Business Services

How to Get Started with Display Advertising

This article was written by Ted Dhanik.

Moving from search to banner advertising can be tricky. Some of the sales techniques you discovered in search may not apply to display marketing, so you need new testing. Getting started in this space without hemorrhaging money in the process is a difficult task for any company to undertake. Who you target and what you sell to them will determine how effective your advertising is over time. Before you spend on a campaign you haven’t thoroughly vetted, read on for tips that the pros use to evaluate their new campaigns.

Research Your Market

The more you know about your market, the more you can decrease the irrelevant traffic for a keyword. When you research keywords, try to look at what your competition is doing and mimic that. Do you notice any consistencies in the banners within your market, or do you see any particular keywords in high demand? You can also listen to your sales team and work within some of the common objections and complaints you encounter as you try and sell. Online surveys and focus groups can offer some intriguing insights, but if you need results now just call or talk to your customers and get feedback in the moment.

Identify Trends

Market trends allow you to effectively adapt to and follow what works. Good places to keep an eye on trends are the popular blogs in your industry, but you can spot them just by doing Google searches too. Review the display and search ads you find, look for commonalities and see what you can incorporate into your own work. Forums are another good source of trends for what works, or at least ideas on what to experiment with next.

Once you have some ideas to work with, focus on devising excellent A/B tests that measure the impact of your changes against what you already know will work.

Emulate the Competition

Chances are that your competitors have been in business longer than you have, but even if they haven’t, you can still see what they are working with. Tools online can help you view creatives, find which pages have the most active placements, and tell you the demographics of people who visit the pages you want to market on. If you see your competition buying up space on those pages, you have two choices: compete directly or seek some other source of traffic. Once you know what they consider successful, you have more information to try and emulate those techniques and placements.

Select Promotional Creative

Selecting the right promotional creative also makes a difference in display advertising, but this can be difficult for the newbies out there to handle. First thing to do is speak with your affiliate representative to find out which banner creative has the highest conversion rate. You can usually trust their advice because it is in everyone’s best interest for you to bring in more sales. Identify why the banner works and you can develop your own creative.

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Ted Dhanik is a thought leader in the display advertising space. As the co-founder of engage:BDR, Ted Dhanik has been a thought leader in direct marketing and sales. For information on improving your direct marketing campaigns, search Ted Dhanik online.