Macy is a content marketing consultant with over five years of experience creating content for dozens of industries including home services, recreation, and education. She’s written about every marketing topic under the sun, from SEO to AI to email marketing. Her work has been featured by Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, Entrepreneur, Clutch, and more. In her free time, Macy enjoys crafting, reading comic books, and walking her dog Daisy.
As you look for how to get the most bang for your buck, you may be wondering — should you invest in traditional or digital advertising? Will you see higher returns from radio commercials or email campaigns?
Whether you’re a large company or a small one, just beginning your advertising journey or re-evaluating your options, digital advertising is a varied, cost-efficient solution to reach your audience.
We’ve collected some of the biggest advantages of digital advertising here to help you decide if the digital route is right for you. Keep reading to discover what they are!
What is digital advertising?
Digital advertising is the act of leverage paid promotion through online channels. As a subset of digital marketing — the overall process of developing your brand online — digital advertising describes the specific online actions you take to raise brand awareness.
While traditional advertising uses channels like TV, newspaper, and direct mail, digital advertisements often appear as:
Search ads
Display ads
In-stream ads
Social media ads
Mobile advertisements
You can use both traditional and digital advertising channels in your marketing campaign to maximize your return on investment (ROI). However, digital advertising offers specific advantages.
4 advantages of digital advertising
In the U.S. alone, the average screen time is 7 hours per day. That means there are a lot of opportunities to reach people through digital advertisements.
A successful advertising campaign depends on reaching the right people in the right place at the right time. By going digital, you can increase the likelihood of all three.
Here are four advantages of digital advertising:
1. Lower cost of entry
Smaller businesses often find traditional advertising channels financially out of reach.
While there’s something undeniably compelling about a glossy magazine ad, that something certainly isn’t the price. On top of setup costs, a national magazine campaign costs an average of around $250,000 per ad.
Digital advertising, on the other hand, lets you start at a far lower cost. Most of these advertising options enable you to choose your budget — you determine how much you want to spend on an ad campaign and allocate funds accordingly.
Even if you need help with your PPC campaigns, the cost is much lower than running most traditional ads. For example, at WebFX, PPC management costs $650 per month, plus ad spend.
When you factor in that digital ads have a better reach and more refined targeting (to reach the right people), it’s definitely a more cost-effective option.
Digital advertising lets you meet your audience where they’re at.
With traditional advertising, potential customers have to pick up the magazine or turn on the channel that’s running your advertisement. While you can invest in multiple ad campaigns to reach an international audience, traditional channels still have a limited reach.
Digital advertising, on the other hand, lets your ads reach people across the world as easily as they reach people down the street. Rather than the people who read a particular magazine, watch a specific TV show, or drive a specific route, your audience becomes everyone on the Internet.
You can keep your focus local or extend your advertising worldwide.
3. Ability to easily measure ROI
If you’re going to invest time, money, and effort into promoting your business, you want to know that it’s working. With traditional advertising, it’s challenging to track your marketing and know if you’re getting a good return.
That’s one of the biggest advantages of digital advertising. While the ability to track engagement with traditional channels is limited at best, digital channels let you track everything from clicks to conversions.
Since the analytics measure your results in real time, you can respond to them faster. Instead of waiting until the end of the campaign to decide on changes, you have the flexibility to fine-tune your approach as you go.
That means you can get a better ROI from your advertising.
4. Increased conversion rate
While you can achieve a certain level of customer segmentation with traditional advertising, digital advertising lets you identify and address a narrower audience.
Reaching an audience interested in hearing about your company’s products or services will let you better target specific leads. Rather than casting a wide net in the hopes of your message finding someone interested, you can target the people most likely to convert.
Digital advertising also saves people from having to follow up in a different medium. While customers might find a TV commercial intriguing, you have to maintain their interest long enough to open another device and look up your website.
When they see your online ad, all they have to do it click.
Elevate your digital advertising with WebFX
When you’re ready to start promoting your business, digital advertising lets you jump in right away. Whatever channels you want to pursue and however much you want to spend, you can reach your audience immediately.
WebFX offersprofessional digital advertising services to help take your campaign to the next level. From PPC to social media advertising, we can help you promote your business on the web to drive more revenue.