By Adam 
Getting your brand out into the public domain is a lot more complicated than it once was. About twenty years ago there were three main ways of advertising your product: print, radio or television. Granted there were a few other niche areas like cinema or billboards, but the reality was that the bulk of the advertising spends went between those three main platforms. The advent of digital however brought with it a whole new set of options. Because digital is a very broad category that contains a huge number of sub-categories and options – it is a broad church. So, if you are looking to spend some advertising budget digitally, here are a few areas that you might want to consider.
Social
Platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have grown massively in the last decade and they now offer brands one of the best profiled and largest audiences available. Their sheer size and reach but the depth of their databases means that social media advertising has become a very popular place for brands to spend. The reach is huge, the targeting is impressive and the return on spend tends to be very good.
Paid Search
Discoverability is a big thing for websites and most spend a lot of search engine optimization. The goal of SEO is to get your page at the top of the list that is returned by Google or Bing or one of the others. But there is another way to get to the top of the list and that is to buy keywords and get to the top of the list as paid search. It is where you want to be, it is generally cheap because you can operate on a pay per click model and it puts your brand right in front of people who are looking for it.
Banners
Banner advertising is the traditional way people advertise on digital platforms. Old school premium campaigns still exist but now most people look to use programmatic solutions that offer a more targeted audience and a much better CPM rate. Programmatic advertising is an online exchange that matches the needs of the publisher (who is essentially the supplier of advertising inventory) with those of the brand (who are the demand source), to secure the best deal for both parties. Because supply far outweighs demand the average CPM rate has dropped alarmingly in the last five years, but it is simply what the market has dictated.
Video
As the video starts to play an increasingly large role in the digital space, so pre-roll and in-roll advertising is the latest form of advertising to grab the attention of media buyers. These are simply video advertisements that accompany video clips. One of the big advantages of this type of advertising is that it cannot be blocked by ad-blockers. In short, if you want to view the content then you have to sit through the advertisement. This means that the brand gets good views and interactions. It also means that the publisher is able to charge much higher rates for advertising. Another win for everyone.
SME Paid Under
Sitetrail Research Team