Online Ads: There’s a wide variety!

When it comes to online advertising, it is a bit confusing. Isn’t that so? Online ads have become a daily part of internet life. For new marketers, it can be confusing getting a grasp on the scope and variety of online ads available.

So we shall sum up the long list of online ads as this.

·         Google Search Ads

·         AdWords Ads

·         PPC Ads

·         Bing Ads

·         Facebook Ads

·         Twitter Ads

·         Tumblr Ads

·         Banner Ads

·         Google Display Ads

Google Search ads are those hat appear alongside the search engine result page when users search a keyword query on Google. These ads are PPC, or pay-per-click ads, in which advertisers pay for each ad click. AdWords ads are online advertisements created within Google’s AdWords advertising platform, identical to Google search ads.

Bing ads are similar to Google ads in that they work on a pay-per-click basis. Here, The Pay per click (PPC) ads are those in which the cost of advertising is determined by the number of clicks an ad receives. AdWords and Bing Ads both use a pay-per-click model.

Face Book ads are also commonly used now a days, and they are what appear on the right hand side of your timeline with the caption “sponsored”. Promoted Posts are Facebook ads that let advertisers pay a flat rate to promote a single post on their Facebook business page. The promoted post reaches more fans and friends of fans than a regular post.

Twitter ads refer to the paid boosts that brands on Twitter can use to extend the reach of their tweets, promote a chosen hashtag, or gain more followers. Promoted Tweets lets advertisers’ tweets reach more people’s home feeds, and offer a healthy batch of targeting options. Twitter ads also include Promoted Accounts, letting advertisers show up more often in Twitter’s Who to Follow recommendation feature.

Another important platform is Tumbler and, in here, ads come in a few different formats. Tumblr also offers sponsored web post ads, which are pieces of Tumblr content crafted by advertisers that appear in users’ main dashboard feed, integrated with normal, user-generated content. These Tumblr ads have small dollar signs to mark them as advertising content. In order to post your online ads onto the Tumblr platform, you'll have to become a Tumblr sponsor.

When it comes to Banner ads, they are image-based advertisements that often appear in the side, top, and bottom sections of websites. They can range widely in terms of size, design, and function. You'll typically find them in all sorts of news-based websites, blogs, and specialized web communities. Many websites brokerage their ad space with ad exchanges such as Google's Display Network, or you can buy the ad space in the same manner you'd buy an ad on a newspaper.

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Social Listening- Important?

In social media marketing, what matters the most out of all can be being updated about anything and everything. May it be Face book, Twitter or Google plus that you use, you need to be updated about the current topics in the society, new trends and fads. This can be properly done only of we are attentive to the conversations happening around, may be among our interested parties/ target groups. This is the very concept of “Social Media Listening”!

Social listening is the process of monitoring digital or online conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online. Marketing teams primarily use social listening for community management, such as identifying customer pain points and providing direct consumer response to questions, complaints, and comments. Marketing teams also use social listening to surface feedback that could help to differentiate their brand, product, or service. Here, they monitor what people generally perceive as issues, and according to them what real solutions are, or at least how the solution looks like.

Listening to what people are saying about your brand on social media will benefit your business as a whole. Not only will customer service be able to provide quick problem-solving, but your R&D team can easily access feedback on what your target audience thinks about your products as well as those of competitors.

Once you’ve established yourself as an active participant in social media discussions, your community will start watching out for you. For instance, more people will start tagging you in their recommendations or conversations instead of just simply mentioning you.

Social listening is important. It is important due to several reasons. As digital channels proliferate, there are myriad ways for consumers to share feedback and experiences — both directly and anonymously. Social listening allows marketing teams to prioritize and evaluate feedback from the public. This feedback can be used to create more appealing offerings, both in the form of product and services as well as content and advertisements.

Before you start monitoring conversations, you need to figure out your goals. Like with most social endeavors, having a specific objective in place will help guide your strategy and influence. What do you want to get out of social listening? What exactly you want to monitor in the online conversations? And whom do you specifically target in this deed?

According to the Social Media Examiner – the followings are the ways social listening can benefit your business;

1. ·         Generate Leads by Solving Problems
2. ·         Attract New Customers
3. ·         Identify Influencers and Advocates
4. ·         Discover Where Your Community Hangs Out
5. ·         Improve Customer Care
6. ·         Get Feedback on Products
7. ·         Find Top Talent
8. ·         Drive Innovation

So, it must be clear to you by now that with social listening, you don’t have to ask people what they want; just listen in on their conversations and use these insights to figure out what they really need. Sometimes, people don’t know how to tell the exact thing that they want to mean when asked. But, still even without their knowledge, they express them in their daily conversations.

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Twitter! A powerful Social Media Tool?

You know this is the 21^st century, and that we live in a highly digitalized world right? We call it the globalization. Unlike yester years, the digital communications play a major role in today’s world like never before. Yes, this is an information era, and miracles do happen, so as the magic!

So, Face book, Pinrest, Instagram, email, you tube, you know about them, don’t you? How about Twitter? You must have probably known about twitter right? Have you ever used that to your personal promotions or for your business? What was your experience? Dull or interesting? Read on, we shall make your twitter experience more interesting!

Twitter is a strong social media platform, no doubt. Many of the public figures use twitter to convey messages to their fans on a larger scale. So, why the same can not be applied to businesses in promoting their brands and their offers? Obviously, Twitter has so many opportunities in it!

People on Twitter love to discover and share interesting content, take part in enthusiastic conversations, and connect with others outside their immediate circles. Becoming part of that active engagement is a fantastic way to raise brand awareness, build relationships, and create advocates for your business.

So, as a business brand, in marketing , it is of vital importance to Get more retweets, likes and replies, which in return show the engagement with the posts that put up. A Tweet engagements campaign promotes your Tweets to a large, targeted group of people. It enables you to place your best content in front of the audience that matters to you, at the time it will have most effect. Tweets in these campaigns are clearly labeled as Promoted but are like regular Tweets in every other way. People can Retweet them, reply to them, like them and more. There is also this advertising options provided by twitter to businesses, same as in Face book and in google. Promoted Tweets appear in timelines, on profile pages, and on Tweet detail pages. You can create a Tweet engagements campaign on ads.twitter.com.

Your Tweet engagements campaign will be more effective if you produce compelling Tweets to promote. People are much more likely to engage with Tweets containing visuals, so experiment with images or video. Get creative with Vine to create short, looping videos or add up to four images in a single Tweet. That’s a tip!

And also, be quick in responding to your replies, messages or any other inquiry on twitter. This is a must not only in Twitter, but also in other social media platforms, because if you are not quick enough, you will be criticized by your own fans/ followers in a blink of an eye publicly!!

                                                                     

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Towards a better FACEBOOK PAGE..

May you be a manufacture or a service provider or public figure or whatever, maintaining a face book page for your product or the brand is of utmost importance as per today, in taking the brand to the general public. So when it comes to an FB page, you know the content, the applications and the sponsored advertisements play a major role. Forget the other two for a moment; take the content pillar in isolation. Now, that is the most important aspect out of the three.

Content is what you simply post. That can be a status, and offer, a milestone, an image or a video. Whatever it is, the audience should value it, and find that interesting. Otherwise, our main goal, the engagement will be unachievable, and the reach will also decrease.

You can have linked posts on your page! Let me be clear now. This says, what ever you may find to be relevant to your target audience on the internet, you may post them by simply posting the link with a caption. That post may not be necessarily talking about your specific brand / product, but still if it’s likely to be important and interesting to your audience, share it! This will increase the engagement and the reach as well.

Guess what? Rich media like photos and videos get more attention and help your message stand out in News Feed. Lifestyle images like the ones you see from your friends on Facebook are always engaging. Try sharing images of your products or photos of your customers enjoying your service. Try to keep your posts between 100 and 250 characters to get more engagement. Shorter, succinct posts are better received. If possible, follow the posts with a hash tag, incase there is a trend going on. Trends can be identified using Google trends, and of course, Face Book now suggests us the trends. We just need to follow sometimes! Easy as that…

On Face Book pages too, we as marketers should encourage two way communications. If it is just you who will always be talking, talking nonstop on your page, may be the audience is not interested. And on the other hand, you don’t get insights on the preferences, and etc. so have two way conversations! Ask your audience to share their thoughts and feedback on your product and services. This is another way to listen to your customers and improve your business. Posting content that shows you took their feedback into consideration can also build customer loyalty and show you value their ideas.

And also, you should keep your fans updated about the promotions and the offers in a regular basis. To improve engagement with your promotions, include clear calls to action, redemption details, and when the promotion ends to add a sense of urgency. Offer special deals or perks to your customers to keep them interested and to drive online sales. Include call to actions with links to the most relevant page on your website.

These are just a few tips to improve the quality of your FB page. Try them, and you may see the difference.

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Search and Social media marketing- Related?

Before understanding the relation of the two terms, we should first understand the difference between these two tools, and their real definitions in our terms. We shall put up it like this.

If our company tries to gain more and more traffic and visibility from search engines via both paid and unpaid terms, that we call as search Marketing. This can be done either through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Wondering what these mean? Do not worry; we shall go one by one.

SEM is actually paid searches. The perfect example would be Google Adwords. On yahoo, it’s Bing Ads. What SEO actually does is bringing the company name / brand name to the first 1-3 search results when an individual types a word and searches for it. For example, if a person types ayurvedic spa, Colombo then, if Horizon Spa, in Kollupitiya comes among the first 3-5 results on the result page, then, there SCO has done its part. As you can see it is a game of words. We play SEO using identified key words, and careful research has to ne surely done before SEO deeds.

Now, What does Social Media mean to us? Face Book? Just that? Nop, Twitter, G+, Instagram, YouTube and Linked in are all are social media. Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

Now, why do we say that these two- Social Media Marketing and Search Engine marketing are inter related?  Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.

For an example, we shall take one scenario. If a newly introduced tour company is to increase its website traffic, backing up via social media is really necessary. It may be needed to have FB posts posted with regard to various travel packages and that need to carry the website link as well followed by a wording like “see more at / view all at / full details at” etc.

A good understanding about the website behavior could be obtained through Google Analytics and, the behavior in social media could be tracked via social bakers, tweet mention and etc. These analytical tools help a lot in understanding the geographies and the demographics of our audience and, based on these, important decisions could be taken.

Thus, today, Search engine marketing is not a stand alone, but a tool highly contributed by the activities in the social media relevant to the brand / company. 

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