Let’s try to transport ourselves a few years back and try to remember those times when we opened a magazine or turned on our TV set and suddenly all these different advertisements would pop up, and offer us a wide range of products. Whether they were in black & white or color they would likely show a huge variety of colorful characters such as a doctor recommending diets, a movie star savoring a refreshing soda pop or a chubby kid with rosy cheeks smeared with chocolate or candy. Advertising in those days was so different compared to the one which we are exposed to nowadays, times have surely changed. The innocence in the potential customers is becoming extinct, just like the written media such as magazines and newspapers which paved the way to the new era’s ruler: Online Media.
This is something that companies are now starting to learn and adopt, since it is preferable for them to center their efforts in online media advertisements instead of clinging to old practices that have been starting to disappear. There are several reasons that reaffirm this statement, and we’ll name a few:
- Technological Convenience
The way in which our lives move on a daily basis has changed throughout the years. Life is definitely not the same as it was ten years ago. There are some differences that are evident in the way in which we learn or interact with other people or with the environment that surrounds us.
It’s impossible to find a person between 10 and 60 years old, who doesn’t own a device through which he can be connected online. According to recent studies, a child gets his first cell phone when he turns 12 on average, and the sales of said devices in 2014 reached the exorbitant amount of 1,244.89 million sold around the world*. This is, in other words, a minimum of 1,244.89 potential customers (taking only smartphones in account) who carry the device on which your advertisement will reach them and, in several cases, this represents their main media of professional, social or educative communication. This is a huge advantage over all written media companies who will never be able to compete with their daily print runs so are now starting to opt for taking a giant leap into the digital world themselves.
- Everyday, all the time
Long gone are those days when our only window to the world, the television, would let us know that it was very late at night by showing nothing but a blank screen being invaded by millions of micro flashes of black static or with thick columns of different colors. Nowadays we are able to use our cell phone, computer or tablet any day at any time and we know that we’ll be getting new and fresh information given that the web never sleeps but is dynamic and is continuously evolving instead. This is well taken advantage of by the new online media advertising tendencies since there are no dead hours anymore but they are capable of reaching out to potential customers all the time, and showing them their new, fresh and innovative ideas and products.
- Publishing outreach
Suddenly, the concept of “globalization” seized to be that, a mere concept, and became as real as humanity itself. These days it’s so easy to learn about new cultures, to visit different countries and even engage in long conversations with people who are thousands of miles away, in real time, and without the need of getting off your seat. This would have never happened if it wasn’t for the internet. Thanks to the web all the frontiers and distances that separated the cultures have now disappeared and achieved an interconnectivity among people that has no precedents.
Many companies have managed to take advantage of said interconnection and have positioned themselves in the mind of a target audience who shares the same needs and acquisitive power as the one that lives in their own area.
- Real Activity Tracking
It is virtually impossible for a company to keep an exact record of how many people have been reached by their marketing efforts when they advertise their products on a newspaper or magazine given that it is a media of which one copy is commonly shared among several readers. At least when it is written media it is not that difficult to keep track of their ads compared to a televised one. By the time a company acquires a space for them to advertise through a tv spot, it is acknowledged that they will never know how many people will see it, that is if they take into account that anybody with a tv set could’ve been reached by that one advertisement of their product, and that anybody that could’ve been reached by that one advertisement of their product could have easily changed the channel. Not to mention billboards or other type of stationary advertisement.
Fortunately, online media brings yet another advantage, which is to enable the companies with the ability of keeping a more accurate track about how many times their advertisements will have been printed. This is due to the fact that when a user opens up a website and the ad pops up, this action is automatically taken account for as a “print” and it is added to the record of said campaign. This can be used to not only keep track of the impressions, but also of the times that potential customers interact with the ads by clicking on them, so they can also be used as links that may lead the way to the advertisers websites. There’s a wide variety of other activities that may guarantee not just a better branding approach, but also a more accurate tracking.
- Return of Investment (ROI)
The goal of every company, and the main reason for creating every strategy, plan, efforts and objectives, is to generate the highest amount of revenue by using the least amount of investment. If you take into account every aspect that we mentioned in this blog, we can say that the return of investment for online media campaigns which transforms into revenue is considerably higher over the return of investment achieved by traditional means.
This is the new era of advertising. Time boundaries and space limits that separated your brand from your potential customer are now becoming extinct. Those statistics with simulated numbers are over and taken over by real records. Sky really is the limit now for those companies that want to be known all over the world, they just need to find the right pilot that knows how to guide them through cyberspace.
*http://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/