The New Age of Advertising

There was a time when the first thing that popped into your mind when you thought about advertising your products was a prime-time TV ad or a billboard on a busy highway. Expensive as these mediums were, you were not guaranteed that your target market would see your ad.

The widespread use of the internet, enhanced by the advent of smartphones, brought a new dawn to the world of advertising. Social media allows businesses to easily capture the tastes and preferences of their potential customers and better tailor their messages to suit them. Given that billions of people spend hours scrolling through their timelines and scouring websites for information, it only makes sense for you to convey your promotional messages on digital media.

Table of Contents

Professional Marketing

There is much more to digital marketing than simply putting up a website or opening social media accounts and hoping internet users find your brand. You need to have a solid marketing strategy backed by hard data. This shows you which channels your target market uses most, what is trending on those channels, and how best to integrate those trends into your campaigns.

Keeping tabs on the changing digital trends is important if you’re to capitalize on them to reach your intended audience. You need to be aware of when a new social media platform becomes popular and develop content for it. You also need to keep abreast with changes in the Google algorithm if search engine users are to find your web pages easily.

As the owner of a young startup, you may not have the time or the expertise required to devise a successful digital marketing campaign. You also may not have the resources to build an in-house marketing department. Instead, you can hire experienced NYC marketing agencies, like Crafted, to help your brand grow.

Social Media

According to Pew Research Center, out of every 10 Americans, seven are active social media users. So, at least in theory, by getting your brand on social media, you will have the majority of America listening to you. Well, that’s not exactly how social media marketing works. Simply having a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube and throwing up posts every now and then is not a guarantee you will get heard.

Getting set up on the various platforms is easy and free, but this is just the beginning of your social media marketing journey. You need to build a following on those networks, which requires you to post engaging content regularly. To know what content to post, you need to do careful research. You may then need to engage media professionals to help you produce this content

Another increasingly important avenue of social media marketing is influencer marketing. There are many facets to influencer marketing, but in general, it involves identifying an Instagram or YouTube user with a large following who is a good fit for your brand. If they like your product or brand, they can promote it directly or find a way to feature it more subtly in their posts. Of course, this is not a free service, and the fee per post will be determined by how large their following is.

Blogging

One of the key pillars of the new age of advertising is selling by trust. A business blog can help you build trust with your target market by offering them useful information. If your readers see you as an authority in a given subject, they will listen to your recommendations for products or service providers.

A blog is not just a nice-to-have feature on your website, it has real potential to lead to higher conversions. Number-crunchers say that sites with active blogs generate more than 60 percent more leads than those that don’t.

For your blog marketing investment to yield results, you need to be deliberate and devote a good amount of time and focus to it. You need to create a posting schedule to ensure you consistently offer your audience content, and you should choose the subjects you tackle in your blog carefully. Not only should they have the potential to generate traffic, but they should also offer great business value.

Mobile

More than half of the world’s population owns a smartphone. Practically everyone in the U.S. uses a cellphone of some kind. Have you received a text notification of a successful transaction and noticed a promotional message of some kind tacked onto it? This is one form of mobile advertising that makes use of push notifications.

Besides the wide reach mobile advertising offers, it allows businesses to target their communication more precisely. It keeps your brand on customer’s minds more frequently. You can also include your website link in the notification to hopefully attract more users.

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised

The days of splurging on TV commercials you’re not sure will ever get the attention of potential buyers are dead and gone. You need to develop a plan to take advantage of the vast yet targeted reach of online marketing. Reach out to professional agencies for guidance as you and your brand take the internet by storm.