One question you may be asking is whether you should be spending your budget on traditional channels or taking a more digital-first view. To compare the two, you might want to consider the following:

1. Spending money where your audience is

For a target audience of teens and millennials for example, a big shiny TV campaign may not be your best approach. Consider the fact that this audience watches 40% less television than they did five years ago. They spend their time online; your advertising messages need to reach them where they are for them to be effective.

You have a reality of options to understand the predominant channels used by your target audience, including audience statistics released by social media platforms and data provided by industry publications. You should also consider reaching out to your audience directly through polls, questionnaires and feedback, as well as examining your current referral traffic.

2. Engaging with your defined audience

Whilst the likes of press, TV, radio and print may have audience demographics that watch specific shows or read certain titles, above the line advertising is more about mass reach.

Targeted digital display advertising is exactly the opposite. It is targeted to reach a precise demographic of users on a more tailored and personalised level. You also have numerous options to reach different audiences, whether through demographic targeting, keyword targeting, contextual targeting, Geotargeting or Retargeting.

Remember, 72% of online users will only engage with ads that are relevant to them, meaning personal and tailored. It’s crucial to give your audience what they want.

3. Building brand awareness

Much of your considerations around opting for traditional forms of above the line advertising may focus on the notion of brand awareness.

What you may not have considered is the ability for targeted digital display ads to be used for this purpose and the ease at which you can get your message out to your potential customers at the top of your marketing funnel. Your approach to product marketing will define how well you do this.

4. Saving budget for performance

All good advertising needs good creative, whether TV ads or digital display ads.

Good creative costs money doesn’t it? For traditional ads it does, and you’ll likely need to work with an expensive creative agency for the output. For digital display ads on the other hand there are simple and intuitive solutions available on the market that enable you to build multiple digital display ads at scale, in minutes to be used across all of your display campaigns. It’s also a much more cost-effective solution than employing a creative agency to spend time tweaking and reformatting ads. This means your budget can go towards what really matters - enhancing the performance of campaigns, while still guaranteeing beautiful, effective and on-brand ads.

5. The promise of campaign agility

Once your traditional advertising campaign is live, there is little you can do to change things up in the face of poor performance.

Running targeted display campaigns is a much more fluid process with changes to creative, messaging and call to actions for example all possible once a campaign is up and running. The reporting on your campaigns will provide up-to-the-second insights to enable you to make live changes to your ads based on the insight derived from continuous A/B testing. This promises essential campaign agility to tweak and change campaigns as you go, ensuring you can generate as much performance as possible.

6. Building a rapport with your audience

We’ve already touched on the fact that consumers want personalised ads, but they also desire a consistent brand experience. Users that land on your website, simply won’t convert on their very first visit. In fact only around 2% of users do. It’s then the job of your display ads, through Retargeting, to re-engage with these users and guide them through their path to purchase.

The targeting element is key here as you’re targeting defined users and serving them with ads based on their activity on your website and what this illustrated about their intent. The ads will be hyper-relevant.

Get your approach to Retargeting right and it will be an extremely powerful advertising tool for your business.

7. Understanding campaign attribution

With multiple targeted campaigns running at the same time, you have the ability to attribute income to different strands of activity, whether Retargeting or Geotargeting for example.

This is even possible to attribute sales in your brick-and-mortar stores when you’re running Geofencing campaigns and providing your users with an omni-channel experience.

8. Feeding insights back into your marketing strategy

The reporting capabilities of digital display advertising platforms provide you with the business intelligence to make key strategic decisions about your upcoming campaigns and wider business strategy.

By understanding which users engage with your ads you’ll have the key information on the age, gender and income of your audience for example, as well as the predominant device they use, the time breakdown and the keywords that began their search.

This will inform your marketing decisions and ensure your upcoming digital display campaigns will be even more targeted.

Next steps:

If you're ready to give display ads a try, then what about dipping your toe in the water with a pilot campaign? Find out more.