Changing channels on a television sounds quite similar to navigating from one app to another. One thing that never changes: ads. Often considered annoying, some ads are unforgettable, like the Chocos ad, most of the audience have seen growing up.
Online advertising is not just mythically related to social media marketing, it is infact a bigger umbrella term. I will be spotlighting this specific term here:
- Google Business: Not just limited to listing your business on Google Maps, it is a complete package in itself.
From owning a custom email address to updating your address, it also offers creating a marketplace without owning a physical store.
Google Ads is undoubtedly a broader concept than most business owners can often think of. As the most trusted brand, people still prefer asking Google or Gemini, rather troubling with inaccuracy and biasedness of ChatGPT. - E-mail Marketing: Almost every popular brand uses this marketing tactic. But the most challenging part is to make the promotional emails delivered right into the „primary“ E-mails folder or at least in the „promotionals“. Main part is to prevent delivering into the SPAM folder.
What matters the most: bypassing the SPAM folder, high delivery rate, open-rate and click-through-rate. Finally the action taken by the user. - META: With a family of four, it offers placement of content on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. Considering its large fan-base, it is undoubtedly one of the most converting advertising channel.
Social Media Management, Social Media Optimization, and Social Media Ads are key concepts. - Content/ Reviews/ Blogs/ Comparision websites: Whenever I think of buying a gadget, the first thing comes to my mind is a comparision website, that is well-developed and I can uninteruptedly compare about four similar products together on one webpage.
However, in my opinion, most of the blogging websites host a sponsored content. This is anyhow a highly converting media channel. A text link or banner ad is often used to redirect to the brand website. - Deals & Coupons: Categorised as exclusive, generic and vanity coupons, these are considered a preferencial choice of most of the internet users. It is a popular trend that people casually surf the internet, looking for these before deciding to buy any product from online marketplace.
- Loyalty / Rewards: Such kind of promotional methods are usually considered lucrative for the users. Quite similar to click-bait, they actually offer some kind of cashback or incentive. Often labelled as “in-organic traffic”, this tactic is highly convertible. It brings more users to the website and they bring more by organic promotions through “word of mouth”.
Top relatable examples could be: GooglePay, PocketMoney, Smytten, CashKaro and many more. - Media Buying: Buying space for posting ad-creatives, blogs, comparisions or reviews on other’s websites is often termed as media buying. Mostly used by brands, agencies and affiliates; who lack in owning a large number of inventory. It mostly includes: Blogs, in-text ads, banner ads, Pop Ads, NativeAds, Push and Pull.
As an Website-Owner, this is usually considered a very good source of income, conditionally you have a large number of visitors on your website. - Banner Ads: Gone are the days when large hoardings were placed on malls, streets, highways and parks; so that people will see them physically and would get to know about the brand.
The customised static or animated image based online promotions are the new new. Likely to the traditional method of advertising, these are also placed on high visibility areas like homepage of a very popular website. - Pop Ads: Remember visiting a popular website like Quora or any news website and then pops-up a window asking you to subscribe for e-mail newsletters; or visiting a mall and passing through the shops of popular brands and suddenly pops a small window screen on your phone often pushed by those brands, informing you about today’s special discount offers. The main conversion goal here is to convince a user to either subscribe to the newsletter or to physically visit a shop.
- Content-Lock: Imagine a situation; you got to know about a popular news and googled about it, then you visit the first or third website on the search page and you are unable to read it completely. Either it asks you to enter your mail-ID to read more or asks you to subscribe by paying a monthly fees. This annoying type of advertisement is labelled as “content-lock”.
Mostly used by news websites. In my home country, I have mostly seen Dainik Bhaskar following this tactic.