Online advertising is one of the ways businesses can connect to their target audience over the internet. What is Online Advertising and what is its role in business success? How do Philippine businesses use online ads to leverage growth amid competition? Read on to find out.
In the Philippines, online advertising plays a significant role in promoting the products and services of businesses. This is because the majority of Filipino audiences spend a lot of time online and often discover products on social media posts— especially on Facebook.
What’s more, Internet users in the country keep on growing on a year-to-year basis. In 2020, the Philippines approximately had 73.91 million active internet users, which account for more than half of the country’s total population. This makes it safe to say that the future of online advertising in the Philippines is promising.
But how does online advertising benefit businesses specifically, Philippine businesses? What are the stats on Philippine online advertising that businesses should know? And what does the future landscape of Philippine online advertising look like? We’ve listed down the answers below.
What is Online Advertising?
But first, let’s define what online advertising is.
Online advertising (or online marketing) is the use of digital platforms— social media, email, search engines, mobile apps, and websites, among others— to promote products and services to target audiences.
In the Philippines, online advertising has made it possible for most small and medium businesses (SMBs) to compete against large corporations. In a way, it democratizes advertising to the level of even micro-businesses.
This is because traditional advertising— for example, commercials on newspapers, radios, and TVs— used to be very expensive for small and medium-scale businesses, which makes it hard for them to promote their brand and outcompete established brands.
How to Do Online Advertising?
The following are the ways businesses can perform online advertising:
1. Content Marketing
Businesses can write and post information or content relevant to their target audience’s needs, interests, and preferences. This helps in quickly establishing connections between the business and its customers. Once that link is made, loyalty can follow. [Read: Top 10 Content Marketing Trends You Need to Know]
2. Email Marketing
Email is an effective tool in making direct and quick connections with target customers. It’s inexpensive (it can even be free) and it’s easy to launch.
It has its fair share of challenges though— like dodging spam filters— but these can be easily addressed. [Read: Top Email Marketing Trends in 2021]
3. Mobile Marketing
Everybody’s going mobile now. People who used to do their online activities on PC and laptops are now doing them on mobile, so it’s important to ensure that every online advertisement is optimized for mobile users.
4. Pay-per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are one of the most cost-efficient ways businesses can advertise online. As the name suggests, businesses will only pay for these ads once customers click on them.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Customers actively look for solutions online and that’s why businesses should help search engines direct the solutions to their channels (e.g. websites or webpages). This practice helps businesses capture sales-ready leads.
6. Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the most widely used platforms on the internet, especially for Filipinos. And because users are widely active there, many opportunities emerge for businesses to advertise their own brand and promote their products and services. [Read: Eight Media’s Guide to Social Media Marketing]
Benefits of Online Advertising to Philippine Businesses
1. Small and medium businesses can promote their brand inexpensively
As mentioned above, traditional advertisements used to be expensive and inaccessible to many small and medium businesses. This makes it hard for SMBs to compete for brand awareness and recall against many established brands owned by large corporations.
With the widespread use of social media platforms, the advertising landscape has changed drastically. Businesses can now advertise organically and reach a wider audience for free. But they also have an option to pay for it to target a more specific but wider group of audiences.
They can also use other platforms like Google Ads to launch pay-per-click ads, where they will only pay once customers click on their ads. This is seen as more cost-efficient compared to other platforms as this is more intent-based. This means that people searching in Google are more likely to be interested in that particular search term as compared to an ad shown to them.
In fact, according to a report, it only costs around $2.50 for social media ads to reach 1,000 people, compared to broadcast TV ($28), newspaper or magazines ($16), and radio ($10).
This means that online advertising is more inexpensive compared to traditional ads, allowing Philippine SMBs to advertise inexpensively.
2. Analytics to track campaign performance
Before, businesses used to pay more to track campaign performances. Nowadays, with the help of internet tools, businesses can generate analytics and assess their marketing performance right away.
This makes it easy for them to do comparisons, make changes and adjustments, or delete underperforming ads so they can optimize their campaigns and convert as many leads into customers as possible at minimal costs.
Overall, online advertising helps Philippine businesses perform better when it comes to marketing campaigns, even without paying more to collect data and analytics on their ad performance.
3. Online advertising makes targeting easier
Before, businesses used to pay more to track campaign performances. Nowadays, with the Selecting your audience has become easier with online platforms such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
Facebook, for example, can automatically show your ads to people who will find them relevant. It allows you to narrow down the audience for your ads based on age, interests, and geography, among others.
You can also limit the audience to people who have previously engaged with your business— online or offline. And reach “lookalike audiences,” those whose interests are similar to those of your best and most active customers.
Google Ads allows audience targeting and content targeting. Using the platform, your ads can be shown to specific demographics (locations, ages, genders, and device types). It can also display your ads on certain web pages based on your topic selection and content keywords (words relevant to your product or service).
4. Allows brands to reach a wider, global audience
Businesses used to find it difficult to widen their reach before. If a business wants to reach a global audience, it has to deal with multiple media platforms— international TV shows, radio, etc.
Now, any business can reach any audience as long as the platform allows it. Businesses in the Philippines can advertise their products and services abroad (to the US, for example) and vice versa.
This opens up a lot of opportunities for local SMBs. And this also levels the playing field between established brands and SMBs.
5. Present opportunities for brands to interact with customers
Businesses can now advertise and at the same time interact with customers, especially on social media.
Facebook and Instagram’s comments sections, for example, allow businesses to see customer feedback in real-time. These are valuable inputs that they can use to make adjustments with their products and services and even their campaigns.
They can also interact with customers— answer queries, address complaints, and thank reviews. Overall, interactions like these help businesses establish more meaningful relationships with customers and achieve customer loyalty.
Stats for Online Advertising in the Philippines
Below are the stats that can help businesses know about the status of online advertising in the Philippines:
- Online advertising spending is projected to reach US$463.8 billion globally in 2021, with the Philippines estimated at US$1.05 billion in the same year.
- The largest segment in the country’s online advertising is Banner Advertising with a market volume of US$402m in 2021.
- In 2021, the average ad spending in the Social Media Advertising segment is estimated at US$5.40 per user.
- In the Philippines, 24.2% of the total media ad spending was spent on digital advertising in 2020.
- The Philippines has the highest internet usage globally— with an estimated 10 hours and 56 minutes of activity, on average, per user.
- Online shopping has become increasingly popular among young Filipinos. The Philippines e-commerce market is expected to reach $10 billion by 2025, from $7.9 billion in 2017.
- The Philippine ad spending had an annual growth rate of 9.7% and a total market volume of US$662 million in 2020.
- By 2025, around 50% of the total online ad spending will be generated through mobile.
- The programmatic segment is expected to experience a spending growth of 1.3% by 2022. By 2025, 84% of the digital advertising revenue will be generated through programmatic advertising.
- Forty-eight percent of Filipinos in the age group 20-29 use the internet.
- Around 90% of Filipinos who go online weekly are most active in email. 83% send private messages through social media, 81% regularly post on social media, and 79% read the news on social media.
- Eighty-three percent of Filipinos claim that their lives have been made easier because of relevant advertising. Thirty-five percent don’t mind getting online ads
Conclusion
Online advertising in the Philippines can be tricky. It may sound easy but with tight competition, you may find it hard to set yourself apart from the others.
What’s important is discovering what works for you and your business— and you can fast-track this process by partnering with our experts here at Eight Media. Contact us to book a free 15-min consultation.
