When you think about influencer marketing, a lot comes to mind: a personal connection with the community, audience engagement, product reviews, experience-based brand endorsement and recommendations. But banner advertising is probably not among the top ten things you’d consider.
At the moment it’s not widely used in influencer marketing campaigns, but considering the potential that those two have when combined together, it will probably drastically change within the next few years.
Banner ads are one of the oldest digital marketing tools.
This format has been around since 1994, when it first appeared in the October issue of ‘HotWired’. With the first banner ad having an incredible over 44% click-through rate, it quickly gained popularity and became the signature go-to solution for advertising on the web.
To this day banner ads have a very established place within the digital marketing space, because it is a format focused on conveying a promotional message by embedding an advertisement directly into a web page – transforming itself into a valuable web real estate. Because of the media oversaturation on the web, the conversion is nowhere near where it was 26 years ago, but it still holds strong among other ad types.
The primary function of a banner is to grab a person’s attention and either drive traffic to a particular website or promote a specific product or a brand.
This is where in-content bannering comes in. Bridging the traditional online marketing approach with the new trends and technologies, and enabling rich media banner ads to be injected straight into streaming content across various platforms.
Since we don’t immediately associate this type of ad with the new wave of marketing, influencers, and content creators, it’s a solution that has not yet been properly utilized by many brands. It’s still fresh and innovative and, most importantly, since the market saturation is low, online audiences are not bored with it and don’t actively avoid it. This is crucial in the current digital marketing landscape, where over 25% of web users use some form of ad blocker.
It’s all about the right context and setting.
Banners displayed on a live feed can be a perfect, non-intrusive addition to the content itself. Especially that they don’t need a lot of screen real estate to be noticed.
The user interaction is the factor that drives the effectiveness of the ad, so making it more personalized and exciting for the stream audience is the key.
Consider the experience that the web user will have with your banner while watching a live-stream. If the banner is in-sync with the content, it will continually attract the audience’s attention, prompting questions, and driving active discussion around the product or brand, encouraging high-quality promotion based on community engagement.
The other thing to consider is that in-content banners give influencer’s fans a sense of satisfaction and achievement. They brag and boast that their favorite influencer ‘made it’ and is being noticed and sponsored by real-life businesses.
By using effective condition techniques and displaying feel-good content around the promoted product, you can instantly blend the positive emotions with the community’s brand perception, boosting conversions, and sales across the board.
It’s time to show your brand in a different, more engaging way.
When 84% of people expect brands to create some form of content in-content bannering takes a traditional form of advertising into a new digital era. As a perfect blend of static imagery with highly-interactive influencer content it lifts them both to a new level enabling effective and measurable product placement and visibly increasing performance.
With marketing being in a constant state of flux, new solutions like these are just waiting to be discovered and utilized to its full potential, opening a whole new world of possibilities before your brand.