How to advertise online?

Step 1: Define your marketing objectives, target audience & budget

• Objectives: As a marketer your objective might be to generate sales leads for your sales team, drive traffic to your site or increase brand awareness. All of these objectives can be achieved through online advertising.
• Target audience: You want to finely target your online advertising as you don't want to reach every web user, only those that are likely to have an interest in your product, service or brand.
• Budget: There are number of pricing models for online advertising. Usually websites quote their advertising rates as a cost per thousand page impressions (CPM). This means that for the quoted cost you will receive one thousand page impressions of visibility.

Step 2: Decide how to reach your target audience

As soon as you have defined your target audience you need to decide how you're going to reach them online.

Websites will be able to provide you with the audience size, (unique users) how frequently the audience is using the site (visits) and how many pages the audience view while visiting the site (page impressions). Some websites can also give you more information about their audience through their visitor demographics.
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Step 3: Design an online advertisement

The next step is designing you advertisement. Just like print ads online ads have design specifications that include the dimensions of the ad and size of the file. You can decide between different advertising positions and it depends on your marketing message and budget as to which one you select, or whether you can book a suite of ad slots. These ad slots are:

• Leaderboard
• Top banner
• Skyscraper
• MPU
• Button

Web advertisement sizes are stated in pixels. For example the top banner size on Opticianonline.net is 468 x 60 pixels, 468 being the width and 60 being the height. Web advertisements can be designed in different file formats such as GIF and flash files.

There are a number of different types of web ads and they can be static or animated. As the names suggest, static ads don't contain moving text or images whereas animated ads do. There are a vast number of other creative options that can be explored and tested. Now you're ready to run the campaign.
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Step 4: Run your campaign

Once you've booked your campaign, supply your online ads and landing page link to your media provider and let the campaign begin. Bear in mind that if you have booked a ROS (run of site) advert the online advert won't appear every time you visit the page, it will appear on a random basis across the site until the number of booked impressions have run.
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Step 5: Test, learn, refine

Once you have completed your online campaign and received campaign statistics the next step is to analyse how well you did, learn from the results and perhaps test something new next time. For example you might want to look at testing new advertising positions or other online media. Alternatively you might want to look into doing some testing of creative or messages to find out what delivers the best results.
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