People learn about your product as much on your site as they do by browsing other websites. If you are running paid advertising, each time your ad appears on a user’s screen it conveys a message, leaving one more impression before their eyes that might underscore your product or service in their mind.

An impression is similar to the billboard image you see on the side of a highway or riding the train/Metro/Marta/Tube on your commute home after a full day of work. You see them, but you don’t really pay attention to what it says. Sometimes you may recognize the branding, but may not even notice or read what it says. This impression is still important. It subtly contributes to the awareness of your brand, embedding in the unconscious of potential customers.

Cumulative impressions might prompt someone to interact with your brand, to click on an online ad, or in the case of advertising before them, scanning a QR code (do people really do that?). If we accept that it takes eight touchpoints to turn a prospect into a lead, then the importance of impressions becomes understood. Knowing that people are getting numb to marketing advertising because of all the media they are exposed to every day, knowing how many impressions it takes to convert into the first touchpoint for your sector would be invaluable. The more you know your target audience, the better you can draw interest to your brand.

Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social network sites allow you to target your ads to specific blocks of people and increase the odds your getting in front of the customers most likely to take positive action (make sure you put a cap on daily impressions).

People learn as much about your product on your website as they do outside through targeted ads. Having an online ad budget is critical to brands, and targeting is crucial. A restaurant, for example, would want to target people around their physical location. A restaurant in Houston spending money to advertise online to everyone in Texas is wasting money. Target your message to where people are, on their phones, their computer, and their tablets, surfing for things that have a common theme or characteristic of your product/service.

Very soon we will see customized ads on TVs, and people need to be ready for these innovations that will come earlier than you think, that is a potential opportunity for an extra impression.

Communicate with your followers and people who ask questions. Engage! Customer experience is essential and one of the most important reasons why someone will choose your brand over another. Know that people have a plethora of choice and when they decide to do business with you or buy your brand, it is because of something you did that was better than the competition. Work your sales pitch. Introduce yourself. Be friendly. Online rules are no different than the social rules your mom taught you.