Author: Mitchell Carey

The current state of the consumer-brand relationship lends itself to digital marketing strategies that cross channels, devices, and audiences, analyzing performance in real time for constant optimization. When done properly, you’ll increase scale and decrease ad spend, promoting products and services on the digital platforms that will yield the highest conversion rates.

However, creating a successful digital marketing strategy is not easy. Without the help of an experienced strategist at a digital marketing company, implementing an effective strategy can be daunting and nearly impossible. Many brands blindly enter into a cookie-cutter strategy and end up throwing away their ad dollars on campaigns that don’t yield the results they originally set out to achieve. If you’ve ever asked yourself any of the following questions, it’s probably time to seek out help from a digital marketing company that can provide you with some answers:

• “What  strategies are essential to achieving my intended marketing objectives?”
• “How can I tell which tools are appropriate to solve certain problems?”
• “What do I really need to get started, grow and develop my digital marketing strategy?”
• “After having tested an initial strategy, how am I going to be able to fine tune my strategy so that the digital tactics that are ideal for my brand are implemented?”
• “Where should I start, with all the information I have at my fingertips?”  

4 Essential Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy

Before diving into the three keys to developing a digital marketing strategy, it’s critical that you understand the essential components required to form the base of an efficient strategy. Every effective digital marketing strategy includes the following elements:

1. A Defined Target

If you’re not clear on who you want your ads to reach, you shouldn’t bother wasting your ad spend on a digital marketing campaign without a clear objective. It may seem like a no-brainer, but many brands continue making the mistake of defining their total addressable market as everyone and anyone that they can reach.

The first step in creating any digital marketing strategy is to clearly define the audience you plan on targeting. Although marketing before the onset of the internet tried to reach as many consumers as possible with a single message via mass media channels like TV and radio, this will yield less than satisfactory performance and require an exorbitantly large marketing budget.

Technology and the way in which consumers interact with brands have changed, so your marketing strategy should too. You can no longer, nor should you, “use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” Be certain that you dedicate time to clearly defining your buyer persona.

2. Identify Optimal Channels

If you’ve determined who your potential customers are, it’s easier to identify  the types of media with which they’re most likely to interact. There are dozens of digital media channels: email marketing, social media, chat bots, landing pages, in-app, etc. Some are good for increasing conversions, others are excellent for generating engagement, and there are some that stand out for their ability to increase brand awareness. Regardless of which channels you opt for, implementing an omni-channel approach is essential to reach all current customers and uncover new leads.

3. Gripping Creative

After deciding to who and where your digital marketing will be directed, you have to make sure that your creative grabs the user’s attention. Some advertisers think that it’s enough to simply put together a nicely written caption and add an image before publishing content. However, in today’s highly-saturated online ecosystem this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The overabundance of messages appearing across banners, search engines, and social networks forces brands to design creatives that will break through the noise and be noticed by their audience. To create a gripping creative it’s essential to:

• Write attractive copy
• Use appropriate fonts and colors
• Design motivational calls to action
• Choose pictures or videos that tell a story to which your consumer can relate

4. A Programmatic Partner

After you’ve addressed the above components of your digital marketing strategy, you have to tie it all together and make sure that your campaigns are properly executed. The best way to make sure that the proper advertisements are arriving to the right people at the right time is undoubtedly through a programmatic ad buying campaign through a trusted partner like Digilant.

Having a reliable programmatic partner allows you to seamlessly implement campaigns with both incredible scale and precise targeting, all while guaranteeing transparent media buying, paying for impressions based on the ROI that they’ll yield.

 

3 Keys to Successful Digital Marketing

Having the above components will provide a structural base for your digital marketing, but if you truly want to compete and create a sustainable strategy, you and the digital marketing company with which you partner will have to do the following in your next campaign:

1. Create Valuable Content

Your business relies on users buying their products and services in order to grow, but if you think that your leads are going to just directly input your URL into their search engine and begin browsing your products, you’re sorely mistaken. Today’s digital marketing strategies have evolved to implement content that drives leads down the funnel.

A complete stranger is delivered your content because it helps solve a problem that his user behavior indicated he might face. The content must then educate this user and spark an interest to seek out more knowledge, now considered a warm lead until he or she is further educated on how your product or services are a solution to their problems, becoming a customer.

Content marketing has become an imperative digital marketing strategy with nearly six time higher website conversion rates for adopters than non-adopters, and more and more marketers are catching on. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers say that they are producing more original content this year than they had in 2016.

2. Design with Mobile in Mind

Once you’ve created valuable content, you must adapt it for all media channels that your campaign will touch. Regardless of how niche the audience is that you’re trying to reach are, you can guarantee that most of them will be using a cellphone, 95% of users in the U.S. to be exact.

Mobile usage has grown and mobile commerce is becoming a vital piece to the digital marketing puzzle. are displayedcorrectly and loaded in the places where you have placed them. Whether designing for native in-app, banners, interstitials, or simply your website, your brand’s digital presence must be fully optimized for mobile in order for your campaigns and following ROI to be optimal.

One way to make sure of this is to design with a mobile-first mindset, meaning your creative and copy are initially made for mobile environments and then adapted for other devices.

3. Make Decisions Backed by Data

One of the most common mistakes that many antiquated digital marketing companies fall into is making decisions based purely off of their team’s opinion rather than analyzing data on past performance to make better decisions moving forward. If you don’t have your campaigns tracked and haven’t set KPIs to assess them, your marketing will remain stagnant and your business will suffer.

If you’re to focus on only one of these three keys to digital marketing, your efforts will be best spent leveraging your data to drive these metrics. Combining first party data from your CRM and the third party data available to you when working with a programmatic partner like Digilant, you’ll have the resources to meaningfully segment your targeting and penetrate all necessary media channels for optimal results in your next digital marketing campaign.

Interested in putting these keys to digital marketing to the test in your next campaign? Learn more about how Digilant can help get you there – or reach out to us today!

Programmatic ad buying has gone from being an advertising technology used only by the largest of businesses, to a key marketing tactic for any brand that wants to be seen and heard in today’s constantly expanding digital ecosystem. Despite its widespread prevalence, programmatic ad buying is an advertising practice that requires sophisticated training and knowledge to properly implement and get the most out of your ad dollars. If you want to plan and execute a programmatic ad campaign like a pro, you need to know what strategies to adopt, what trends and data to pay attention to and which metrics to follow to monitor performance?

Although programmatic ad buying campaigns can vary greatly in their tactics, with some aiming to amplify brand awareness, and others more focused on generating leads, a marketer that can develop a programmatic ad buying strategy that effectively reaches desired ROI while maintaining transparency is considered successful. Transparency refers to providing buyers with a clear view of the price of inventory purchased, the data leveraged to place their ads, and the environments in which those ads will ultimately end up, and being able to identify attribution.

How does programmatic advertising fit into an overall digital marketing strategy?

Whether you’re using digital media for direct acquisition or for brand awareness, if you’re still buying it traditionally, you’re letting go of opportunities to optimize your ad spend and maximize your total addressable market. In order to compete in today’s digital marketplace, integrating programmatic ad buying into your digital marketing strategy is a must.

In the broadest sense, programmatic is the automation of marketing activities, from the smallest programming of a post to implementing a highly layered real time omnichannel campaign. If you haven’t already dove into programmatic ad buying and are debating whether or not to get your toes wet, considering the following:

• Would programmatic buying more efficient than how my brand is currently buying media?
• Would programmatic buying be more transparent?
• Would programmatic buying be more profitable?

How does the process of programmatic ad buying work?

The development of algorithms using data science driven technology that analyze the behavior of an individual user, is the driving force of programmatic ad buying, optimizing bidding in real time and reaching audiences composed of the users that are most likely to convert.

Businesses that bid for inventory through programmatic ad buying can compile an enormous amount of data that can become audience segments. The sooner you launch a campaign and the more time it has to gather this data, the sooner your programmatic ad buying platform’s data intelligence can strengthen your overall digital marketing strategy through more efficient targeting.

Learning about how programmatic ad buying can drive your digital marketing campaign is great, but it’s equally as important to know what’s underneath the hood. Purchasing programmatic ads involves the following systems:

1.) DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) facilitate the purchase of ad inventory and allow marketers to reach their target audience when integrated with a data management platform. In Today’s marketplace there’s a wide variety of DSPs available to brands looking to buy ads programmatically, and programmatic agencies such as Digilant who can manage your campaigns.

2.) DMPs (Data Management Platforms) compile and analyze massive quantities of cookie and mobile data that provide insights that help advertisers make better and more informed decisions. Generally the data sets with which DMPs work with are:

• 1st party data: Data compiled directly from the advertiser; their website, social media platforms, email marketing and display campaigns, or their own CRM.

• 3rd party data: Data compiled from external sources. The user data points generally consist of age, gender, social and professional interests, geographic location, and other interests or needs of the user inferred from their online behavior.

3.) For content publishers, SSPs (Sell Side Platforms) are essential in providing a source of revenue. This platform is where various types of online media manage their unsold ad inventory. Bidders using DSPs are provided with information on the value of the available inventory from the SSP with data on page visits, visitor demographics, number of pages viewed, and length of site visit.

Step-by-Step Process

It’s essential to know how to work with the data insights that you acquire through your DSP. Once you feel that you have a strong handle on the aforementioned elements involved in the programmatic ad buying process, you’ll want to launch your campaign on a programmatic buying platform.

Whether your campaign is managed or you opt for a platform with self-service, it’s crucial that you partner with a provider that has a great support team to help you through any challenges that you come across throughout your campaign’s operation.

As seen in the above infographic, the programmatic ad buying process can be divided into 5 steps:

1. Picking: The starting point of any programmatic ad buying process, picking refers to the period during which brands define the inventory criteria that they’d like to set before moving forward with bidding. Regardless of the DSP that you opt to use, you’ll be asked for information surrounding your budget, target audience, and the KPIs you want to achieve.
2. Matching: Now that the DSP system knows what type of inventory you’re looking for, it will search ad networks and buy audience data from various digital environments and match your ads with the sites and platforms that will best align with your KPIs.
3. Triggering: Once a match is found, the ad is placed and waits for a trigger. There are various types of triggers, but all refer to an interaction with the ad creative,  whether it’s a click, a mouse-over, or simply a page view.
4. Tracking: With the ad now visible and receiving engagement from users, data surrounding this engagement will be collected to provide advertisers with insights about how effectively the campaign is operating.
5. Repeat: Programmatic ad buying is a cyclical process that repeats itself. Once you’ve launched your campaign and have had ample time to analyze its performance, the human aspect of programmatic must come into place. you will have to return to the starting point steadily. Being an automated process, the repetition becomes one more step, which the user assumes as natural and proper to the operation of this system of purchase.

Common Concerns of Marketers New to Programmatic Ad Buying

Programmatic ad buying was specifically designed to help marketers execute more scalable, efficient and precise digital campaigns, so why are some marketers hesitant to give it a shot?

There are several reasons why some brands don’t feel completely secure with implementing programmatic ad campaigns.

1. Ad Fraud

In today’s digital ecosystem, ad fraud is a huge concern for programmatic marketers. According to a Wall Street Journal report, it’s estimated that more than a third of online ad traffic is fraudulent, meaning a third of ads won’t be viewed by an actual user.

However, with advances in programmatic technology fraudulent traffic can now be detected by analyzing user behavior. The most common forms of fraud come from bots that generate irrelevant clicks and falsifying user characteristics, and ad fraud comes in many forms, including:

• Selling of inventory automatically generated by bots or background mobile-app services
• Serving ads on a site other than the one provided in a Real Time Bid – or RTB request
• Delivering pre-roll video placements in display banner slots
• Falsifying user characteristics like location and browser type
• Hiding ads behind or inside other page elements so that they can’t be viewed hindering a user’s opportunity to engage by frequently refreshing the ad unit or page

Fortunately, technology exists that combats ad fraud, tracking suspicious traffic and retargeting ads to user traffic with real potential customers that are most prone to convert.

2. Viewability

As previously mentioned, a fraudulent ad will never be viewed by a real user, but beyond being seen by a human, what constitutes a viewable ad? The Media Rating Council deems a programmatic display ad viewable if at least 50% of the creative is visible to the user for at least one continuous second. This may sound like a non-issue, but viewability is crucial metric for any programmatic marketer. A study conducted last March found that 57% of ads served are not considered visible and that leads to wasted ad spend and diminishing ROI.

3. Brand Safety

Companies like Integral Ad Science, that specialize in guaranteeing brand safety, have evolved to fully integrate their services to protect programmatic advertisers’ campaigns from operating in ways that can damage brand reputation. The main responsibility of these companies is to assure that ads across the digital ecosystem don’t appear in environments that could be compromising to a brand’s identity or mission.

It’s ultimately not worth the risk to invest in a programmatic ad buying platform if you aren’t able to guarantee that your ads will be displayed on secure media platforms, and more importantly, alongside relevant content with values congruent to those of your brand. Let this past March’s Google Ad Crisis be a reminder for all advertisers to prioritize brand safety.

Major Brands Relying 0n Programmatic Ad Buying for Results

Many brands today are decreasing their traditional ad spend or cutting it all together. In an interview with CNBC, Adidas’ CEO, Kasper Rorsted, stated, “All of our engagement with the consumer is through digital media and we believe in the next three years we can take our online business from approximately 1 billion euros to 4 billion euros and create a much more direct engagement with consumers.”

This decision marks an important paradigm shift for digital marketers. With the sheer quantity of online user behavior data available and a plethora of digital media channels on which to reach these users, today’s advertisers are positioned to create digital marketing campaigns with incredible scale. When combined with programmatic ad buying, this scale is effectively leveraged to target and uncover the most valuable users in real time.

Interested in unlocking data and uncovering your brand’s potential through programmatic ad buying? Learn more about Digilant’s solutions here.

By Colin Brown, Chief Operating Officer, Digilant

‘The Times’ unearthed a massive scandal in digital marketing this March. The British newspaper broke the news on YouTube and Google’s placement of ads alongside content associated with political violence, extremist religious propaganda and other offensive content incongruent with the messages of brands and organizations advertising on the platforms.

Upon discovering this extreme lack of oversight, the United Kingdom suspended all advertising through the search engine until it received a complete guarantee that all necessary filters would be implemented to ensure that the incident wouldn’t repeat itself.

In the following days, the phones in the offices of top ranking executives at Google and YouTube didn’t stop ringing. Huge advertisers followed suit with the British government, halting their advertisements on the platforms. One of the most notable agencies to pull their ad spend from Google was the Havas Group. Havas is responsible for managing nearly 650 million dollars in digital ad spend, of which about 225 million dollars belonged to companies running campaigns in the United Kingdom, such as the BBC, Clarks, Dominos, and Hyundai, among others.

The Mountain View tech giant watched as its shares plummeted in the stock market as everyone from multinational corporations to small independently-owned businesses began withdrawing their advertising budgets from YouTube and other platforms. The list of nearly 300 companies that withdrew their investments included some of the biggest brands in the world, like AT&T, Verizon, and Johnson & Johnson.

The most pressing concern surrounding the search engine’s crisis was the enormous economic blow that resulted from it; according to calculations from global investment group, Nomura, Google could lose more than 7% of its revenue in 2017, which would translate to approximately 750 million dollars. Their earnings totaled 7.8 billion dollars in Great Britain alone in 2016 and that figure will likely be much lower this year.

However, Google rushed to address the concerns of its shareholders, informing their clients that they’re moving forward with the creation of tools to detect and eliminate content related to the defense of terrorism, incitation of violence, xenophobia, homophobia, and all forms of radicalism. Their response to the crisis has at the very least allowed for its stock to recover significantly after reaching rock bottom on March 24^th.

Of course, it isn’t easy to control what content is uploaded to YouTube with 300 hours of video being shared every minute. According to the platform’s data, YouTube has around a billion users (a third of the world’s internet users) that watch videos for 3.25 billion hours with billions of plays in only a month’s time, largely attributed to subscriptions to the channels of recognized influencers and other less-famous, but nonetheless noteworthy YouTubers.

Despite the power and influence still held by YouTube, what happened will contribute to a rebalancing of the distribution of global advertising investments. An eMarketer study conducted prior to the scandal estimated that YouTube and Google would receive 60% of the 203 billion dollars in revenue generated from digital ad buying, but actual revenue will very likely fall short of that estimate after news of the crisis was made public by ‘The Times.’  While there is still uncertainty for the future, it’s undeniable that brands that want to relate as fully as possible with their audiences can’t simply remove their ads from YouTube.

Reliable Partners

As is customary, every crisis provides an opportunity to make improvements and the solution lies in technology. There are already formulas, algorithms, and data-driven tools available to prevent ads from ever appearing alongside undesirable content. The players that participate in the intelligence and data-driven digital marketing ecosystem provide sufficient guarantee that an advertiser will almost never see their ads placed with compromising or low-quality content.

In fact, this problem is one that even the most experienced companies have overcome, those that strengthen their services by acquiring secure data and placing ads on guaranteed inventories. Ultimately, it’s the programmatic partners who are the first to be concerned with improving the user experience, ensuring that only relevant and novel advertising is delivered to each user, that brands have the peace of mind that their media budget will be used to place their ads on the sites of reliable publishers. It’s all about generating qualified traffic, which takes brand safety and reputation into consideration so that the brand’s online presence strengthened and values are maintained.

Constantly improving upon existing technologies is a crucial process for programmatic media providers. When well developed and responsibly managed, those technologies allow for advertising in a safe and controlled environment.

At Digilant, we have data solutions that enable clients to control brand safety. Advertisers are becoming increasingly demanding with how and where they advertise and we want to meet their needs. In order to achieve this, we always try to stay a step ahead with transparent processes from the moment we begin working with a client until their campaign is complete. It is crucial that upholding brand reputation remains a key priority for any media buying partner, so that programmatic continues to be the best solution for a business seeking to grow their digital advertising spend.