3 Digital Marketing Strategies That Will Rule 2017- Valutrics
Online advertising saw a 7.1% gain in 2016. It’s expected to grow by double digits in the next year.
There’s a good reason for that. As consumers turn off the TV and turn on the Internet, advertisers see a gold mine of opportunity to reach people in their target market online.
However, it’s easy to waste money on advertising. That’s because marketers often “shoot blind” by running PPC ads that seem to be effective, but often bear little fruit.
Digital strategists who want to increase market share in the new year should promote their brand with emerging trends that are showing signs of strong success.
Here are 3 online advertising strategies that will rule 2017.
1. Video Ads Will Flourish
Video ads have been around for a while, but you can expect them to emerge as a dominant force over the next 12 months.
Why? Because publishers love them.
Video ads offer interruption marketing that’s similar to a commercial that you’re forced to watch on TV. They make people take notice of the advertised product or service.
Nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly likely that you’ll click on a blog post and see a full-blown video ad smack-dab in the middle of the content. That ad will often include audio that interrupts your concentration as you’re trying to read the article.
Does that drive you crazy? It should, but it’s not going away.
Publishers are looking for any way they can to monetize their blogs. Video ads offer a lucrative and effective means of doing just that.
Casual blog readers who boast that they’ll boycott sites with video ads will eventually end up boycotting so many sites that they’ll have almost nothing left to read online.
Of course, video ads also work great on YouTube. Advertisers have multiple options to run video ads on that platform.
Video ads are also offered on social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram. Those platforms also offer great targeting options as well.
In the coming year, savvy strategists will produce single video ads that run across multiple channels, such as blogs, YouTube, and social media sites. That’s going to generate a nice ROI because it keeps production costs down.
Also, video ads work just fine on mobile platforms. Since mobile technology is only expected to get more sophisticated from here on out, there’s no reason to doubt that video streaming will always be supported on smartphones, tablets, and phablets.
Many advertisers are aware of that, and invest accordingly. According to eMarketer, mobile video ads will account for almost half of all video ad dollars.
My company is producing video ads and segments around the clock for the clients. Clients love the creative and the returns.
2. Native Advertising Will Grow in Popularity
We’ve all seen them: ads on the homepage of a website that look like a natural part of the site.
You can expect to see a lot more of them in the coming year.
They’re called “native ads” because they don’t look like ads. They appear to be a natural part of the website.
But if you click on one of those ads, the publisher of the website earns a nominal fee.
They’re going to rise in popularity over the coming year for a couple of reasons.
First, they offer the visitor a better experience because they’re not based on interruption marketing. Some publishers who might be reluctant to embrace video ads will look to native ads as a monetization alternative.
Second, they offer a great way for advertisers to promote their brand. That’s because native ads often use clickbait headlines that help marketers reel in prospects.
It’s not uncommon for native ad copywriters to employ “old school” marketing headlines that make people sit up and take notice. For example: “Here’s What Your Credit Card Company Won’t Tell You.”
Those kinds of headlines can attract quite an audience. And build a business.
Native ads a very easy to run and they work.
3. Big Data Will Be a Big Deal
Good marketers don’t just focus on reaching as many people as possible. They focus on reaching as many of the right people as possible.
It does little good to run an ad for kitty litter in front of someone who’s allergic to cats.
That’s why marketers do a lot of up-front research to target their ads to exactly the right people. They don’t want to waste ad spend by running ads in front of consumers who aren’t even part of their target market.
In the new year, you can expect to see advertisers take that policy up a notch. They’re going to do more micro-targeting.
For example, they’ll use marketing data from different sources to determine that women ages 18-25 who frequently visit the website Elite Daily are also interested in cheap kitty litter. They’ll run ads for cheap kitty litter targeting only that group.
Of course, to make that determination, they’ll enlist the aid of Big Data. If you’re not familiar with the term, “Big Data” is just a high-tech way of describing a huge database that stores millions of rows of relevant information (in this case, marketing information).
Advertisers will use Big Data to cross reference data gleaned from multiple sources so that they can run online ads that are targeted to a very specific subset of their market.
The result: a higher ROI as advertising dollars are spent on only the most likely prospects.