonplace anymore and works only for local businesses. The digitized version of mail advertising is email advertising, where potential customers receive emails from companies promoting their products and services.
Television
Television advertising is the type of traditional advertising that is still prevalent today. Since the media has a comprehensive reach, companies catering to a large or nationwide market will find it ideal. With the help of sight, sound, and movement, these ads are persuasive enough to influence the viewers to buy a product or subscribe to a service.
The cost of creating ads and purchasing slots for these on TV is prohibitive. Usually, the slots are sold in units of seconds (20, 30, 60.) Moreover, the slot prices depend on length, frequency, time of the day, TV show, etc.
Radio
Radio is one of the oldest advertisement types, and it is still widely popular to reach your target demographic. Mainly if your target audience listens to a specific show or station, constant advertising will have a high chance of bringing in new consumers.
One downside of radio advertising is it reaches an audience through sound only. People might forget what the ad is about as there is no visual. That is why you often hear the same ad repeated on radio stations. Without a sufficient budget for frequent ads on the radio, you will not get the desired results.
OOH or Outdoor
You might have come across giant billboards with stunning ads while driving on a highway or seen hoarding containing advertisements while waiting on a bus stoppage. These are called outdoor or OOH (Out-Of-Home) advertising. You can see these on buses, metro, taxis, airport lounges, etc.
This traditional advertising has become digitalized, and the transformation has undoubtedly made it more impactful. These ads usually focus on catchy visuals with minimum text, so that audience can easily get the message without having to read long lines. These ads can be quite expensive, depending on the location and audience count.
Product Placement
Does your favorite TV show host drink coffee from a mug imprinted brand name? This is one classic example of product placement. In this traditional advertising, companies put their products or brand name on television shows, news, or movies.
Sometimes companies want to reach the target audience discreetly. In such cases, they opt for product placement where the product name is not mentioned explicitly, but the viewers can see it. For example, a movie can show the characters having dinner at a place with the restaurant’s name visible.
Types of Advertising: Digital
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
When you search using any word or phrase on a search engine, you might see some advertisements appearing on top of the organic search results. These ads are known as PPC or paid search. You should include PPC ads into your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to complement your efforts to reach the audience organically.
Besides reaching the target audience directly, it reduces the advertisement cost as companies have to only if someone clicks on the ad. However, businesses must participate in bids to win the ad position and target keywords.
With the rise of social media, advertisers moved to these platforms to showcase their products and offers to the consumers.
Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram let you filter the audience based on country, age, and preference, so you do not have to spend money advertising to a broad audience. On social channels, there are two types of advertising: paid and unpaid ads.
#1. Unpaid Ads: These are the organic way of attracting customers where you post about your products, services, and offers through your company’s official handles or accounts.
#2. Paid Ads: These are sponsored ads people see on their feed while scrolling.
Mobile/In-App
Mobile advertising has become the most common advertisement type. If you use a smartphone or tablet with internet connections, you must have seen these ads. These advertisements can appear while you check social media, visit a website, use an app, or play a game.
In exchange for watching in-app ads, customers receive rewards from the games or apps. The benefit of this advertising is it reaches the customers no matter where they are. It is also possible to target people depending on their geographic location and demography.
Native
Native advertisement blends your ad content with the website or mobile app content. It helps improve the content delivery experience since native ads do not interfere with the host content, and readers can stay on the reading flow.
Businesses mostly target professional and technology blogs and magazines for hosting their native ads. For example, if you are going through professional content on accounting terms, you will likely experience sponsored content from accounting software developers. Here, this ad content will not break your flow, and you might come across useful accounting solutions for your business or work.
Video
The digital advertising industry considers video ads as premium advertisements since it has the potential to get you many eyeballs. Video ads go in between the content on YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some monetized websites may also show video ads before, in-between, and after web content.
Video ads have undergone many advancements, and now there are intuitive video ads. It means consumers can interact with the video and shop for the products of their choice. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies also influence the video ads to influence the audience to go through your sales funnel.
Display
A display ad is an example of a high-tech ad. Here, businesses infuse marketing research, consumer retargeting, and visual elements to persuade customers to subscribe or buy services or products.
You can show display ads almost anywhere, provided the media uses an online content delivery system with supported HTML or other website programming languages. Thus, you can efficiently deliver the same ad to the same customer on different websites, YouTube videos, mobile apps, online games, eBooks, and many more.
Display ads highly rely on website cookies. Thus, if customers do not accept a webpage’s cookies, it becomes hard to serve them the right display ad.
Podcast Advertising
The podcast is becoming increasingly popular among various age groups and professions. Also, top music content apps like Spotify and Pandora have dedicated sections for paid or free podcasts. Thus, the podcast is a powerful medium for digital advertising and is also comparably cheap than other types of advertising like TV and radio.
The podcast host can read their own script, or the sponsoring business can provide an advertisement script. The best part is that the host relates the product or service they are advertising with the podcast content. Therefore, the patrons, followers, and listeners find a reason to buy or subscribe to the advertised product or service.
Newsletter functions as an informative marketing email that serves the following purposes:
#1. It helps website bloggers engage with their patrons and followers through weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly communications.
#2. Bloggers and businesses can personalize the newsletter content according to the user’s choice. It lets you make your customers feel that their choices matter to you.
#3. Newsletters create an awareness of the services and products that you are selling. Thus, the target audience keeps coming to your store as repeat customers.
#4. If the customers like your newsletter, they may forward it to their connections, and you get free promotion through word of mouth.
However, you will require engaging and actionable newsletter ideas to keep your readers and consumers engaged.
Conclusion
Advertising could make or break your products/services. It could also cost you a lot, and you may not gain a sufficient return on investment (ROI.) Thus, learn about the top types of advertising from above.
Then research further and sit with your advertising team to choose the advertising form and platform wisely. Your strategy should follow the concept of minimum advertising investment and maximum response from ad campaigns.
Now that you know which ad types suit your product learn about the tools that help you create ad videos and images.
