Reasons for Online Advertising

But many companies want their name out there, if it is through classical media or if it is through online media. Now creating brand awareness can be done in different ways, depending on what you exactly want and depending on your product and/or service. The more distinct or simple the product/service the relatively easier it is.

To start off you want to create brand recognition, Coca-Cola, Audi, DELL and Apple are good examples as everything starts with a strong logo. Coca-Cola is so recognizable that just the name alone makes you recognize it, the four rings of the German car giant Audi are so recognizable that you don’t have to look twice, even though you might not be familiar with the exact specifications or qualities of their products. 

After this step brand awareness comes in, you would like your target group to become aware of the qualities of your product “the refreshing taste” of Coca Cola, or the excellent driving qualities of Audi. This is all in an effort to make your target group to choose for you when they are going to make that final decision.

Increase sales.

Of course, a company likes to sell their products, and maybe rather than just creating brand awareness, it can advertise just to increase sales. Many ads on google shopping are targeted this way, a product, a price “but me now”. This will work mainly for companies that can clearly offer higher quality goods, or (the same) goods for a lower price than the competition.

But companies have another trick up their sleeves when it comes to online advertising specifically. They will offer the same product as the competition for a higher price and advertise it more aggressively hoping to cut out the search results of the competition.

Off course increasing sales is an important goal for companies by itself, but blindly pouring money into for example google ad-words or Facebook advertisement is not going to help a great deal. Costs per click are high and when not set right with Budget, Region(s), time of day, target group in mind it will not be a very effective tool. In my professional experience, many companies that request my help are in trouble because they are spending x hundreds or x thousands of euro’s a day in Google advertisements and not seeing any real results.

Relating these goals and translating them into online advertising strategies you will get very different campaigns. With creating brand awareness you would like your page to be seen and would most likely not care about clicks that much, let alone sales since for that campaign it is not the goal. What would be interesting is getting your name out there, being seen by as many of your target group as possible.

For an Increase in sales campaign, you would most likely want to create an offer, a link directly to the product in your online shop or a direct buy link. Here you have to really convince your target group to buy your product (preferably on the spot). In this case conversions from your ads, value and costs per conversion would be interesting metrics to keep track of performance wise.

Methodology another key element like mentioned before is not that you set up a campaign, but how you do it. Collecting the right data for your campaign to give it the right feedback is key. In all, I can advise to set up the Use and goals of the campaign first, Analyse before you begin, what your competitors are doing, which regions and times of day are the best to advertise, via which media do you reach your target group. How do you create ads that go down well with your target group, set up a measurement plan and only then start your campaign? This, of course, will be some work, but keeping track and being able to adjust accordingly is key to becoming better at advertising and gaining more from it, whatever your goal is.