It’s a discipline as broad as my arms and your arms all put together. Digital advertising is an important part of the marketing puzzle and comprises:
- Google Ads – setting up campaigns for search and display on the Google network that reach the people you’re trying to
- Social media advertising – from choosing the right channels and building audiences to crafting copy for AB testing, creating campaigns and allocating spend
- Native advertising – which is when you want to go beyond the major players like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and try to reach your audience on the websites they enjoy browsing
- Retargeting – which is serving ads back to people that visit your website or that are signed in on the web and you can reach via an email audience list (e.g. synced from Hubspot)
- Tracking – which requires properly configuring Google Analytics and Tag Manager to record events and clearly tell the story of your website. Hotjar is another tool that can tell you a lot with the heatmaps it builds.
- AB testing – for example with a tool like Google Optimize (free) so you can see what changes to copy, menus, pages and more do to your funnel
That’s even the whole of it: there’s search retargeting, direct ad buying, YouTube advertising, landing pages…
If you’re wanting to chew the fat about digital advertising, I have a broad understanding of the major channels you should be thinking about.