What is Advertising? | 11 Most Prominent Types of Online Advertising

What is Advertising? Find out What are Popular Means, Platforms, Forms and Types of Advertising !

 

What is Advertising? common forms and types of online advertising : Advertising is a form of marketing where an individual/ business/ professional/company or seller tries to showcase their products (using advertising platforms or forms ) or business in such a way that it can effectively promote/sale or create an interest in buyers or its potential customers for a short or long period depending upon the scope and size of the advertised product.

 

 

Here in this post we will limit our discussion to only ‘online advertising’ rather ‘all advertising’ forms in the world.

 

 

Advertising Products

We all know that consumer goods, cars, phones, accessories are the most advertised products in the market.

In advertising term, a product could be a live person or material thing or even non material things. If a celebrity, singer, author, or a professional business man is being presented or written about in such a way that people get impressed/ influenced/ curious/ interested in that individual, it means he/she is being advertised or promoted through paid promotions.

 

Advertising platforms or media

 

 

Everyone of us is very well familiar with regular household goods and consumer related products being advertised on Tele-Vision, and in Newspapers, and Magazines. While smaller business entities and shop owners try to attract you with a small budgeted advertising campaigns through graffiti on the street walls of your town.

 

These all above mentioned means are called advertising platforms or advertising media and by using them a business or company advertises their products or services.

The other Popular forms and terms closely related (and mixed) to Advertising

Marketing and business are very closely related with advertising and survival of all is dependant on each others. Without marketing and business there won’t be any need of advertising, and without advertising, it would be very difficult for marketing and business to survive their very existence .

If we move a little further, branding, promotions, and public media are the entities that are also closely related with advertising. They are the ways and carriers of advertising for without them advertising can’t be executed successfully to the desired extent. 

 

Types of online advertising – Best forms and means of online advertising

 

 

In the recent years, Online Advertising has become very vast and complex as the new types of online advertising are being invented and discovered constantly, resulting in a more complicated structure of advertising. There are the other factors and catalysts that are also involved in it a lots and they drive online advertising to a new horizon. As we all know, social media and social networking have made the most powerful impact on online advertising. Social networking and Web 2.0 has been the biggest change maker in this decade. They have impacted whole of the Internet world and ‘Online Advertising’ is no exception to that.

 

Online advertising can be divided in two major parts based on the direct cost involved in for executing it:

 

1. Paid online advertising (used mainly by companies, marketers, Groups,  and professional experts ) , and
2. Free Online advertising (prevalent among individuals, businessmen, professionals, and small-sized companies )  

Ok, we will start discussing about the types of online advertising and will share brief details for each of the type separately.

Well, there could be countless types of online advertising, but we will discuss here only about the main types of online advertising. Ok, lets begin with the most common and basic types:

#1.Banner advertising – Displaying banners on website and blogs

 

Advertising online by displaying banners of your website or products on others web pages is a face of one of the traditional and most common way to advertise on the Internet. Banner advertising was flourishing in that times when majority of the advertisers was not aware about any other forms of online advertising that were so easy, effective, and commonly available .

Banner advertising is still successful, but it has shrunk a bit and changed its shape and expressions to deal with the new changes in Internet marketing and advertising industry.

#2. Search Engine Advertising – Driving Search Engine traffic to landing web pages (paid n’ SERP’s )

As one of the Most popular forms of online advertising today, Search Engine Advertising is very effective and widely used advertising type . You only pay whenever a customer/potential buyer/user visits your web page . Most of the online businesses use Google’s world-famous paid advertising platform: Google AdWords.

Plus points of using AdWords for your online advertising campaigns :

• Your website or product/business web pages get advertising benefits instantly as and when you activate your AdWords account.  Your website gets huge volume of traffic, it starts showing on Google AdWords affiliate advertising networks as well as in SERP’s ( Search Engine Result Pages displayed in Google search when you search/type for any keywords/phrases )
• Customization facility : Google AdWords is a very potent advertising tools and most powerful of ’em all ! AdWords offers you great flexibility, freedom, analytics, and customization features in order to enhance your advertising campaigns.
• Advertise wherever and whenever you want – Literally ! Why pay for USA clicks when most of your potential customers resides in UK, Europe, or Asia? Yes, you can customize your online advertising projects as per : Time/space/money/ad networks/display devices.
• Timely ads : define or set exact time period when you want to display your ads.  Space : Set the geographical location where you want to display your ads in. Money : Fix and define your budget for each ads/webpage separately. Ad networks: Choose yourself that websites only for them you want to see your ads on. Display devices: where you want your ads to appear? on Desktop, Laptops, notebooks, or mobile devices? 
• Google AdWords offers you great command on how so much you can optimize your advertising benefits. You can experiment with them continuously, and set campaigns that gives you maximum advertising profits.

 

#3. Social Media Advertising – Lead Generation through Social Networking Sites

 

Social networking sites have caught people’s imagination to a degree of obsession and now it has become a common norm that every one spends some time on social media and networking sites for various reasons.

Nowadays every company, how so big or small,  has their own Fan page on the main social networking sites, like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest, etc, where they can get to connect with their potential and existing customers with a different perceptions, angles and aspects.

Social media sites are great places to advertise your products, business, or brand.

Companies hire separate social advertising agencies to create awareness about their brand among mass people. You can even use social networking sites for direct advertising, like Facebook, Tumblr are already open for providing paid advertising services to anyone – individual, professional, or business. But as you do for the SEO of your business website , you need to perform a well calculated social media optimization for your social activities to get the desired results out of your social media campaigning.

#4. Online advertising through eMail marketing, Newsletter, and mailing list subscription

Who says that email marketing is dead? Perhaps those people haven’t learned it well. Yes, in contrast to other means of online advertising, you have to master the art of email advertising.

email advertising is a very effective advertising technique, if executed well, to draw customer’s attention to your product, and some times your email marketing campaigns pay you off instantly on specific occasions depending upon your campaign types and users demands .

Anyways, e-mail advertising is comparatively cheaper, more effective, and very beneficial in many ways.

#5. Local search engine advertising – Get more filtered and relevant leads by attracting real local customers for your business

Local advertising is IN ! Google Places ( Google Maps ), and ‘Google Local’ revolutionized the way advertisers get their leads from Search engines, local  search engines, and local business directories. This is one of the best online advertising technique where you get the most relevant, filtered, and the kind of leads that could be converted into sales very fast and easily as your audience will be most likely to be interested in your products due to the location proximity of  your business with the inquirers .

This gives them a sense of reliability for your business that is based locally, and near by them their own living places.

#6. Video Advertising – Similar to advertising on TV, but with very very less cost compared to it.

Video sites are making fast movements for grabbing the advertising revenues share of TV and other public digital media. Due to the increased interest of common people who are now visiting more so often on Video Sharing Sites (You Tube, for ex.) and because of constantly rising trends in which social sites are offering online video watching/sharing facility to its users to provide them every type of entertainment they might think of !

YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Daily Motion are examples of a few video social sharing sites that have taken entertainment world by storm. Watching your favorite media channel, Entertainment TV channels, movies, songs on these video sites have become now a common thing.

End results for online advertisers? They get to advertise before the same TV, media channels viewers on these video networking websites with a cost that is 100-1000 times lesser than for those traditional live entertainment channels.

Online businesses create their professional video channels on these sharing sites and get several thousands of subscribers and millions of video views on their professionally created videos to allure the end users.

Online advertising on video sharing sites ? Free as well as paid, you can avail of any methods, it depends entirely on your budget. But, in any ways, you save a lot of money !

 

#7. Advertising online using content marketing techniques to drive a huge interest in your product over the whole of the Internet

 

Content marketing is not a very old advertising method, it has just become popular since the last decade when blogging and content writing gained a lot of craze on the Internet. It became a mandate for every online business to have their own company blog where users and customers could interact, complain, seek online help, or give a feed back on their products.

Sooner, companies started realizing the value of offering their users useful content and sharing with them meaning full content for free.

Content marketing became milestone advertising technique for inbound marketing, and it also became the much-needed effective way to connect with your customers and potential buyers to know their needs, interests, inclinations, and requirements more precisely . And it helped businesses a great deal in many ways to strengthen their marketing and brand making strategies more effective and result oriented.

For an example, many online service providing companies and businesses run professional blogs that post new contents regularly . They get good number of daily unique visitors on their blog, later on these users or visitors might turn into their customers. Apart from that, via blog’s email-subscription option, companies make mailing list with good numbers.  Then, through mailers and Newsletters, they further expand their online marketing campaigns that continues to grow till for ever.  Are you counting ? No use ! Benefits are countless in this!!

 

#8.  Online Advertising through distributing free ebooks, uploading free PDF and Word files on ‘online file sharing’ platforms

 

Everyone loves free stuff! This fact is used by all of big marketing and sales companies to allure their customers. ‘Buy 1 get 1 free’ instant hit formula has been tried and tested over and over again by marketing agencies to advertise for their client companies. In the same fashion there is a lot of scope for the online advertising where you are offering your readers and customers some useful and advantageous content in the name of free !

By distributing e-version of his best-selling book – ‘The Alchemist’ – for free, Paulo Coelho became the most successful and pioneer author on the Internet who had revolutionized the way ebooks are being sold on the Internet today !

He offered his e-book for free on the Internet to let the readers taste it,  and then it broke down all the records of selling paper book print version of the book once the e-book got popular among online users .

#9. Blog Commenting, Forum Posting, and Sponsored Blog Posting

Getting sponsored comments on your blogs, using online forum sites to promote your brand, and hiring paid bloggers who review your product in their own blogs with back links to your source – are some of the new trends that became good add-ons for online advertising. These were the by-products of the major advertising weapons invented by the revolution of social media and web 2.0 sites !

Newly invented advertising techniques that use content marketing for some quick benefits as mentioned below :

• Blog commenting is cost-effective, if done cleverly, gets huge targeted traffic towards your original web pages.
• Traffic received from blog commenting is fast and sustainable due to the blogs ever-updating nature. They get indexed fast by search engines and RSS feed burners.
• Is good for brand making of your official web page, or blog. It generates curiosity and interest among the readers.
• MUST be done carefully, otherwise it could do more harm than any good. Use good online content marketing services for blog commenting who provide manual/real blog comments and not from some kind of auto submission software which can get your content marked as spam. It will down your online reputation.

 

#10. Promoting Online by using Affiliate Marketing to Increase Sales with the help registered affiliates Who can Market your Products on a Commission basis

This technique of advertising – affiliate marketing – is almost as old as the Internet itself ! In this you can create an army for affiliate marketers for your business products. They will advertise and market your products or services to their own audience . This is such a beautiful way of advertising that you only have to pay them when they deliver actual sales to you!

The biggest advantage of affiliate based marketing is that : you only pay affiliates when they first get you paid by selling your products. Some cool advantages of affiliate marketing than the other means include:

• Once set up well, you don’t have to worry more about managing your  affiliates and resellers. You just have to sit back and take care of the backend. All the other activities are accomplished by the affiliates on your behalf. Even very small sized companies can run their own affiliate reseller programs easily without needing much investment and management.
• You don’t have to pay affiliates for the actual amount of the work they perform while advertising your products, you only pay them whenever they make a real sale. Even then you pay them a small share of the revenue they generate for you. In this way affiliate marketing is very profitable and cool concept for generating leads and sales in a very cost effective way.   

 

#11. Post Classified Ads on Online Advertising Sites- Generate Free leads and sales for your business and Products

Posting online ads has been the most popular and commonly used method to promote or sell products. In this way small businesses market themselves and create branding opportunities for their company. Publishing Advertisements online is so much simple, effective, and wide-spread that every traders do that .

• You can post unlimited advertisements using local classifieds sites for your locality. Yellow pages and business directories are also a good mean to spread the words about your company. There are countless number of business directory sites present today. You can make a good strategy to take advantage of this type of free advertising opportunities on the Internet in a hassle free way.
• Publishing Online Advertisements is mostly free and you won’t have to pay to post ads. You may only have to pay to external ad posters if you outsourcing this work. You can design a separate marketing campaign to get this done.