Social and Display Advertising

Social ads are ads placed on social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter etc.

Display ads are the banner ads you find across the web.

This is a very large and popular marketing channel.

Why social and display ads?

These ads are mainly used for two purposes:

• To build brand image and increase awareness
• To get a direct response (like signing up or making a purchase)

Social ads can also gain you fans that engage with your brand and eventually turn into customers.

What are social ads?

The main goal of social ads is to build awareness of your brand or product. It’s important to build a loyal community before trying to make a sale.

Use social ads to start a conversation around your product. You can put out content on social media that gets people talking (positively) about your brand.

Write messages that people care about. Don’t be afraid to spend money to promote these and other good content from your company.

Tools like Outbrain and Sharethrough can make your content look like native content on its partner sites, which may increase click-throughs.

You can also encourage people to post photos with your brand or product, share with friends, tag friends, or share your brand in other ways on social media.

The major social networks to run social ads are: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, reddit, Buzzfeed and Pinterest.

Adaptly allows you to manage and place social ads on multiple sites.

What are display ads?

Display ads are usually bought from giant ad networks that own space all over the internet.

The largest display ad networks are Google’s content network, AOL’s Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. These networks allow you to target different categories of people with multiple ad formats.

You can also purchase from niche ad networks, which focus on a specific demographic.

You can analyze competitors’ ads with tools like MixRank and Adbeat. Or find your competitors’ target demographics with tools like Alexa and Quantcast.

Where to begin

You can place low-cost social ads on social networks to test users’ responses before investing a lot of money.

A great place to start buying display ads is BuySellAds, which makes buying ads easy for beginners.

You can also contact small sites directly to place your ads for a small fee.