REACH THE RIGHT PEOPLE WITH DIGITAL!

5 O’clock Marketing Digital Advertising Options

Why add digital to your marketing strategy?

If there’s one area where digital marketing excels, it’s control. Digital offers unmatched, extremely granular control over every aspect of your advertising: who sees your ads, when they see them, where they see them, what action you want your audience to take, and how much you want to spend. Digital also enables clear insight into how effectively your ads are accomplishing your marketing goals—it’s easier than ever to connect your advertising dollars with precise, measurable outcomes. Not only does adding digital to your marketing mix unlock a significantly wider audience, but it also enables you to deliver highly targeted creative at just the right moment to elicit action that’s valuable to your business.

Native Display

Everybody’s seen them. Display ads are like miniature digital “billboards” that are programmatically placed on websites and mobile apps. Native display ads are dynamically created using assets you provide to match the look, feel, and layout of the placement they’re inserted into, which helps them fit in with the surrounding content.

Meta (includes Facebook & Instagram)

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Building awareness, generating demand, retargeting
  • Available ad formats: Single image and multi-image carousel, both with headline and body copy fields
  • Unique strength: Widest and most precisely targeted audience reach of any social media platform

There’s no question: Meta is the king of social media platforms. Facebook and Instagram’s ubiquity means you can reach almost anyone on the planet with your ads. Meta’s advertising platform is mature and feature-rich, offering dozens of ad formats, audience targeting options, and campaign objectives, and its highly sophisticated ad delivery algorithms are unmatched in efficiently spending your budget to get the results you want. Of particular note is Meta’s audience targeting, which offers interest-based, lookalike, customer list, retargeting, precise geographic, or completely automated targeting options to find the right people to see your ads.

Google Display

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Wide reach, low-cost clicks, retargeting
  • Available ad formats: Single image and video display, with short headline and description copy fields
  • Unique strength: Widest audience reach on the planet

Unlike Meta ads which are primarily placed on Facebook and Instagram platforms, Google Display ads can be shown nearly anywhere on the internet. Google’s second-to-none display network enables your ads to be placed on almost any website in the world. This makes brand- and awareness-building easy and low-cost. Google offers topic targeting options, which enable you to choose website topics that closely align with your products and services on which to place your ads. That means a better chance of audience alignment and relevance. Google Display is also great for retargeting previous website visitors or customers to give them that last little push they need to re-engage with your brand and take the next step.

Digital Video

Video is one of, if not the most consumed types of media in the world. With video, users are typically more focused and engaged than with static content, and inserting your video advertisements at just the right time can offer unique advantages in user engagement, education, and brand building.

Meta (includes Facebook & Instagram)

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Building awareness, generating demand, retargeting
  • Available ad formats: Single video in-feed, Facebook & Instagram stories
  • Unique strength: High engagement and precise audience targeting

Meta video ads are similar in function to their native display ad counterparts, but they offer unique opportunities for audience engagement and open up additional reach. Shortform video content can generate greater curiosity and brand recall, and can deliver your messaging in a more compelling way than static images alone. Video ads on Meta platforms offer a great way to strengthen your brand’s messaging and resonance with your target audience, especially when paired with strongly written ad copy that matches what’s being communicated in your videos.

YouTube

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Building awareness, additional reach & frequency
  • Available ad formats: Skippable or non-skippable pre-roll or in-stream video ads
  • Unique strength: Generating huge numbers of video views at low cost

Unlike the other platforms, YouTube ads have a more captive audience, which means a much higher percentage of users end up watching your ads. Similarly to traditional TV, YouTube ads can play before, during, or after the content the user is watching. However, YouTube offers precise video content targeting options through topic targeting, so you can reach people who are most relevant to your brand. YouTube offers two primary ad formats: longer-form video ads with no maximum time limit, but which can be skipped by the viewer after 6 seconds. Or if your messaging can be sufficiently communicated in a short amount of time, you can opt for non-skippable video ads that can be up to 15 seconds in length. Whatever you choose, YouTube grants you access to a huge impression inventory to wide or narrow target audiences, and its cost-per-view is usually mere pennies.

Digital Radio

Digital radio has one primary advantage over all previously mentioned digital channels: it offers the highest audience retention rate. Digital radio ads are typically not able to be skipped by the listener, and since the ads usually play between songs or during breaks throughout podcast episodes, the percentage of your ad impressions that are played all the way through is often well over 90%. That means listeners are a captive audience who hears your entire message.

Pandora

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Branding & awareness, additional reach & frequency
  • Available ad formats: In-stream audio ads up to 30 seconds in length with image banners
  • Unique strength: 95% and higher typical audience retention

Of the two digital radio ad platforms we use, Pandora offers the largest audience reach, enabling access to a wide network of radio and podcast platforms on which your ads can be played. Pandora offers demographic, location, interest, and content targeting. It also allows you to opt into banner ads that are retargeted to people who have already heard your audio ads, reinforcing your message and encouraging further action from listeners.

Spotify

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Branding & awareness, additional reach & frequency
  • Available ad formats: In-stream audio or video ads up to 30 seconds in length with image banners
  • Unique strength: Ability to target playlist themes

Although Spotify is very similar to Pandora in terms of audience retention and ad formats, it has one primary advantage: it allows you to target specific themes of user-created playlists. Spotify users can create and share custom curated playlists, and those playlists can be saved by other users who listen to them repeatedly. Examples of popular playlist themes are workout, relaxing, holidays, parties, and many more. This allows you to place ads that have niche messaging into contexts where listeners are more likely to take action. An example would be choosing a party playlist placement for your ad for pizza delivery.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

When you want your audience to take action, search engine marketing is your best tool. People using search engines like Google and Bing are on the hunt for a solution to their problem. That means high intent, and if you can show up with careful messaging that matches what someone is looking for, they’re likely to take you up on your offer. One of the highest-intent and most valuable searches people perform when they’re looking for a product or service is “[insert your product] near me”. This makes search engine marketing a great solution for local businesses looking to drive valuable customer actions.

Google Search

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Providing products & services for high intent, ready-to-buy customers
  • Available ad formats: Search results text ad
  • Unique strength: Most widely used search engine in the world by far = highest search volume

Google is by far the most-used search engine in the world. Every second of every day, people are searching for businesses that will provide a solution to their problem. That means you can capture more value with far fewer impressions than other types of digital advertising by placing ads in front of people who are actively searching for what you offer. The Google Ads platform is one of the most mature and feature-rich digital ad platforms, and it’s always being improved. Google has the unique advantage of having an unfathomable amount of data about people’s search behavior, and that means they can provide advertisers with powerful tools for optimizing ad delivery for maximum return on investment. If you’re ready to sell and you want to reach people who are ready to buy, Google Ads is where you want to be.

Bing Search

Quick Facts
  • Great for: Providing products & services for high intent, ready-to-buy customers
  • Available ad formats: Search results text ad
  • Unique strength: Capturing additional searches that may not be happening on Google

Although not affiliated platforms, Bing and Google offer nearly identical advertising products. In fact, it’s so easy to add Bing as an additional ad platform that your existing Google campaigns can be seamlessly imported into Bing and immediately launched with little to no modification. Although Bing’s search market share is a distant second to Google, there are still many people who exclusively use Bing as their search engine, and by adding Bing to your digital marketing strategy you can reach people you otherwise wouldn’t reach with Google search ads alone.

If there’s one area where digital marketing excels over traditional channels, it’s control. Digital offers unmatched, extremely granular control over every aspect of your advertising: who sees your ads, when they see them, where they see them, what action you want your audience to take, and how much you want to spend. Digital also enables clear insight into how effectively your ads are accomplishing your marketing goals—it’s easier than ever to connect your advertising dollars with precise, measurable outcomes. Not only does adding digital to your marketing mix unlock a significantly wider audience that’s not accessible through traditional, but it also enables you to deliver highly targeted creative at just the right moment to elicit action that’s valuable to your business.

Available Digital Marketing Channels

Native Display

Everybody’s seen them. Display ads are like miniature digital “billboards” that are programmatically placed on websites and mobile apps. Native display ads are dynamically created using assets you provide to match the look, feel, and layout of the placement they’re inserted into, which helps them fit in with the surrounding content.

Meta (includes Facebook & Instagram)

Quick Facts

  • Great for: Building awareness, generating demand, retargeting
  • Available ad formats: Single image and multi-image carousel, both with headline and body copy fields
  • Unique strength: Widest and most precisely targeted audience reach of any social media platform

There’s no question: Meta is the king of social media platforms. Facebook and Instagram’s ubiquity means you can reach almost anyone on the planet with your ads. Meta’s advertising platform is mature and feature-rich, offering dozens of ad formats, audience targeting options, and campaign objectives, and its highly sophisticated ad delivery algorithms are unmatched in efficiently spending your budget to get the results you want. Of particular note is Meta’s audience targeting, which offers interest-based, lookalike, customer list, retargeting, precise geographic, or completely automated targeting options to find the right people to see your ads.

Google Display

Quick Facts

  • Great for: Wide reach, low-cost clicks, retargeting
  • Available ad formats: Single image and video display, with short headline and description copy fields
  • Unique strength: Widest audience reach on the planet

Unlike Meta ads which are primarily placed on Facebook and Instagram platforms, Google Display ads can be shown nearly anywhere on the internet. Google’s second-to-none display network enables your ads to be placed on almost any website in the world. This makes brand and awareness-building easy and low-cost. Google offers topic targeting options, which enable you to choose website topics that closely align with your products and services on which to place your ads. That means a better chance of audience alignment and relevance. Google Display is also great for retargeting previous website visitors or customers to give them that last little push they need to re-engage with your brand and take the next step.

Digital Video

Video is one of, if not the most consumed types of media in the world. With video, users are typically more focused and engaged than with static content, and inserting your video advertisements at just the right time can offer unique advantages in user engagement, education, and brand building.

Meta (includes Facebook & Instagram)

Quick Facts

  • Great for: Building awareness, generating demand, retargeting
  • Available ad formats: Single video in-feed, Facebook & Instagram stories
  • Unique strength: High engagement and precise audience targeting

Meta video ads are similar in function to their native display ad counterparts, but they offer unique opportunities for audience engagement and open up additional reach. Shortform video content can generate greater curiosity and brand recall, and can deliver your messaging in a more compelling way than a static image can. Video ads on Meta platforms offer a great way to strengthen your brand’s messaging and resonance with your target audience, especially when paired with strongly written ad copy that matches what’s being communicated in your videos.

YouTube

Quick Facts

  • Great for: Building awareness, additional reach & frequency
  • Available ad formats: Skippable or non-skippable pre-roll or in-stream video ads
  • Unique strength: Generating huge numbers of video views at low cost

Unlike the other platforms, YouTube ads have a more captive audience, which means a much higher percentage of users end up watching your ads. Similarly to traditional TV, YouTube ads can play before or during whatever content the user is watching. However, YouTube offers precise video content targeting options through topic targeting, so you can reach people who are most relevant to your brand. YouTube offers two primary ad formats: longer-form video ads with no maximum time limit, but which can be skipped by the viewer after 6 seconds. Or if your messaging can be sufficiently communicated in a short amount of time, you can opt for non-skippable video ads that can be up to 15 seconds in length. Whatever you choose, YouTube grants you access to a huge impression inventory to wide or narrow target audiences, and its cost per view is usually mere pennies.

Digital Radio

Digital radio has one primary advantage over all previous ad channels: it offers the highest audience retention rate. Digital radio ads are typically not able to be skipped by the listener, and since the ads usually play between songs or during breaks throughout podcast episodes, the percentage of your ad impressions that are played all the way through is often well over 90%. That means listeners are a captive audience who hears your entire message.

Pandora

Quick Summary

  • Great for: Branding & awareness, additional reach & frequency
  • Available ad formats: In-stream audio ads up to 30 seconds in length with or without image banners
  • Unique strength: 95% and higher typical audience retention

Of the two digital radio ad platforms we use, Pandora offers the largest audience reach, enabling access to a wide network of radio and podcast platforms on which your ads can be played. Pandora offers demographic, location, interest, and content targeting. It also allows you to opt into banner ads that are retargeted to people who have already heard your audio ads, reinforcing your message and encouraging further action from listeners.

Spotify

Quick Summary

  • Great for: Branding & awareness, additional reach & frequency
  • Available ad formats: In-stream audio or video ads up to 30 seconds in length with or without image banners
  • Unique strength: Ability to target playlist themes

Although Spotify is very similar to Pandora in terms of audience retention and ad formats, it has one primary advantage: it allows you to target specific themes of user-created playlists. Spotify users can create and share custom curated playlists, and those playlists can be saved by other users who listen to them repeatedly. Examples of popular playlist themes are workout, relaxing, holidays, parties, and many more. This allows you to place ads that have niche messaging into contexts where listeners are more likely to take action. An example would be choosing a party playlist placement for your ad for pizza delivery.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

When you want your audience to take action, search engine marketing is your best tool. People using search engines like Google and Bing are on the hunt for a solution to their problem. That means high intent, and if you can show up with careful messaging that matches what someone is looking for, they’re likely to take you up on your offer. One of the highest-intent and most valuable searches people perform when they’re looking for a product or service is “[insert your product] near me”. This makes search engine marketing a great solution for local businesses looking to drive valuable customer actions.

Google Search

Quick Summary

  • Great for: Providing products & services for high intent, ready-to-buy customers
  • Available ad formats: Search results text ad
  • Unique strength: Most widely used search engine in the world by far = highest search volume

Google is by far the most-used search engine in the world. Every second of every day, people are searching for businesses that will provide a solution to their problem. That means you can capture more value with far fewer impressions than other types of digital advertising by placing ads in front of people who are actively searching for what you offer. The Google Ads platform is one of the most mature and feature-rich digital ad platforms, and it’s always being improved. Google has the unique advantage of having an unfathomable amount of data about people’s search behavior, and that means they can provide advertisers with powerful tools for optimizing ad delivery for maximum return on investment. If you’re ready to sell and you want to reach people who are ready to buy, Google Ads is where you want to be.

Bing Search

Quick Summary

  • Great for: Providing products & services for high intent, ready-to-buy customers
  • Available ad formats: Search results text ad
  • Unique strength: Capturing additional searches that may not be happening on Google

Although not affiliated platforms, Bing and Google offer nearly identical advertising products. In fact, it’s so easy to add Bing as an additional ad platform that your existing Google campaigns can be seamlessly imported into Bing and immediately launched with little to no modification. Although Bing’s search market share is a distant second to Google, there are still many people who exclusively use Bing as their search engine, and by adding Bing to your digital marketing strategy you can reach people you otherwise wouldn’t reach with Google search ads alone.