The most important thing you need when you have a shop is customers. But how do you get all those potential customers into your shop? Advertising, of course! As early as the 15th century, people began to advertise by means of pamphlets, and since then advertising has only become bigger and more extreme. Where not so long ago a simple banner frame could do the job, nowadays whole books have been written about advertising.
The early days
A long time ago, the butcher had a gable flag hanging outside the door and the greengrocer had window stickers on the windows to show what kind of shop was in the building. Life certainly used to be simpler when it came to advertising. One was completely dependent on printed matter and so it was ordered in large quantities. Flyers, posters, banners and flags were, much more than now, part of the daily street scene.
Bright, brighter, brightest
It was quickly realized that brighter colors were more eye-catching and therefore more successful. As a result, shops started printing advertising material in bright colors so that it would stand out more and thus result in more customers. The big turning point came when LED screens came on the market. This way, companies could still make clearly visible advertisements that could not be thrown away after one use.
Google advertising and SEO
But the biggest change came when Google started working with different algorithms. On the basis of these algorithms, the organic findability of certain websites in the Google search engine is determined. This way, companies can advertise on Google; we call this SEA which stands for Search engine advertising. By paying for these advertisements, companies can increase their ranking in the Google search engine in a short period of time.
The other option is to optimize your website. We call this SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. This is a lot more complicated, but in short it is about processing relevant search terms from people on web pages.
Google reads your web pages, as it were, and assigns a certain value to them. So if your web page is of great value to Google users, your page will appear at the top. A clever way for Google to show its visitors good results.
The future of advertising
In the future, advertising will be more targetable and much more measurable. You’ll be able to add first-party data and syndicated data to anything and everything. And because most of the advertising will be done digitally, there will be more self-selection, and more of it will be native.
