WHY IS DIGITAL ADVERTISING IMPORTANT ?
- Digital advertising creates powerful opportunities to tell brand stories at scale and in context. Through ads on various devices and channels, marketers can reach larger audiences in a way that is real-time and increasingly personal.
- As marketers, we may feel like we have come a long way with digital advertising, but we are still in the early stages. With digital advertising continuing to gain momentum, it is more vital than ever before to make it an integral part of your holistic marketing mix.
Three Reasons for a Digital Focus There are three reasons why digital advertising is critical in today’s multi-channel, multi-device buyer landscape:
1. Your Buyers Are Constantly on Digital Channels
- Your buyers spend a lot of time online. Gone are the days when newspapers and magazines dominated your buyer’s attention. We are firmly entrenched in the digital era. In fact, a recent study by Media Dynamics states that since 1985 a typical adult’s digital media consumption has grown 40% to 9.8 hours per day
- With your buyers constantly switching channels and devices, how can you reach them? Digital advertising is a fantastic way for your brand to live across channels.
2. Marketers Have Greater Targeting Capabilities
- When you put an advertisement in a magazine you have very little control, if any, over who sees and interacts with it. With today’s advancements in digital advertising, marketers can now target the exact audience that’s mostly likely to purchase your product. By combining the power of marketing automation and an advertising network or platform, you can avoid sending messages to people who aren’t a great fit for your product or service. Targeting your ads on digital media isn’t only limited to the demographic or firmographic characteristics of your audience. You can also deliver messages that are uniquely created to resonate with your audience as individuals, based on who they are and what they do.
- With today’s powerful marketing and advertising tools, there is so much data available about your customers. By leveraging the latest and greatest tools, like Marketo’s Ad Bridge, you can leverage customer profile and intent data from many different channels to have one seamless view of the customer. You can personalize your ads based on who the individual is from her behavior, her demographics, where she is in the buying cycle, her level of engagement with your brand, and the content or offers she has viewed. With this advanced personalization, you can have more relevant conversations with buyers across all channels—which is truly the holy grail for marketers!
Impact of advertising on consumer buying behavior :-
This study shows that there is positive impact of all the variables on consumer buying behavior. This means that advertisement does in fact affect the buying behavior of consumers. Among the four independent variables however, we can see that Familiarity and Entertainment have the most significant impact. So, we can see that the psychological impact that Familiarity has on consumers does in fact lead to positive buying behavior. In this case, most consumers have also taken Entertainment as a positive indicator towards a brand rather than negative.
‘Advisement Spending’ comes in third in terms of significance. This implies that people’s association with ‘Spending’ and ‘Brand’ is likely to lead people to buy a product. In other words, advertisement spending is somewhat successful in persuading people to make a purchase. Social Imaging in Advertisement is seen to have the least impact. It means that people’s desire to belong to a certain group sometimes makes people buy a product. But consumers are more concerned with other factors rather than the ‘social imaging’ in the advertisement.
Consumers are more motivated to buy a product when they see an advertisement of it somewhere; they also feel safe to buy a product that they have seen advertisement of. Consumer develops a level of trustworthiness for a brand they have seen advertisement of. They were even noted to collect information of products from advertisement, get to know about the usage and benefits of product and then make a purchase decision based on that. Therefore, advertisement is a very good marketing tool for generating more sales.
Some limitations of this study ought to be addressed. Firstly, the sample size could have been more if we had access to a larger number of people. Secondly, it would have been more desirable if we could get hold of people from a diversified age group especially, the older age group of above 60 years. It would have been more interesting to know more about their thoughts on modern advertising. Thirdly, this research could have included a more diversified range of variables to analyze the same topic from a different perspective.
How Digital Advertising Can Help to Grow Business ?
- Global reach - a website allows you to find new markets and trade globally for only a small investment.
- Lower cost - a properly planned and well targeted digital marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.
- Trackable, measurable results - measuring your online marketing with web analytics and other online metric tools makes it easier to establish how effective your campaign has been. You can obtain detailed information about how customers use your website or respond to your advertising.
- Personalisation - if your customer database is linked to your website, then whenever someone visits the site, you can greet them with targeted offers. The more they buy from you, the more you can refine your customer profile and market effectively to them.
- Openness - by getting involved with social media and managing it carefully, you can build customer loyalty and create a reputation for being easy to engage with.
- Social currency - digital marketing lets you create engaging campaigns using content marketing tactics. This content (images, videos, articles) can gain social currency - being passed from user to user and becoming viral.
- Improved conversion rates - if you have a website, then your customers are only ever a few clicks away from making a purchase. Unlike other media which require people to get up and make a phone call, or go to a shop, digital marketing can be seamless and immediate.
