Advertising is the promotion of products or services to the public, and an effective advertising strategy is essential to the success of any for-profit company. This field has grown more important, as well as more complex, since the advent of the digital era. In addition to traditional print, radio, and TV ads, today’s digital marketing professionals have many more channels to use as well as greater control over the audience these channels reach.

Google Ads search advertising is a quintessential example of this new era; while similar in format to print ads, the power of Google’s search algorithms and user data allow advertisers to target ads so that they are displayed only to users likely to be interested in their products, and to pay only when these ads are successful in garnering clicks. Social media marketing such as Facebook advertising and Twitter advertising also allows for user-specific targeting of ads that can use images as well as text.

There are also new opportunities for longer-form advertising. Native advertising uses the same format of the usual content of a publication, has expanded beyond traditional “advertorials” to include sponsored content on social media as well as branded content such as white papers. These formats may offer a means to convey more complex value propositions that can be particularly effective in business-to-business sales.

Regardless of the channel used, today’s advertising professionals also have sophisticated marketing performance measurement and management tools to evaluate their effectiveness. That means that success in this field requires more than a knack for coming up with a memorable message - you also need to have skills in analytics to understand your results, iterate, and optimize.