How To Achieve Targeted Reach Through Banner Ads?

By C.S. Raman
Posted Thursday, July 1, 2004

When you run a banner advertising campaign, your strategy should be to achieve as much focus as possible in audience profile and then look for ways to get wider audiences within that profile. You want targeted reach. Let’s look at some ways to achieve a wider yet targeted reach.

Banner advertising methods

Buy ad space on suitable websites

Run an Affiliate program

Participate in a Banner Exchange scheme

Buy ad space

This is the conventional approach to banner advertising and you have to decide on the type of websites that suit your product in terms of content. When the content is relevant, the audience visiting that site is likely to be a focused audience for your products/services.
Given the fragmented audiences on the Internet, each website in a particular specialized area attracts a small audience. Unless you have a major player like Amazon.com in a category like books, you usually have to use a combination of sites to reach a significant portion of your intended target.
You can choose large portals where there is a lot happening - News, business sections, sports, email facility, search engine facility, games, music etc - for instance, a portal like MSN or a newspaper website. Portals attract a larger number of visitors who usually visit to check their email or catch the latest headline news. The visitors to such portals usually cut across demographic barriers and represent all age groups and occupation types. But even on such a portal you can choose the sections that you consider relevant for your brand. This brings focus and given the high popularity of the portal you benefit from the larger audience base within your target group.
Research shows that travel-related advertisers prefer broad reach sites like portals and search engines, while consumer goods companies follow the targeted ad approach, preferring to spend a major portion of their ad dollars on focused content sites and channeling a smaller proportion of their ad budget to broad reach sites.

Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs revolve around the banner and in the placement of banners at affiliate sites. If you start an Affiliate programs you are guaranteed wider Internet presence among potential customers. Those who seek affiliate programs for their websites look for programs that complement their site content. Your affiliates display your banners, and when visitors clickthrough to your website and buy your product, you pay commission to the affiliate.

You do require a certain amount of initial outlay to kick-start an affiliate program because of the support tools and software necessary to run an affiliate network. There are companies that offer customized affiliate program solutions as well as companies that offer specialized banner creation services.
You can achieve additional sales when you run an affiliate program as well as widen the presence of your brands through banner displays at a large number of affiliates.

Banner Exchange schemes

Banner exchange schemes especially benefit small and medium businesses. This is a barter-like opportunity to create brand awareness without spending money. In a banner exchange network, members display each other’s banner ads at their web sites in a particular ratio. In a 2:1 scheme, for example- for every two banners displayed on your site your banner is displayed once on the banner network.

The scheme is mutually beneficial for the participating websites. On many banner exchange networks you can choose the categories of web sites. This provides targeted displays and ensures audiences with similar interests for your banners, thereby increasing the likelihood of click-throughs. Check out (www.linkbuddies.com)

Create a banner and choose a suitable scheme
If you are battling with how to create awareness for your website within limited resources, you should explore the innumerable banner exchange schemes available. You can create banners for free through online free banner design websites that offer all kinds of tools from color, animations, 3D effects and so on, and thereafter sign-up for one of these schemes.
If you have been in business for a while and can afford to invest a little bit in the name of long-term brand building, then go ahead and launch an affiliate network for your brand/brands.

If you want your banner to have a presence on high profile high traffic sites, you can buy space on sites of your choice. You can also adopt new design techniques in ‘rich media’ to improve the impact and effectiveness of your banners.

The internet is a great place to achieve focus in audiences reached and finding these opportunities is the key to running a successful banner campaign.

About the Author
(http://www.emarketinganswers.com)
C.S. Raman is a prolific business writer on topics like marketing, web copy content, and business management. He is a guest writer for emarketinganswers.com, providing free emarketing resources and promotion tools. He has over two decades of work experience as VP of two top US ad agencies. You are free to reprint this article in your web site. However, please keep the author’s section at the bottom of the article as is.
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