Part of any successful brand’s digital marketing strategy involves the tactful implementation of an internet ad buying plan. Although mapping out an impactful internet ad buying plan is a crucial and necessary step to take when growing your business, it can be a daunting task for even the most experienced marketer. For this reason, it’s generally more effective to hire a professional internet ad buying agency that will meet your needs and maximize your ad dollars from start to finish of your campaign.
Rather than taking full advantage of internet ad buying, many marketers opt to forgo more advanced internet ad buying strategies, simply because they’re unfamiliar with or can’t afford the ramp up time needed to properly run campaigns in-house. Among the many forms of internet ad buying, the model proven to be the most beneficial for brands of all sizes and verticals is programmatic media buying. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “What is it that programmatic internet ad buying can do for my brand?” and the answer is rather simple: it reaches the right audience, at the right place and time, and at the lowest cost for the advertiser.
How are brands managing their internet ad buying today?
Programmatic internet ad buying is powered by RTB (Real Time Bidding), which has become the go-to investment for brands looking to get the most out of their internet ad buying, because the bidding process is constantly improved upon as DSP‘s (Demand Side Platform) identify the inventory spaces that yield the highest ROI. This powerful software can identify, purchase, and place an ad impression across the digital ecosystem in milliseconds, but if you slow things down, the RTB process can be broken into five stages:
- A user accesses a web page.
- Cookies on the page retrieve data on the user’s behavior and this data is used to create a profile.
- Advertisers participate in auctions with the publisher for the page inventory if the user profiles align with their target audience.
- Buyers set their CPM (cost per mil or cost per 1,000 display impressions) and the bidder with the highest CPM wins the auction.
- The creative is delivered by the advertiser to the ad space on the web page that the user is visiting.
What are the benefits to having a programmatic internet ad buying partner?
As an advertiser, you want to assure that your products and services will be discovered by as many users within your target audience. Whether your brand is focused on selling sportswear to women between 40 and 55 years-old or life insurance to millennial newlyweds, buying internet ads on one channel alone won’t yield results. Just like the people we know in our everyday lives, internet users are multidimensional and your internet ad buying strategy should be too. Although programmatic technology leverages artificial intelligence and is capable of incredible, hiring a programmatic partner with an experienced team to implement omnichannel approaches to your internet ad buying will set up a people-first digital strategy, leading to higher conversions and even uncovering new users that you previously didn’t know were part of your target audience.
Before hiring an internet ad buying agency, consider the following factors:
1. Specialization
Every company is unique and the roadmap and buyer’s lifecycle of each vertical, market, and even product-type, can vary significantly. For example, if you’re a healthcare company with a highly niche user demographic, you’ll want to inquire about case studies and the experience that the agency’s team has within the healthcare industry. If the agency’s portfolio is primarily composed of consumer-packaged goods and retail clients, they probably aren’t yet suited to set up a high performing campaign for a B2B company that sells medical devices.
2. Creativity
Contrary to what many people might think, the programmatic buying of internet ad inventory isn’t a process completely void of creativity. It’s very important to determine whether or not the agency will be capable of coming up with innovative and creative strategies to reach the users in your target audience and uncover new ones. An agency’s ability to be agile and flexible to adjust its for your is very important.
3. Time Efficiency
Your marketing team member’s talent might be limitless, but their time certainly isn’t. Firstly, having access to a DSP (Demand Side Platform), allows you to bypass the timely process of negotiating with ad buyers and publishers involved in traditional media buying. Secondly, when you have a specialized internet ad buying agency managing your campaigns, there’s more time left for you and your team to focus on other marketing efforts that will enhance your strategy.
In the past, marketing managers and agencies could buy inventory directly from the publishers. A purchase decision that in many cases was based on the content. Depending on the target you would like to impact, you should choose a specific medium. However, the emergence of technologies such as DSPs, DMPs or SSPs have not only solved some of the inefficiencies of the traditional media buying process, but also, has made the process faster and easier to identify the target and the right moment to impact it.
4. Cost Efficiency
Very often advertisers will begin their campaign planning by setting a budget, a logical thing to do when planning a digital ad campaign. However, the question shouldn’t be, “How much money can we spend on this campaign?” but rather, “How much money do we need to spend on this campaign?” The entire goal of internet ad buying is to reach and convert users with scale and precision that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to with traditional media buying. Therefore, greater ad spend does not always translate into greater campaign results. Make sure that the agency you decide to hire is more focused on your company’s performance than their paycheck.
5. Transparency
It’s very important to evaluate the level of transparency that the agency can provide your brand. Not only does it give you peace of mind to know where your ad dollars are being spent, but it’s also one of the best ways to shape your strategy. A top tier internet ad buying agency should be able to offer you with aggregated KPI metrics along with real time reports displayed on a dashboard for your team to reference and monitor. With this information you can glean insights from the internet ad campaigns that the agency’s managing and improve your digital strategy moving forward.
When embarking on your search to hire an internet ad buying agency, coming across a partner with all of these factors are only within the reach of a few companies among which, of course includes Digilant. Do you want to know more about how our programmatic solutions can help you launch a great internet ad buying strategy?