• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Online ads: Agencies on hot seat to create action works

Online ads: Agencies on hot seat to create action works

As companies navigate toward increasing their ads online, either to follow trend, increase brand awareness or boost product sales with unclear measurement on return on investment (RoI), the development now compels agencies to create ads that call for action. Due to increase in internet usage, analysts are predicting growth in online advertising over the next five years.

Recently, Zenith Optimedia, a media agency that offers full spectrum of marketing communication, projected that online advertising, a fastest growing medium, which grew 16.9 percent in 2014, was estimated to grow 15 percent over the next two years.

With increasing spend on online advertising, CEOs and CMOs will require results to defend the budget, apart from just clicking as a measurement. An analyst says advertisers would require creative online ads that would move consumers to take action, saying the objective of advertisement is sales apart from brand building.

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In order to create presence online, some companies in the view of the analyst just transplant their print or TV ads to online medium.

In his article on Smallbiztrends.com, Marc Weisinger, director of marketing at Elite SEM, one of the fastest-growing search engine marketing agencies in the US, admitted that “online marketing has never been more important. Today, people turn to the web for even the most minor tasks. If something can be done online, that’s where people will accomplish it. And your business needs to be where the people are.

“But online marketing isn’t about creating a single standard campaign, getting ads on a few websites, and calling it a day. The process and strategies for successful online efforts have become incredibly sophisticated, especially with the growing demand for mobile options.”

On how to design online ads, Weisinger told marketers to first understand the goal of online advertising, saying “all business owners know that their company needs marketing to get in front of potential customers and create revenue, but many fail when it comes to strategising. A general ad campaign that hasn’t been tweaked for local markets or tested is unlikely to generate the kind of demand you seek.”

Advertisers, according to him, also need to define a game plan for overall strategy and for each type of campaign they plan to deploy. “The messaging and language throughout should be consistent and scale to local campaigns, which will allow you to target specific demographics in a meaningful way,” according to him.

Thirdly, ads should create effective calls for action. To reap the full benefits of your online marketing strategy, your ads should have a specific call to action. Effective calls to action should be: Visually appealling, brief, action-oriented and focused on value. The design should catch users’ attention and compel them to click.

Advertisers need to focus on their audience, he also advised, stating that businesses that struggle to create effective online ads do so because their strategies focus on telling potential customers what the company does, rather than how it can help them.

“Instead, focus your messaging around users and what problem or challenge you’re solving in their lives,” he said.