What is advertising today?

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5 Mar 2024

Whether you've just made a website to start a business or want to promote an existing one, advertising can help you do so. There are many opportunities to reach new audiences, drive sales and achieve brand awareness through traditional and digital types of advertising.

To help you sort through all the advertising methods that exist, we've broken down the most prominent types of advertising. Once you get the lay of the land, you'll be best equipped to choose the best type of advertising method and embark on your journey of growing your business.

What is advertising today?

Advertising is a marketing strategy that businesses use to promote their brand, products and/or services. Each type of advertising will have similar goals—whether turning potential buyers into actual customers, sharing information with new audiences, or building brand awareness—ultimately, advertising helps grow your business.

Marketing vs. advertising

While there are many similarities between marketing vs. advertising (and many use the term interchangeably), advertising is just one part of your marketing strategy. Marketing is a strategic part of building a business that includes all sorts of promotions, including organic and paid advertising, while advertising, no matter what type, means that you’re paying to get exposure to your brand.

As your small business grows, you will need to develop different advertising campaigns to achieve specific business goals and landmarks within your marketing strategy.

Advertising can be broken down into two main categories: traditional advertising and digital.

Traditional advertising

Traditional advertising refers to types of advertisements typically done offline. Newspaper ads, billboards and radio advertising are all advertisement examples that represent traditional marketing methods. Businesses still use these traditional advertising platforms to sell products or attract people to their brands.

Digital or new media advertising

Technology’s evolution has changed the marketing world—and many businesses do most of their advertising online. From SMS text messages to social media campaigns, digital advertising refers to marketing across online platforms and digital communication channels.

Digital marketing has become an ubiquitous part of online browsing, where almost every daily internet touchpoint offers an advertising opportunity. Small business owners find digital ads especially attractive, as they tend to be more cost effective and often use advanced analytics to measure results. One of the main types is SEM, or search engine marketing.

Digital advertising, according to Statista was expected to reach over US$500 billion in 2021, increasing to an incredible expected US$876 billion by 2026. Proof of how companies the world over have embraced digital advertising as a large part of their advertising strategies.

10 Types of advertising

01. Online search advertising

American adults spend an average of 3.5 hours of their day online. This high amount of internet usage helps explain why more and more businesses are turning to online advertising. After all, the goal of relevant advertising is to get in front of your audience where they spend most of their time.

Additionally, marketers treasure the ability to track the immediate reach and results of their online campaigns. Since many tools and analytics are integrated into digital ads, you can know in real-time where your sales are coming from and make quick optimizations to boost performance.

Due to the strength of this type of advertising, you can use many digital methods to promote yourself online:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to show up in front of your audience in a non-abrupt way while on search engines. In PPC campaigns, you select a series of keywords to bid on so that your ad will be at the top of the search results for words that describe your business or products.

You can even bid on competitor brand names so you can give yourself a chance to be considered as another option. After all, 90% of searchers haven’t made their mind up about a brand before starting their search.

These types of advertisements show up in text format, so make sure to write compelling ad copy since you can’t rely on images to draw users' attention.

Moreover, many advertisers send their paid online traffic to landing pages exclusively dedicated to the promotion in order to increase customer conversion.

Lastly, PPC ads are designed so that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, so it's a great way to learn how to advertise on Google. You can choose how much you are willing to pay for that cost per click (CPC). Therefore, this is an excellent online advertising method for campaigns with defined sales goals, CPL and ROI benchmarks.

Display banners

Have you ever read an article online and noticed a square or rectangular image appear on the edges of the page or between paragraphs? This type of advertising is known as display banners and is usually composed of rich images or videos that showcase a promoted offering with layered text and a CTA.

Banner ads are charged on a CPM (cost per a thousand impressions) or CPC, depending on the platform you’re running ads on. Since the click-through rate (CTR) isn’t as high on display banners as PPC ads, the former is often used to build brand awareness and help you stay top of mind with your audience.

Native ads

What differentiates native ads from other types of advertising methods is that, as their name suggests, we often don't notice they are ads. These pieces of advertising are disguised by matching the format and style of the organic content on the page, making them nearly indistinguishable.

Their camouflage ability has made this ad format quite popular. Native ads will account for a whopping 74% of total US display ad revenue by the end of 2021. Marketers love them because they are a sneaky way to get in front of your target audience in a not-so-obvious way. For instance, if you look closely at a content piece that is at the bottom or between articles on sites that serve ads, you’ll notice a small font reading "sponsored stories" or "promoted by."

Since native ads are often live on content publishing platforms or video-based channels like YouTube, they can be a great way to drive traffic to a blog post, a tutorial video or other types of longer-form educational content.

02. Social media advertising

Social media marketing and advertising are unlike most promotion outlets because it allows you to engage with your audience in an authentic way. Not only can you personalize your ads to fit your target audience parameters but also interact with people who’ve engaged with the promotion, it's contextual advertising at its finest.

Besides, the usage of social media is growing by the day. Now, there are several leading platforms to choose to advertise on, depending on your target audience and goals.

By 2021, global social media marketing spend topped US$180 billion. The majority of this was spent on mobile advertising. Total spend is expected. to increase to over US$ 350 billion by 2026.

LinkedIn advertising

Known for B2B advertising, LinkedIn lets you tap into their professional database of over 690 million users and reach your audience through Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, text ads and dynamic ads.

What is special about this channel is that people are already in a professional mindset, making them more likely to be open to interacting with new opportunities that can help grow their business.

Be aware that LinkedIn’s CPCs are higher than other social media platforms. However, for B2B businesses that have a high-value price tag per sale, it can still pay off their ad spend with a positive ROI.

Facebook advertising

Facebook ads have a reach of 1.6 billion people and lets you customize your campaigns based on specific objectives and countless audiences. You can choose to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network or across them all. Most of their ads are on a PPC model with relatively low bids, and there is no minimum spend which can be beneficial for smaller businesses.