Converting competitors' customers into your own is an art form. Beyond being the best at what you do, you need to beat the competition at their own game. If you want your business to grow, you must constantly be seeking new opportunities. It's only logical that the most effective place to seek out those opportunities is among users who are already inclined to purchase your products and services. As the information economy evolves, there are several highly effective strategies for nabbing the competition's audiences.

Bidding on Competitors' Brand Keywords

One strategy involves going right to the source — include your competition's brand name in your pay-per-click ad campaign. You may have seen this plan in action when you're searching for a particular store or item and another brand name pops up. The challenge, however, is to keep your quality score high. Consumers looking for Best Buy may not be happy to see Bob's Computer Services pop up, and search engines will rank your ads and site lower for that. But for new businesses, or in markets where there is brand confusion, this can be a highly effective technique.

Though the death of banner ads was predicted long ago, 2016 is set to defy expectations and actually be (and you'll have to pardon the expression here ) a banner year for banner ads, as display advertising is set to eclipse search advertising for the first time ever in the U.S. According to eMarketer, marketers will spend more on banner ads than any other type of digital advertising this year. In order to fully take advantage of this blockbuster year for banner ads, take a quick look at some banner ad best practices for 2016.

No Flash, No Problem

Though Flash was an essential plugin back in the early 2000s, times have changed, and Flash is getting more outdated by the second. Almost every one of the major desktop browsers has stopped natively supporting it. These browsers' users now need to manually enable the plugin to view Flash content. Though nearly one in 10 websites still uses Flash, according to Web survey site W3Techs, Ad Age reports that if all the major browsers were to disable Flash suddenly, roughly 84 percent of banners across the Internet would not be viewable on desktop browsers. To avoid issues with Flash's decline, marketers should switch over to HTML5 as soon as possible to ensure that their banner ads are viewable for all browsers in the new year.

The call-to-action is a huge component of many different digital marketing strategies. Considering the long, winding path consumers can take to an online conversion, CTAs have tremendous utility: They can make tangible progress on the consumer path to purchase, sending traffic further down the funnel.

But effective CTAs aren't just growing on trees. Too often, marketers write them as an afterthought. But calls-to-action are a very specific piece of content targeting a very specific goal. As such, they need to be carefully developed and placed in a position where they can thrive. Here are some simple mistakes that undercut calls-to-action, as well as some basic solutions.

Reaching Consumers Where They Are — Literally!

Whereas in the past, dealers had to rely mainly on commercials and flashy billboards to entice customers into their stores, today they have the added benefit of being able to reach consumers in real time right when they're in the neighborhood. As consumers continue to spend more and more time on mobile devices, it's important to reach them where they are — not only where they'll be most likely to see your message, but where they'll be the most receptive to respond to it. That means using geofencing to serve ads in social networking apps, Web browsers and other mobile applications to target consumers who are close by your dealership. You can target consumers while they are out car shopping and serve them a deal right when they're in your neighborhood.

Banner ads and other traditional display ads haven't gone out of style, but they do face a pressing need to evolve with the times. Because the real estate on Web pages remains valuable as an advertising tool, the challenge marketers face is maximizing its potential to inspire attention, engagements and conversions.

A partial solution to this challenge is the advent of rich media ads as a form of display advertising. These ads are increasingly being deployed to local media websites — newspapers, radio, TV and other sites that see traffic from concentrated regions with specific audience interests in mind.

This two-part strategy — creating rich media ads and deploying them to relevant destinations — is driving critical gains for marketers, improving performance metrics and flexing the value of display ads, even in the face of rapid landscape evolution.

Banner ads are one of the oldest forms of advertising online (circa 1994), but time hasn't rendered them ineffective. MediaPost notes that 80 percent of brands in a recent HubSpot survey still use banner ads to showcase themselves to their target audience. This time-tested marketing channel remains a staple of monetized strategies online.

Because of that long track record, the makings of good banner ads are well understood, but truly great banner ads are a more rare find. Even a relative newcomer to online marketing can find a simple road map for building banner ads with a modest degree of success. But ROI, conversion rates and other performance metrics are constantly coming under the microscope and being compared to performance seen in social media, content marketing and other emerging digital campaigns.

Display ad purchases aren't just a matter of bidding for available space. Other factors enter the equation, particularly when it comes to the type of website where ad space is purchased. Brands tend to be concerned about where their advertising dollars are spent, and they weigh all the pros and cons of their associations with television shows, print publications and, yes, websites.

This is where a digital consultant can be invaluable in directing your brand safety efforts. Programmatic advertising has made the process of matching ads to available spaces much easier, not to mention hands-free. But it's also created an increasing need for brand safety solutions — technical measures that can help you ensure that you're only placing your ads on quality websites that align with your company values.

Whether you have a small, single-location business or a growing midsize company, building brand awareness is a vital component of any marketing campaign. It can help turn one-time visitors into repeat customers who not only recognize your business as a provider of certain goods and services, but also see your brand as important in their lives.

TV, radio, and print advertising provides marketers with broad platforms capable of reaching thousands of consumers. Digital display and video help augment these marketing strategies and build brand awareness among targeted demographics with specific messages designed to increase knowledge and familiarity with the brand. These two approaches work particularly well in tandem, since one strategy alone simply isn't effective enough in today's media-saturated world.

A/B testing, or split testing, is a tool that online marketers use to compare two versions of a piece of content to see which one performs better. These tests may be run on various types of content, including Web pages, banner ads, social media posts and blog entries. A/B tests, which can run for any length of time, give marketers insight into which kinds of key phrases, design elements and calls-to-action are most effective.

According to Marketing Land, U.S. digital ad spending hit an all-time high of $49.5 billion in 2014, and 16 percent of that, or $8 billion, was spent on desktop ads alone. Banner ads aren't going anywhere anytime soon, so it's important to make sure you're using them to your best advantage. Optimizing your banner ads with A/B testing can help you stand out from your competitors and reach your audience in a meaningful way. Here are three of the benefits of performing these tests on banner ads.

Mobile display ads are often associated with generating website traffic or boosting social networking profiles. However, there's one key feature that marketers may be overlooking: the ability to generate calls to your business. Though traditional search ads are still a great way to reach consumers, the mobile variety has become an increasingly important component of campaigns, designed to drive calls in response to shifting consumer behavior patterns.

The Shift to Mobile

It's no secret that consumers are using smartphones to browse the Web more than ever. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that "34 percent of smartphone Internet users go online mostly using their phones and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer." That represents a huge shift in behavior, and it's important that marketers respond to it. While fairly few consumers use only their smartphones to access the Web, marketers looking to drive calls through display campaigns need to reach consumers where they are comfortable and where they will be most likely to respond instantly to these ads — on their smartphones.