Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Outbound channels, when used correctly, are good at generating demand by raising awareness about products and services. Additional awareness can help generate demand in the market, and bring potential buyers into the funnel. An outbound strategy starts at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, and aims to expand the reach of the product and the company’s promotional material. Some of the main outbound channels to use at the top of the funnel are online display advertising, like banners and video advertising. Both display and video are similar in how they target and engage audiences as both are well suited to showing creative formats to people based on audience targeting criteria.
Effective video and online display advertising uses targeting criteria like audience characteristics, behaviors, locations, the devices they use, demographics, and interests to help show ads to a relatively precise segment or segments of people online. The goal is to target different segments with relevant and engaging creative formats designed to resonate with the audience and to bring them into the funnel and ultimately generate demand for your products and services from this audience group.
Display and Video advertising benefits
So, some of the key benefits of video and online display advertising include the following:
- Reach: A large number of people can be quickly reached in a cost-effective manner.
- Awareness: Awareness of product and service can be effectively driven using display ads as a means to generate demand.
- Branding: Display and video ads also have a direct impact on the company’s branding efforts. The audience can be easily exposed to the brand and brand colors many times.
- Influence: Since display and video ads can be engaging and impactful, they can influence customers who are already in the purchase funnel to ultimately take action at a later stage.
Display and video as assisting channels
When deciding how to measure the effectiveness of online display and video, it’s important to recognize that display and video is not closing channels. But they can help assist in driving conversions via closing channels by bringing people into the funnel. This makes online display and video an assisting channel.
This is an important consideration for campaign measurement. So, when assessing the impact of display and video activity, it’s important to look at assisting metrics like channels that drove first video views or visits to the site, or those that drive visits in the middle of the buyer’s journey in the lead up to a conversion rather than measuring display and video performance using direct conversion metrics. Choosing the most appropriate metrics and KPIs is essential to show the value of display.
Cathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Critically assess the digital channel mix
- Systematically analyse tactics and techniques used for demand generation
- Critically evaluate the impact of outbound and inbound marketing on demand generation
