Sponsored articles, social media campaigns, user interaction: these are the advertising methods that every beauty company wants. They form relationships with consumers, building trust and creating loyalty.
Yet you shouldn’t overlook the importance of banner and header ads, either. They are a key part of a strong marketing drive, supporting and augmenting your work with articles and on social media.
Here’s why:
1. Brand Awareness
The primary goal of adverts is not to get people to click through to your website (although, of course, that click-through rate is important!). It’s to increase brand awareness and recall.
When faced with a purchasing choice, consumers will choose the brand they recognise over the highest-quality or best-priced product.
Brand recognition – the ability to recognize a brand when you see it – is useful for grocery shopping. But for many beauty businesses, brand recall – thinking of a particular brand when only prompted by the category – is even more important.
And creating brand recall means increasing brand exposure. The more times that your potential customers see your brand’s name or logo, the more likely they are to recall it. Adverts, as the primary method of creating impressions, are key for this.
2. Support Your Advertising Campaign
Familiarising your audience with your brand will improve the efficacy of your other advertising drives.
Your sponsored articles and social media platforms will be more effective if users already recognise your brand. Adverts can be used to indicate your values, point of difference, and products in a way that primes your target market to more deeply engage with other forms of marketing.
In other words, adverts allow your sponsored content and social media platforms to strengthen a message that consumers have already been engaging with.
3. Low-Investment And Low-Effort
There’s no denying that marketing is hard work. A sponsored article requires hours of investment, from angle refinement to interviews and photo sourcing. An effective social media campaign needs daily posts, not to mention constantly monitoring and responding to comments and messages.
In contrast to this, an advert simply needs to be created once. The most impressive results may come from high-investment channels, but don’t overlook the value of a low-investment campaign such as a banner ad.
4. Constant Promotion
Adverts mean that your brand will be accessible to your target audience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They never stop promoting you: they build up brand awareness ahead of major trade shows, when staff are on holiday, and before and after articles and interviews with publications.
5. Digital Insights
Real-time analytics means that you can check the click-through rate, the number of impressions, and more for every banner ad. This feedback will help you analyze the efficacy of different campaigns, phrasing, and imagery, allowing you to further refine your marketing strategy.
You can even run tests with different styles of banner ads, allowing you to gain insights that will help you shape the best possible sponsored content, social media campaigns, and – of course – banner ads. As a low-investment channel, ads are the ideal medium for these kinds of tests.
To find out more about banner ads on EssieButton – or any of our other advertising packages – contact sponsors@essiebutton.com or visit our advertising page here.