Online advertising is big. How big? It’s estimated that over the next two years, more money will be spent on digital advertising than television advertising – for the first time in history.
When it comes down to it, marketing is all about getting your brand in front of people where the people are. It just so happens that in today’s world, people are online. They’re browsing the Internet, talking to friends, reading articles, and watching videos online.
Meanwhile, TV viewership is stagnating. More people are turning to subscription-based services like Netflix and Hulu that forgo advertising altogether. And it’s all too easy to avoid commercials, especially when you stream.
Plus, you can do many things with online advertising that you can’t do with TV – such as precisely target a market with the right ads, at the right time, in front of the right people.
Online advertising will be bigger in 2018 than any year prior. Here are a few trends to take note of as we go through the year and plan our marketing strategies.
Businesses Are Finding New Ways to Advertise
The rise of ad-blocking software is hurting brands’ attempts to traditionally advertise online through banner ads, long the mainstay of online advertising.
As such, brands have to get creative – and they’re rising to the challenge.
One development is what we call “shoppable video.” This is technology that allows you to interact with content in the video itself. Want to know more about a particular product? Touch it and you’ll get more info. You can even buy what you touch. This follows a bigger trend that we’ve discussed previously: interactivity with augmented reality.
You can also advertise to captive audiences through gamification, which became a big trend a couple of years ago and is continuing in force through the widespread creation of apps that provide a useful – sometimes addictive – service and ample opportunity to display ads.
But one of the most disruptive advertising platforms to be developed lately that will increase in importance in 2018 is chat. Chatbots, like Facebook’s Messenger app, create a chance to not only interact with a consumer, but to also give them valuable information – even generate leads.
And people like chatbots. Octane AI estimates that anywhere from 15% to 60% – yes, 60% – of consumers click on links given to them via chatbots. That kind of clickthrough rate is amazing, considering that 10% CTR on Google AdWords is elite and even 1% CTR on display ads is mindblowingly awesome.
It’s all in an effort to find those innovative angles for advertising to an audience that, paradoxically, sometimes doesn’t want to be found, but is always looking for something useful.
Marketing Automation Will Be Key
Another area primed for growth in online advertising is automated advertising. This can also be known as programmatic advertising.
The idea is that automation can help you not only define your audience, but predict where they’ll be and then deliver a tailored message to them in the most optimal way. Automation saves time and money and creates better ad delivery, meaning a smart programmatic provider can do a better job pairing ads with customers than you can manually.
Programmatic automation is already here, but it is very new. 2018 could be the first full year in which automation becomes widespread. And businesses that seek to find a better, smarter way to advertise – to maximize online ad budgets – can turn to automation for that.
One of our services is what we call Consumer Intelligence Advertising (yes, the acronym is CIA), which is basically our take on programmatic, automated advertising. By using a variety of ad formats and concepts, along with hyper-targeted audiences, we can deliver tailored ads with pinpoint precision with more consumer accuracy – meaning the ads are more relevant and less obtrusive.
This configuration also allows you to take advantage of native advertising, which has emerged over the last half-decade and has become one of the best ways to deliver ads in an unobtrusive manner.
If you want to succeed at a high level, some part of your advertising will have to be automated, using online and offline data to better target your audience.
Online Advertising the Smart Way in 2018
A lot of what will work in 2018 when it comes to online advertising is still being developed. The field is ever-changing. The best way to succeed is to be aggressive and innovative, and find a marketing partner who has a forward-thinking perspective on how to best approach a target audience.
Our digital advertising team has extensive experience crafting tailored campaigns across a wide variety of proven digital advertising platforms, not limited to just the traditional platforms but new, innovative methods like the ones we discussed in this blog post.
If you want to learn more, talk to our team and we’ll be happy to explore digital advertising in 2018 with your brand.
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