Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Demand generation and search campaigns
Demand generation is a digital marketing strategy that aims to create brand awareness, generate leads, and drive qualified traffic to your website. It involves every stage of the customer journey, from bringing an unknown consumer to your website to converting them into a paying customer. You can use demand generation in your search campaigns.
Outbound advertising
One way of generating and growing demand in the market is to use outbound advertising techniques in your search campaign.
With outbound advertising, you can feed the search funnel by targeting pre-defined audience groups with video, audio, images, or text ads on different websites, social media platforms, and mobile apps.
In an outbound advertising campaign, the advertiser targets audiences and pushes their message 'out' to potential customers. The advertiser initiates the contact with the customer. For example, the advertiser may target them with a text or video ad. When they view the ad, the customer can click through and visit the website immediately. Alternatively, they may view the ad or video and visit the website later.
Inbound advertising
The opposite of outbound advertising is inbound advertising. In an inbound advertising campaign, consumers come to a brand or company looking for something. For example, they may want to learn more about a product or service you offer after reading one of your blogs. With inbound advertising, the customer initiates the contact.
Outbound advertising vs. search engine marketing
How does search engine marketing relate to outbound marketing?
Search engine marketing places online ads in search engine results pages (SERPs). It tends to serve ads to people who are actively seeking your product and who demonstrate a certain amount of consumer intent for your products or services. The search network is mainly used to reach people at the end or near the end of the buyer’s journey.
Outbound advertising uses a variety of channels to serve ads to people who are on websites and match your audience targeting criteria. Outbound channels include:
- Video
- Audio
- Display
- Native advertising
- Digital PR, and
- Paid social advertising
The consumers that outbound techniques reach may not display as much intent for your product as a searcher, but they fit your target audience profile and may become customers in the future.
For that reason, advertisers need to build awareness through their outbound campaigns, so consumers recognize the brand. They also need to build consideration, so consumers find out more about their offering and will search for them in the future.
Outbound advertising can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey, but its strength is in reaching people at the beginning of their journey.
The goal of outbound advertising is to generate demand for a product or service, which can create buyer intent as target audiences see your ads. In time, this buyer intent can lead to more search traffic and sales as people move through the buyer process.
Value of video, display, and native advertising
Video, display, and native advertising are important outbound channels. They can put your ad onto thousands of websites and mobile apps, including large websites and smaller, niche ones. They can position your ad close to related content and put it in front of interested audiences.
Video, audio, native, and display prospecting campaigns should be viewed as awareness-building, upper-funnel activities. The KPIs you choose for these campaigns should reflect this.
Benefits
You can use video, audio, display, native, and paid social advertising to support an overall search marketing strategy. The benefits of using these channels include that they:
- Increase brand awareness and create and grow demand by driving reach among your target audience
- Drive brand consideration or product from the demand in the market
- Create purchase intent for products or services
- Increase reach (broad or narrow) for your content and brand within a target audience, and drive frequency of exposure
- Re-engage with customers and others who recently engaged with your content or website
- Offer advertisers multiple types of ad formats to choose from
- Can be cost-effective in terms of media and production costs in comparison with traditional outbound methods like TV, radio, print, and outdoor advertising
Display and video advertising challenges
As with any type of advertising, you may face certain challenges in relation to display and video advertising when planning your activities and setting objectives and expectations. Try to mitigate these challenges if you can. Here are some of the key challenges to be aware of:
- Ad blockers
- Poor audience targeting
- Ineffective creative formats, images, and messaging
- Lack of cut through (creatively and in terms of relevancy to the audience)
- Overuse of ad-serving frequency (banner blindness), and
- Data privacy and cookie restrictions
Brooke Hess
Digital Marketing Strategist and VP of Paid Media (NP Digital)
Brooke Hess is a highly skilled and passionate digital marketer with an extensive background in the paid media space. While leading a team of Directors across strategy, paid social, paid search, and programmatic media, Brooke oversees paid media strategy for priority clients and develops effective strategies for new clients. Brooke is also recognized as a high achiever in providing effective educational opportunities for paid media professionals to ensure they get the most from their paid media strategies.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
