Date Published: 20-Oct-2012

With people spending an increasing number of hours on surfing the Internet, and the number of such people proliferating, most businesses feel it a great place to promote themselves. In this respect, various Internet marketing (IM) strategies are of much help to them to reach the targeted audience with less time and effort.

Of all sorts of IM strategies, online display advertising is one, that is tried and proven efficient by many business owners. Even industry experts opine, online display advertising is a cost effective way to reach specific audiences. Let us discuss the benefits of online display advertising, that any business can reap.

Effectiveness of online display advertising

• Catchy and effective way to reach prospects: In online display advertising, the marketing/promotional message of a business is made to appear on different websites and on search engine result pages. The messages can take any format such as banner ads, pop-up ads, text ads, etc. These ads usually contain text, logo, pictures and animated images. The more creative a display ad is, the better and effective will be the results. Choosing appealing colors, images, page layouts, catchy texts help the advertiser attract readers’ attention and thus, drive more traffic to their websites.

• Enables geographic and demographic targeting: Geographic targeting is highly helpful for businesses to target their local customers. Geographic targeting could easily be achieved with online display advertising by displaying the ads only to the local audiences who search on Internet using location specific keywords.

  Similarly in demographic targeting, ads are posted on the websites which are used frequently by users of same age group, gender, or income levels similar to the typical customers of a business. This enables targeting the end users of the product/service much effectively.

• Marketing message spreads faster: Compared to traditional advertising, online display advertising is much faster in terms of reaching the potential purchasers. Based on your advertising budgets, you can start sending your ads to more and more number of audience in less time. The more wider your ad campaign is, the better would be the brand awareness.

• Easy to update your promotional message: A significant benefit of online display advertising as against other traditional means is that it is easy to update the promotional message. Advertisers can personalize their messages to deliver them to the target audience and they can update them once in a while to break monotony of the same old message. Promoting with special attractions of the business or discount offers becomes easy with the help of online display advertisements.

• Easily measurable: Measuring the performance of any campaign is of paramount importance to find its effectiveness. If it is a traditional medium of advertisement like TV, radio or newspaper you will never know how many people saw your ad. But when it comes to online display advertisements, you can easily track the number of users who click your ads (click-through rates) and also the number of users who complete the action as desired by the advertiser (conversion rates) like making purchase, getting registered, etc. This kind of tracking helps the businesses to adjust the campaign based on the report.

• High conversion rates: Targeting in terms of context, geography and demographics helps your business to reach people who are actively interested in the topics related to your business and, thus the conversion rates are probably high compared to other ads which are targeted at general or irrelevant audience.

• Affordable even by SMBs: Unlike other forms of advertising, online display advertisements enable businesses to set a cap on their advertising budgets. They can, thus, either increase or decrease the amount to be spent based on the results of their first campaign.

Moreover, advertisers are charged only when users click their ads. Thus, online display advertising is cost effective and hence is affordable even by small and medium sized businesses.

The manifold benefits of a single strategy shows the effectiveness of an online display advertising campaign. Implemented properly, it yields the highest value at lowest price.

As the process involves technicalities, it is sensible to delegate the responsibilities of your online display campaign to expert professionals. These help you get immediate and better results in less time.