The Ultimate Guide to Advertising in 2021

 When you hear the word advertising, what comes to mind?

Do you think of banner ads on your favorite website? Those hilarious Super Bowl commercials? The billboards along the highway or posters in the subway stations?

While most of us have a pretty good idea of what advertising looks like, we often struggle to nail down exactly what it means — and how to do it well.

From the printing press to pop-up ads, advertising has certainly changed with the times. Despite this, though, the need for advertising hasn’t changed, and neither have the techniques and best practices that make for quality advertising. That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

How does advertising work?

Advertising works by breaking through the clutter and noise of everyday life, disrupting the viewer’s attention, and demanding their focus.

Depending on the goals of your ad campaign, advertising can go to work for your company in a variety of ways:

  • To raise awareness of your brand

  • To drive potential customers to your business

  • To promote sales for both new and existing products

  • To introduce a new product or service to the market

  • To differentiate your product from your competitors’

Advertising can also be executed in various ways. Radio commercials, billboards, branded t-shirts, and social media endorsements all count as advertising — as we'll discuss later on in this guide.

What are advertisers?

Advertisers are the people at a company who are responsible for advertising a product or service. "Advertiser" can also refer to a company or organization that's paying for advertising on a billboard, in a magazine, or through a website or mobile application.

All advertisers are marketers, but not all marketers are advertisers. Let's dig deeper in the differences between advertising and marketing.

Advertising vs. Marketing

Marketing constitutes the big picture of how a company plans to raise awareness of their brand and convince customers to make a purchase. Advertising is communicating the persuasive messages around these broad goals.

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