Engaging with consumers online effectively

Just for a moment, I’d like everyone to take off their advertising hat and become a consumer, with passions, needs, and preferences. Think about a brand which you feel a particular connection with, one that helps you fill a need in your life, one that has stood out from the competition because it connected with you emotionally. In fact, you feel so strongly about this brand that you rave about it to your friends and family, because you want to share that feeling with them.

These concepts of – relevance, creativity, and a shared experience – encompass the core elements of storytelling and are common to all consumers. In an age when consumers are living more of their lives online, the Web has the ability to leverage them in a way that no other medium can, and advertisers should take advantage of the Web’s inherent advantages to develop stronger bonds between consumers and brands that affect purchase and usage behavior.

Today’s innovative online ad formats enable advertisers to “wow” consumers on a whole new level. Whether it is through an ad that uses the entirety of the digital canvas, a branded entertainment series that wraps a compelling theme around the brand, or a rich media, interactive mobile ad, advertisers have the tools to allow them to tell better stories.

Here are some examples of advertising solutions that offer a more targeted solution and an expanded creative canvas:

Video Advertising: Extend the points of engagement for your content by taking it to the Web with video. Look beyond running a TV commercial online. Consider video as a format to stream live events, deliver original content and to play extended video content.
Rich Media: Rich media allows advertisers to turn creative concepts into a range of attention grabbing ads. The content mashup is an example where advertisers can combine articles, videos, photos and other content into an ad to generate conversations on social networks. A custom branded environment such as a digitorial provides consumers with a portable microsite within an ad to seamlessly blend advertising and content for distribution across a media property.

Social advertising: Social ads enable viewers to comment on and share an ad with their friends on social networking platforms including Facebook and Twitter directly from the ad format. This ad format allows advertisers to generate word-of-mouth brand impact, exponential reach and increase engagement.

Mobile Advertising: With more consumers accessing the Internet through their mobile devices, mobile display and rich media ad formats provide a rich canvas for advertisers to deliver their message in an uncluttered and actionable environment.

Smart Ads: Look for media owners who offer demographic targeting features and have the capability to deliver smart ads. Smart ads serve highly relevant content based on deep consumer insights. Its technology provides real-time personalisation to match the right ad to the right customer at the right time. By automatically optimising an ad with visitor interests, lifestyle or demographic variables defined by advertisers, consumers will be shown a limitless variety of creative executions on a website.

Retargeting: Retargeting technology can be used to reach out to prospective customers who may be searching for specific information on a media owners’ website. Using information garnered from a specific keyword phrase, retargeting technology serves up a display ad that is relevant to a consumer’s recent search terms with the aim of improving conversion rates to impact your business.

Taking storytelling to a higher level requires advertisers to deepen their engagement with consumers. Advertisers have learned that they can evoke emotion from online campaigns by telling the right kind of stories about their brands. No other medium but the online allows brands to “activate” consumers in a variety of engaging ways across the screens of their lives, influencing both consumer attitudes and behaviors.
 

Yvonne Chang, Vice President and Managing Director, Yahoo! Southeast Asia