Digital Advertising Workbook
Digital Advertising Workbook
Digital Advertising Workbook
Workbook
Learn How to Develop a Winning
Online Advertising Strategy
Table of Contents
Welcome! You’re here to learn how to create a digital advertising strategy that not only drives business value,
but that also delights your audience.
Digital advertising is a targeted, data-driven advertising strategy for reaching consumers online at every
stage of the buyer’s journey, including awareness, consideration, and decision stages. This includes social
media, paid search, display advertising, and more.
Advertising across platforms can work together to drive leads, nurture contacts, and generate revenue for
your business. When done correctly, digital advertising helps you build a relationship with new and existing
audiences and encourage progression through the buyer’s journey.
The buyer's journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and
decide to purchase a new product or service. A strategic advertising strategy uses digital ads to:
• Offer value to prospects at every stage by answering questions
• Relate to prospect pain points
• Offer helpful resources
As opposed to spammy promotional messaging and intrusive advertising tactics, a modern digital
advertising strategy can help you discover new audiences, build and maintain relationships with your
prospects, and drive leads and sales for your business.
Earning your Digital Advertising Certification and completing this workbook are the first steps towards
becoming an expert in the industry.
Here’s a list of suggestions to get the most value out of this workbook:
• Please save this workbook to the desktop on your computer. This way your progress will be saved
correctly as you complete each section.
• If you prefer to have a hard copy to write on, then print out this PDF.
• Join the Content Marketing Professionals group on Facebook. We believe the best way to learn is by
implementing strategies, sharing ideas, and discussing what you’ve learned with a group of marketers,
just like you.
• Connect with HubSpot Academy on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. We’re here to support
you, and we want to follow your journey.
Advertising and content go hand-in-hand. Whether you’re promoting an ebook offer, driving sales for a new
product, or launching a rebranding campaign, great content fuels a successful advertising strategy. Plus,
digital advertising impacts organic marketing efforts, too. That’s why it is crucial to align organic marketing
and paid advertising efforts to produce the greatest impact possible.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
Let’s analyze what other advertisers are doing online. First, open up your favorite social media channel or a web
browser on your phone or computer and find an example of a digital ad online that interests you. You can do this
by either looking through your feed or stories on a social media platform or conducting a search in a search
engine on a topic that interests you. Once you’ve found an example, proceed to the questions below.
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Think about a recent purchase that you made. What did that journey look like? When did you become aware
of your need? How many different options did you consider? What made you decide on one option over the
other? That process is the buyer’s journey at work. And, chances are, that digital advertising has played a role
in your own buyer’s journey at one point or another.
Journey-based advertising is powerful because it adapts your advertising strategy to the buyer’s journey. You
can map the awareness, consideration, and decision phases to paid advertising offers and ad copy, as well as
the structure and strategy of your paid advertising campaigns.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
If you don’t already have a primary buyer persona established for your business, create one using HubSpot’s free
Make My Persona tool.
In the box below, write a brief profile for your primary buyer persona.
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With your own buyer persona in mind, answer the following questions about the buyer’s journey to better
understand the steps they take throughout the awareness, consideration, and decision stages.
How does your buyer persona describe their goals and challenges?
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What solutions does your buyer persona investigate to meet their goals or solve their challenges?
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Where does your buyer persona conduct research when evaluating potential solutions?
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What criteria does your buyer persona use to evaluate potential solutions?
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With your buyer’s journey in mind, consider how digital advertising could play a role at the awareness,
consideration, and decision stages. For each stage, brainstorm a digital ad that could help your buyer persona
and encourage their progression through each stage.
1. Awareness stage
In the box below, outline the ad content and purpose. What do you want to communicate?
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2. Consideration stage
In the box below, outline the ad content and purpose. What do you want to communicate?
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3. Decision stage
In the box below, outline the ad content and purpose. What do you want to communicate?
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Successful digital ads stem from a well-thought-out campaign, including understanding your target
audience, identifying your goals and objectives, determining your paid media budget, and having a plan in
place for optimization. Understanding the building blocks of paid media campaigns will enable you to put
your best foot forward and create remarkable ads that speak to your target audience.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
Building trust with your audience is one of the biggest challenges you will face as an advertiser. At its core, you
want your audience to believe you. The problem is that consumers hear all kinds of marketing messages from
various brands throughout the day. What makes your message more valuable and more authentic than the
hundreds of other companies also competing for the same audience?
That’s where your reasons to believe come into play. Simply put, your reasons to believe, or RTBs, are why your
audience should trust your advertising message and believe in your company. Your RTBs could be anything from
sustainable packaging and ethical sourcing, to testimonials and more. Highlighting your brand’s reasons to
believe in your digital ads will help you build a positive relationship with your target audience.
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Targeted advertising helps you reach specific audiences online, whether you’re remarketing to existing
contacts or discovering people who haven’t heard of your brand before. To make the most of your
advertising budget, you want to position your ads in front of a qualified audience. Ad targeting allows you to
strategically define that audience based on different criteria.
Different ad targeting strategies are suited to different ad types, channels, and goals, but all three can work
together to drive an impact in your digital advertising strategy.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
In the boxes below, brainstorm the demographic, behavioral, and contextual data that you could use to target
your ideal audiences.
What demographic information (ex. age, location) will you use to reach your target audience?
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What contextual information (ex. interests, publications) will you use to reach your target audience?
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The words, imagery, and conversion paths that make up your ad campaigns all have a role to play in the
success of your digital advertising strategy. These three elements work together to convey the value of your
offer to your prospects and establish a clear path from stranger to lead to customer. Successful digital
advertisers have skills in copywriting, design, and conversion rate optimization. Mastering these skills will
enable you to create the assets you need to launch your own campaigns.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
Select a product, service, or piece of content that you would like to advertise. Let’s brainstorm some ideas for
writing effective ad copy, designing eye-catching ad creative, and building an optimized conversion path for your
campaign.
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What will your call-to-action (CTA) bet? Write down some ideas here.
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Design an ad creative to match your campaign using Canva. Describe your design here.
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Based on your headline and creative, describe what the conversion path will look like.
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Over the years, organic reach on social media platforms has been steadily declining. With more content
creators every day, social media platforms are crowded, and reaching your target audience with organic
content alone can be challenging. In fact, organic reach for posts on social media platforms like Facebook
could be as low as just 1% of your audience on the platform. When implemented successfully, social media
advertising can be a great supplement to your organic strategy. Let’s practice how you can develop the right
content and strategy for your social media ads.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
There are a ton of social media platforms available today, and each of them come with a unique audience, features, ad
types, and targeting capabilities. Keep your buyer persona handy as you complete the following activities, which ask
you to identify which social media platforms are most relevant to your buyer persona and why.
Which social media platforms does your target audience spend time on online? List at least three.
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2 Practical Exercise
This exercise aims to help you create ad concepts that will resonate with your target audience. Refer to the social
media platforms and motivations for your target audience that you identified in the previous exercise.
In the boxes below, specify which ad type you think will be the most successful at engaging your audience. Then,
write down how your advertisement can be optimized to perform its best across quality, engagement, and
conversion metrics.
What ad type will you use to reach your target audience and why?
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Google, Bing, Yahoo and other popular search engines receive billions of search queries every day. Think
about how frequently you turn to the internet to answer your questions. From questions like “How do I fix a
leaking faucet?” to “What is the best marketing software?” and everything in-between, people around the
world turn to search engines to find solutions.
You and your business have things that you want your audience online to know about you. While optimizing
your website for organic search is one way to get your content in front of people surfing the internet, paid
search advertising is the other. This section will walk you through how to create search ads that entice
viewers to click through to your website.
Resources
Lesson: Introduction to Paid Search Advertising
1
Practical Exercise
Let’s get started with some keyword research for your search ad campaigns. To complete this exercise,
signup for your free Moz Keyword Explorer account. Or, if you already have access to another keyword
research tool, feel free to use it instead.
Fill out the table below with keyword research for your own company.
ex. HubSpot Academy ex. Udacity ex. Online Learning ex. Education
ex. HubSpot Academy ex. Udacity ex. Online Learning ex. Education
While completing exercise 2, keep your keyword research from exercise 1 in mind. Let’s write your paid search ad.
What brand or non-brand keyword will you be using for this ad?
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There’s more to advertising on Google than writing headlines and descriptions. To master search advertising
on Google, you need to have a strong understanding of how the Google auction works and how to use ad
extensions to optimize your search ad’s performance.
In this section, you’ll get some hands-on practice with ad extensions for your business.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
In this exercise, we’re going to dive deeper into ad extensions. As you complete this section, reference your
keyword research and ad copy from Section 7. There are many types of ad extensions to choose from. In each of
the boxes below, select one ad extension type and brainstorm what these ad extensions might say.
Ad extension #1
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Ad extension #2
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Ad extension #4
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Programmatic advertising is everywhere, from the podcasts you listen to on your daily commute to the
videos you watch on YouTube. These ads also show up while browsing social media sites and even in online
publications. Programmatic advertising is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to buy ads in
real-time, instead of going through human negotiations and pre-set prices. This takes a lot of the manual and
guesswork out of advertising online.
To get started with programmatic advertising, you’ll want to select a demand-side platform that makes the
most sense for you and your business.
Resources
1 Practical Exercise
The first step to getting started with programmatic advertising is to pick a demand-side platform (DSP) where you
will manage your campaigns. In this exercise, research the top demand-side platforms using this article from G2,
a software review website.
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In order for your digital advertising strategy to be effective, you need to understand what return you are
getting on your investment. The good thing about return is that it isn’t an absolute number. There are
initiatives that you can launch to improve the efficiency of your campaigns. This is done by launching
experiments and calculating ROAS, or return on ad spend.
In this section, you’ll practice both of these skills by completing the following exercises.
Resources
Lesson: How to Monitor and Report on Ad Performance
Blog post: How to Conduct the Perfect Marketing Experiment [+ Examples]
Blog post: The Plain English Guide to Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Tool: The Advertising ROI Calculator
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Practical Exercise
In this exercise, we’re going to set up a marketing experiment. Choose a digital ad specific to your business, and
then answer the following questions.
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2 Practical Exercise
For this exercise, use HubSpot’s Free Advertising ROI Calculator to determine your ROAS. The data points for
this exercise can either be based on your own past performance or hypothetical. Once you have used the tool,
answer the questions below.
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What metric(s) could you optimize to see a great return on your investment?
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Your next step is to apply the strategies and tactics you’ve practiced in this workbook to improve your own
digital advertising efforts. Keep an eye out for new opportunities to put your digital advertising strategy to
work by exploring new channels, identifying new audiences, or experimenting with your campaigns.
Remember, digital advertising doesn’t have to be at odds with the inbound methodology. Keep your
customers top-of-mind and you’ll be well on your way to creating digital ads that delight your audience and
drive business value.
One last thing: Let’s make this process of learning online a bit more social by engaging with each other
online. Follow HubSpot Academy on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, and join our Content
Marketing Professionals group on Facebook. We all learn better, together, when we share insights, ask
questions, and engage one another in conversation.
Best of luck as you continue along your digital advertising journey. We can’t wait to see what you accomplish.
Always be learning,
Ad blocking:
The action or practice of using a special piece of software to prevent advertisements from
appearing on a web page.
Ad copy:
The text that makes up an advertising message aimed at catching and holding the interest of the
prospective buyer.
Ad creative:
The visual attributes of the creative object that is your digital ad.
Ad extension:
A feature that shows extra business information with your ad, like an address, phone number, store
rating, or more webpage links.
Ad group:
One or more ads that share a common theme.
Ad rank:
A value that's used to determine your ad position (where ads are shown on a page relative to other
ads) and whether your ads will show at all.
Ad tracking:
The process of collecting data and user insights on the performance of online advertising campaigns.
Advertising network:
A company that connects advertisers to websites that want to host advertisements.
Attribution model:
The rule, or set of rules, that determines how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touch
points along conversion paths.
Automated bidding:
Uses machine learning to maximize results based on your campaign goals.
Banner ad:
A display ad that appears across the top of a page on the internet.
Behavioral targeting:
A method that allows advertisers and publishers to display relevant ads and marketing messages to
users based on their web browsing behavior.
Bid:
The maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for a desired action on your ad.
Broad match:
A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some
combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order.
Buyer’s journey:
The process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a
new product or service.
Caching:
The process of storing temporary files that make a device, browser, or app run faster and
more efficiently.
Campaign:
A set of related ad groups that is often used to organize categories of products or services that you offer.
Click-through-rate (CTR):
The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email,
or advertisement.
Contextual advertising:
The practice of placing ads on web pages based on the content of those pages.
Conversion path:
The process by which an anonymous website visitor becomes a known lead.
Conversion rate:
The rate at which website visitors to your site convert on a form and become a lead.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO):
The process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, like filling out
a form or making a purchase.
Copywriting:
The activity or occupation of writing the text of advertisements or publicity material.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA):
How many advertising dollars you spend to acquire one new customer.
Cost-per-click (CPC):
The amount you pay for each click on an ad.
Cost-per-lead (CPL):
How many advertising dollars you spend to acquire one new lead.
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM):
The cost an advertiser pays per one thousand impressions on a digital ad.
Data-management platform (DMP):
A software platform for collecting and managing data.
Demand-side platform (DSP):
A system that allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchange and data
exchange accounts through one interface.