What is display advertising?
Display advertising is visual based advertising through the use of images, video, animations and audio. These ads are published on websites across the internet.
Display ads are banner ads, and include many different sizes. The most popular sizes are 300×250 and 728×90.
Display advertising is a great medium for businesses to build brand awareness with general messaging. It is also a great medium for businesses looking to connect with past website visitors through retargeting.
What is social advertising?
Social advertising is advertising that uses social platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to deliver marketing communications. The purpose of advertising on these platforms is to build your brand online, and drive traffic to your website.
It involves building ads and selecting your targeting parameters within that platform. Each platform has its own targeting parameters, and this is based on how the social platform utilizes user information.
LinkedIn ad
Instagram ad
Why display?
Display advertising is a medium that allows businesses to promote their brand across the internet. This gives businesses the opportunity to reach a much larger audience than other forms of online advertising. It is said that you can reach over 90% of people who surf the web, globally. This makes display advertising very popular, especially for businesses looking to build brand awareness. With many targeting options; including website targeting, retargeting, and search targeting, you can reach customers at every stage in the customer funnel.
Historically, display advertising has been highly complicated, expensive and time consuming which has prohibited many businesses from even trying. Adacado solves these issues by making it easy, and accessible for all businesses.
Adacado is built for businesses of any size. The average CPM rate for display ads through Adacado ranges from $5-$6. As well, Adacado provides you with the ability to build your creative for free.
Adacado provides you with free templates to build your ads so that you don’t have to worry about hiring a creative designer. All you need to do is select your creative template, add your images/text, choose your media settings, and hit publish.
Getting started with display advertising is easy and all you need is a landing page. You don’t need a ton of content to get started, as long as you have a clear call-to-action that leads the user to your offering.
Why social?
Social advertising is a great medium if you are looking to segment your campaigns by audience. Social media is largely consumed by younger generations, however, you can find older generations on YouTube and Facebook. That said, each platform is suited for targeting different kinds of audiences.
A couple examples of social media platforms include, Instagram and LinkedIn. The majority of Instagram users fall in the 25-34 age range, followed by 18-24. If you’re looking to advertise to a younger audience this would be the platform of choice. There are different ad formats to choose from such as image, video, and carousel ads. Depending on what you are looking to promote, a carousel ad would be optimal for a business selling products.
LinkedIn is another viable choice for social media advertising. The majority of LinkedIn users fall in the 46-55 age range, followed by 36-45. As you can already tell, the demographic on LinkedIn is much more mature and is primarily a business audience. There are different format options available such as image and video ads.
Another major difference between social media advertising and other forms of online advertising, is the “social” aspect. Social media is a platform for people to share interests, and engage in conversation. If your advertising is executed well, you may get people talking about your brand. This opens up potential for the virality effect. However, you want to make sure the effect is positive.
Lastly, engaging in social media advertising opens up the opportunity to directly engage with your audience. You also have the ability to listen to what people are saying about you and respond accordingly.
Ultimately, your business will grow its social media presence by being present in the social space.
Display vs Social – Why you should invest in display advertising
Display and social are both great mediums to advertise on and should be used in conjunction with one another. That said, if you are looking to get started with something that is easy, affordable and results driven then display is the best medium for that.
Display advertising sees on average between 0.39-1.08% CTR, whereas social media platforms such as Instagram only see on average 0.22% CTR. Further, Instagram’s reach is limited to users of Instagram, whereas you can target anyone on the internet with display. This is the same for all social media platforms.
With display you can build very targeted ads using dynamic creative. These ads reflect customer preferences and browsing behavior online. On social platforms you are much more limited with your targeting options, and can only reach users specific to the social platform you are advertising on.
To advertise on social media, you need to have content and a decent following to build trust with your audience. In other words, your ad isn’t likely to be successful if a customer visits your social page after and doesn’t see any content. For display, all you need is an ad and a landing page.
Lastly, display advertising allows you to work with many different ad sizes. These sizes vary depending on where you want to deliver your ads (desktop or mobile). Ad sizes for social media advertising are restricted to social platforms exclusively, thus building out your content can be a bit trickier.
