The decade that went by was phenomenal for the world of advertising and marketing. Not just in terms of the increasing scope of the market, but also in terms of the technological enhancements. It was around the start of the millennium over two decades ago that the world saw the role of data in advertising and branding. Since then, the world has been evolving towards a customer-centric market.
Tracing back the origin of Digital Advertising, one would stumble upon the first milestone that AT&T set by running the first banner ad for HotWired.com in 1994. The dependency, scope, and size of digital advertising have only been on a steady increase.
Since it’s inception with a banner ad, the forms of digital advertising have grown to suit the needs of the customer. Brands now have user-centric omnichannel advertising that reaches out to customers on platforms where they’re active. Predictive advertising has been on the rise in recent years with brands demonstrating a higher conversion rate when their ads are relevant to the customers. This is in stark contrast with traditional advertising where the ad content was for a specific user group rather than an individual user.
Online platforms are instrumental in driving the focus of advertising from brand awareness to customer experience and engagement. An internet survey pointed out that over 87% of consumers search the internet before buying a product or a service. This data comes of use to brands that invest in remarketing as they can continue to reach out to the customers long after they have left the page. This means the customer continues to learn about the product or service until the buying decision.
Digital advertising opened up avenues for a measurable, transparent, fast, flexible, and cost-effective mode of reaching out to a wider audience. This apart the rise of e-commerce use and data penetration are some of the reasons for this growth.
According to a recent report, Facebook’s mobile ad revenue for the year 2018 was around US$15.5 billion, while Google made a whopping $32.6 billion. The search engine giant Google earns around 70.7 percent of its revenue from digital advertising, which showcases the significance and reaches of digital advertising in 2020.
Organizations can now have specialized ads called shoppable posts on all their social media platforms to reach out to their target audience. This is against an ad pop up that interferes with the user’s browsing behavior. This genre of advertising is on the rise as the users will not have to leave the app or website to finish their purchase. A recent study found that over 54% of the users research product purchase behavior on social media, so it is only obvious for brands to be there too!
Other popular digital advertising trends for the year 2020 include teaming up with micro-influencers, exploring alternative social media platforms like Pinterest, and interactive emails. Yes, emails! While most marketers would argue that email is the caveman’s way of marketing, we would still vouch for it. The reason? A report by Statista, 2020 found that the total number of email users will increase to 4.3 billion by 2023, and that’s a lot of potential customers for businesses to tap into. Another study pointed out that the ROI on email marketing is 42 for every $1 that your business spends.
A report by IAB and PwC found that the revenue share of internet advertising grew by 21.8% between 2017 and 2018 in the US market alone. The revenue touched a whopping $107.5 billion. Advertisers need to keep their approach to marketing a little more agile and reduce their dependency on third-party data providers for their branding efforts. Instead, building personalized customer data and buying behavior to suit their marketing needs will be an effective approach.
In short, for success in digital advertising brands need to focus on taking a data-driven approach to marketing, embrace a transparent approach, have an agile approach, and build data ownership.
While it is hard to predict what the coming decade would look like in terms of digital advertising, one could confidently say that an AI-driven approach in all aspects of advertising and marketing would be a sure trend. Brands that put their customers first and use personalized data without risking the privacy of the users are bound to succeed.