Adblockers are awesome. At least, adblockers are awesome when you’re the one who’s using them. But what about if you’re in advertising? How do you get your products out there to the general market?
Anybody old enough to remember the days of pop-up ads and old-school Internet Explorer will have no qualms in saying they’re thankful for ad blockers. However, for marketers, the decrease in revenue due to them has been a blow.
There’s an adblocker for every device imaginable. There are plugins for website editors and even adblockers that can block commercials from YouTube videos. They also aren’t showing any signs of slowing down.
Although that could seem like a danger to the world of digital marketing, banner ads and the like haven’t been much of a thing for a while now. In fact, if you’re still using them, your loss might not have all that much to do with adblockers.
How to get your message across
Truth be told and in the vein of Jurassic Park, the internet will always find a way. As is the case with adblockers, the more showed up, the fewer companies started relying on invasive ads as revenue.
Instead, they worked out a way to get around it, and that was by avoiding giving people things they didn’t want to see.
I’m sure we’ve all seen websites that have pleaded for visitors to turn off their adblockers. While nobody can blame them, opening a website to a popup that tells visitors to disable their adblockers to see content just drives people further away.
Examples
A good example? 74% of people are more likely to leave the site altogether than disable their adblockers.
Of course, you need to make revenue from your website and/or products, but people are just no longer interested. We live in a quick and fast society where Netflix allows skipping of intros and most streaming platforms have, at most, two or three ads.
Furthermore, we live in a world where even mobile devices have adblocking software available. And more and more people are using it. Just consider the fact that more than 62% of users buy things via mobile already.
Alternative ways to advertise in a world of adblockers
People block ads for all kinds of reasons. One of the leading is loading time, which is a big deal in a world where we all have information at our fingertips.
Mobile ad blocking surged to 90% of users in 2015, leading to press coverage about how it was the end of an era and, possibly, the worst thing ever to happen to digital marketing. If this is the case and the trend is only going to continue, what can you do as a marketer to get revenue?
By stopping with the intrusive ads of yesteryear and appealing to the users personally.
Some of the ways bigger brands are tackling advertising these days are as follows:
-
- Influencer marketing: We’re not talking Taylor Swift or even C-list celebrities. There are smaller influencers (micro influencers) on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube who can do wonders for your campaign. They’re part of some of the leading marketing strategies, quadrupling in interest since 2013. These people have fans and those fans like what those people like.
- Native advertising: You’ll have seen this mostly on websites and Google. Native ads are the antithesis to big flashing banners – they’re ads that look more like everything else on a webpage than anything that screams, “Here I am!”
- Social advertising: Netflix’s “Sponsored” posts are a great example of this. Putting a little towards sponsored posts on facebook or Instagram can pay off. These posts look exactly the way other posts in your feeds look – you can just also buy things from them.
- In-app advertising: Although being interrupted mid-Candy Crush is always frustrating, these ads are usually also incredibly good ways to put your product forward. Weirdly, as long as there’s an option there to skip, people might actually continue to watch.
However, you also don’t need us to tell you about any of these. We’re surrounded by them, and one need only be averse to using the internet not to notice that flashing banner ads have been replaced.
Essentially, people want to make the choice to buy something. They don’t want to be told. Similarly, they don’t want to ‘accidentally’ click something, they want to do it of their own accord.
Once you base your marketing campaign around that simple fact, you can successfully advertise to every adblocker-user on the web.