In a 2014 study commissioned by Brand Science and Microsoft, the study shows that not only does online advertising deliver excellent ROI efficiency, but it also provides extra value to your other spend in the media. Can be read here [PDF].

In basic terms the report shows that the difference in ROI is striking when a campaign has an online element against those that do not have any online element. When online advertising is added into the mix, the return on investment is much improved.

From a dental point of view, this means that when a brand sponsors an event or runs a conference for their clients, the marketing campaign needs to cover all mediums.

Over recent years, this is the way the online marketing world has evolved. Brands within dentistry have been hesitant to spend all their budget on online marketing but will often use some of their budget online, to compliment campaigns in magazines, events they are hosting or to promote attendance at an exhibition.

Businesses can see that they need coverage across all mediums, their customers are constantly using and sharing digital content and therefore digital is becoming as important as non-digital channels when looking to achieve maximum ROI on their marketing spend.

Therefore, digital is certainly important in the marketing cycle and plays a part in helping produce results from non-digital media channels. This is another reason that online marketing is here to stay. 

In Part 9 of this series, we take a look at engagement and the number of options we have to engage with potential customers. 

Online advertising lets you know a customer's exact level of engagement. You can see how many impressions and clicks an ad has and where the ad has been clicked. This again gives you the marketer, a lot more information than ever before.

Although the click to a landing page is a form of interaction and engagement, the measure of engagement is often based on other criteria and seen as a compliment or an alternative to measuring the traditional click which has been historically the first form of engagement taken into account. So this means this could be via content, ads or audience interaction.

You therefore can see what has been effective for your product or brand in achieving engagement; comments, impressions, shares, recommendations, social media, contact forms, competition entries etc

You might have circulation and readership data for a print publication, but you can’t know how much time customers spend interacting with your ad, how much time they spent on your website, if they researched more of your products, and whether that ad led to conversions. In fact, with print it is impossible to even see if someone has seen the ad in the magazine. Print advertising is often just following the old adage of “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” (John Wanamaker (1838-1922) At least with online ads, you get to see how much engagement there has been.

An online presence gives you all of a whole range of valuable data and places you in a position to learn where your most engaged prospects live, work or interact. With a bit of research you can find out where your potential customers congregate, whether that is a forum, social media or a marketplace like Amazon or Ebay.

This access to data means you can start to reach people where they are most engaged and where they are genuinely interested in receiving your message.

When using social media, online ad engagement can then be used for engagement retargeting, which is now used by all major retailers and marketplace sites.

To summarise this part  of the series, online advertising has all the right skills not only to attract your potential customers but to get them properly engaged and totally involved in what product or service you are looking to offer. Online advertising opens a world or opportunity and options to get your client engaged within your story. 

The image above greeted me this morning in an email from Google. The email read “With last week's announcement of YouTube TV, the lines between TV and online video continue to blur.”

Read more here. I thought this was perfectly linked to part 8 of the blog on Reach and how attracting interest in your product or service needs to incorporate so many different mediums to be effective. 

So according to Google, people are watching less live TV and turning to their computers, smartphones or tablets for their favorite shows, music, and to access their news.

Marketing professionals therefore need to make sure that they are staying in front of their customers and tracking their behaviour. So as all the latest stats suggest, your customers are online, so you should be too, and sooner rather than later!

Moving online gives you access to a global audience (if that is your target) and it means your ads can be working for you 24 hours a day. The options are practically limitless when it comes to your reach capabilities when you take your campaign online.

This means that your reach increases dramatically once you start the online advertising journey, as discussed previously you have a lot more control over your ads and they are building up impressions and clicks 24 hours a day, reaching unique 

Online advertising enables you to promote your products and services locally, or even worldwide. With the print media you can only reach fix number of customers limited to a certain location, but online offers you a global opportunity and certainly a larger number of options than has ever been possible before.

So with a modern marketing plan, your reach can be greater than ever before. Your online advertising plan can incorporate social media, video, blogs, plus of course specialist sites for your particular niche. Utilising all these methods of retargeting, means you can reach your target audience a number of times a month and hopefully get your message across to your desired audience.

Thanks for reading.

Part 7 on Affordability Here.

Compared to TV or print ads, online ads are still relatively low-cost for companies who are looking to reach their desired market.

Additionally, online advertising tools give you the ability to lower your budget or even stop your campaign within a few seconds. Print or TV operates on contract basis, and when you are in a contract, things are not always as flexible.

Because you are spending less with online ads and have the flexibility to reduce costs or spend more instantly, advertising online gives you a loads of options for your marketing campaign.

With the added flexibility that online ads provide, the amount of options you suddenly have are a huge advantage. The ability to publish a number of ads at once, or change the ad as often as you want is a huge advantage. This flexibility is all part of the package and therefore the costs don’t rise. If you advertise on a billboard or in print, you can’t adapt your message instantly and you certainly can’t change the message as you go along.

According to this article on whether online advertising is expensive, which I have to say does go off some generalisations and is US centric they sum up their article with the following statement:- “Offline, traditional marketing costs an average of $22.00 per impression as opposed to $3.45 per impression with online marketing.”

Online advertising reflects modern society in being instant, flexible and results driven! If you are looking for value in your marketing, you have to be looking online.

"Flexibility - the ability to be easily modified."

Online advertising campaigns can be adjusted with a few clicks or changes to a banner.
You have the flexibility to respond to incoming data and make changes instantly. Similarly, you always have the ability to pause a campaign or adjust your marketing plan within minutes. This flexibility allows you to stay in front of your customers– anticipate customer needs and adjust your ads before anyone even notices.
 

At GDPUK we offer extra flexibility because our software gives the customer a number of options when they book a space on our site. Via our DFP software, our customers can actually run more than one advert at once in a given month. This means one of our customers can actually advertise two things or more from the same booking. One of our clients is currently using this method to advertise a number of offers at once. Added value and flexibility from GDPUK!
 

Having the option to change or adapt a campaign as you go along is another advantage to online advertising. Once you send an ad to a magazine it can’t be changed but with advertising online you can always experiment and adapt as the campaign develops. Online advertising definitely provides flexibility.

Part 5. Brand Awareness can be read here.

In part 5 of the blog series, we are looking at brand awareness and its part in the online advertising journey.

Online advertising can be used to drive traffic to your site and build brand awareness. Effectively targeted campaigns can create brand influencers and reach complementary audiences.

The online space that gets booked, helps to establish your online presence, and get your potential customers / consumers excited and interested about who you are and what you have to offer. As mentioned in previous blogs, online advertising enables brands to focus on their ideal audience and tailor messages that improve both recall and engagement with the brand.

To be easily recognisable has to be the aim for every brand within their sector, which then builds your brand awareness. Creating brand awareness is one of the key steps in promoting a product. Brand awareness is particularly important when launching new products and services; and for a company to differentiate similar products and services from its competitors.

So using online advertising can be part of building brand awareness and making your target audience more aware of your brand. The more aware your audience are of your brand, the easier it is to convert the awareness into sales.

What options do we have available to create and improve brand awareness?

• Traditional advertising
• Online Advertising
• Sponsoring an event.
• Publicity stunt
• Word of mouth
• Reviews / testimonials
• Content / Blogs

So as you can see when building a brand, we have a number of options to play with but  what is the role of online advertising?

Online advertising plays a critical role in brand management and awareness whether at the corporate, retail or product level. With the help of advertising you can increase your brand's value and then it helps you to gain the new customers that we all look for :)

The end goal of any online advertising is to eventually convert all leads that you gather to actual sales. Whether it be an awareness or educational campaign, all businesses engage in advertising to ultimately generate sales! By creating a strong presence online, with whatever medium you choose, your investment in advertising and marketing will produce results and ultimately bring the extra revenue we all strive for.

So online advertising becomes a major part of building a brand and brand awareness. Online needs to be taken as seriously as the other more traditional mediums in helping to build that ultimate goal we all share of making your brand synonymous with the product or service you offer.

Thanks for reading part 5.

As a marketer, do you know the profile of the perfect customer for your business?
Of course you do :)

Online advertising gives you the ability to target and retarget the ideal prospects you identify for your business.

When advertising online, you will choose a website or community where you believe that your perfect customer will be a user or reader. Online ads reduce the chances of advertising to the wrong group of people, thus wasting your budget and time. This means that your campaign can be targeted at your perfect customer and help you reach your desired target audience.

When it comes to social media advertising, retargeting will serve ads based on prior engagement, enabling you to identify your ideal customer profile. Once you know what your customers look like, you will know just who to target and where to find all similar users online, making sure they too are being served your ads. You can focus on customers based on their geographic location, gender, age, behaviour patterns on social media and special interests.

This means that when for example you want to attract women to your latest endodontic course, you have the ability to target a population as specific as women, age 40-65, who have endodontics listed as their profession or an interest. This will help to make your campaign extremely targeted and hopefully successful.

The ability to target your perfect customer, whether through a specific special interest website or through social media, gives you a whole variety of advertising options that have never been possible before. Popular options include display, search, email marketing and affiliate marketing. This gives advertisers the chance to communicate with the audience they want to target, using the right technique, whatever their particular objectives are for that campaign.


Thanks for reading.

Part 2 of our series on Online Advertising can be found here.

Part 4 - Creative Opportunities.

Insight: - "The capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something."

Welcome to part 2 of our series on online advertising. In this second blog, we look at insight and what an important element of advertising it is. Insight in advertising is seen as a huge advantage of modern day advertising.

We all strive for more insight in our lives, working out why things have gone a certain way, a certain decision has been made and looking to understand things fully. This is also true in relation of social media and advertising. The modern world strives for insight and analysis into everything we do and think.

Online advertising provides you with endless insight allowing you to become a more effective marketer. Marketers went from having no data 20 years to more data than we know what to do with. Online advertising has helped solve this problem because of the visibility and access to data and of course reminds us of the famous line from John Wanamaker:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

With online advertising you begin to get an idea of where your traffic is coming from and who is clicking on the banners or social media posts. This is the first major advantage of online advertising, it provides us with incredible insight and a stronger knowledge base than ever before.

Therefore, this makes online advertising unique. Running a campaign online provides us with the chance to show activity throughout the entire online consumer journey. Common activities include sales, newsletter sign-ups, the number of times an advert is displayed (ad impressions), the number of times people click on an advert to visit a microsite or landing page (click through), the number of times people have interacted with an advert, sign-ups and how much they have interacted on social media.

Although having more knowledge is not always beneficial, when we are looking to market our brand or product we want as much knowledge as possible. So therefore having access to a range of data and information about our campaigns is a fantastic improvement on marketing in the past and gives online advertising a huge advantage.

Thanks for reading.

Part 1 Here.
Part 3. Targeting.

About GDPUK

As mentioned previously, 2017 marks the 20th year of GDPUK.

GDPUK.com is for dentists and dental professionals to discuss all aspects of their profession, their practice and their business, centred on the UK. Subjects dissected have been diverse, from tips on simple techniques to guidance on buying major equipment, to discussions on the various practice management software packages, and of ongoing developments in British dental politics.

Moderated in Manchester, England by Dr Tony Jacobs BDS, the Group was started in Summer 1997, and continues to grow rapidly.

GDPUK.com also publishes UK dental news, and has had many exclusive stories, as well as being able to publish the latest news relevant to dentistry before other dental news providers. In addition GDPUK blogs, both editorial and product updates are well read throughout the dental profession and industry. A unique feature is the @DentistGoneBadd visual blog.

The group now has nearly 10,000 members, and attracts interest and sponsorship from major companies involved in the dental trade.

Blog Series

To mark this anniversary, we thought we would put together a 20 (get it!) part series of blogs about online advertising and all the advantages of it. Over the next 19 blogs, I am going to look into detail at the reasons that online advertising is effective and why a medium like an online community can be perfect for your brand …. Especially If you are looking to reach a target audience.

Over the series of blogs, we will explore all the elements of online advertising from how you can be creative, the opportunity to increase brand awareness, plus the adaptability and flexibility of online advertising.

Advertising online can no longer be viewed as a new medium, it is extremely well established but we hope this series can convince the sceptics but also prove useful to anyone who is looking to do some powerful marketing of their brand or product in the year ahead. Please get in touch we any queries or questions.

Hope you enjoy this series of blogs. Thanks for reading.

Happy New Year.