Digital advertising is the wave of the future. Unfortunately, many small banks are still only using traditional forms of advertising to share their brand with the community. Instead of paying $5,000 for a full-page ad in a magazine where you don’t know if your target audience has seen it, you could pay an average of $3.00 per click instead and actually see if consumers are heading to your website. Not only are you missing a chance to track results but you might also be overspending.
What Is Display Advertising?
Display advertising is a form of digital advertising where banner ads are placed on websites. You can either pay per 1,000 impressions or pay per click. The display ad can link to a landing page on your website and drive conversions. It’s a great alternative to print advertising as you can target the types of websites/online publications that you want your ads to show on.
Now that you understand what display advertising is, let’s go through how it benefits banks.
Display Advertising Can be Tracked
As stated earlier, by using display advertising, you’ll be able to track how many people saw your ad and clicked on your ad. Not only does this help with accurately conducting A/B testing on ads to see which is most successful but you’ll be able to see a direct correlation to your bottom line. In other words, you’ll be able to quickly determine if it’s helped your ROI.
Display Advertising Can Be Extremely Targeted
You can target display ads based on keywords, placement and interest. For keyword targeting, Google will find sites that have content that is similar to your chosen keywords. These sites will then show your display ads. This saves time when trying to determine on which websites your ad should go on.
For placement targeting, Google will allow you to choose specific websites for your ads to appear on. A benefit to this is that you can choose websites with high traffic that are relevant to your target audience.
For interest targeting, Google gives you the option to display your ads to users based on their interests. This targeting method can be very effective to banks by allowing them to target consumers based on certain products or services they’re searching for.
Display Advertising is Flexible
Not only can you choose how many clicks or impressions you want to pay for but you can also run the display ads for as long or as short of a time as needed. Currently, the majority of community banks are advertising in their local newspapers or magazines. Well, display ads can be seen as the new magazine/newspaper ads of the internet. And you’re not restricted by the editor’s requirements, you can set your ads on your own terms.
At the end of the day, you don’t need to abandon your traditional forms of advertising like print ads completely. They can still be very beneficial. However, by editing your marketing strategy to include print and display ads you will be much more successful.
If you’d like to learn of other ways to market your bank digitally, check out my latest blog post on using SEO for community banks!
