Programmatic is not just for conversions; it's also a valuable part of your branding strategy.
Historically, brand awareness strategies have been advertising activities above the line: TV, radio, print. These have a wide reach and are therefore perfect for top funnel marketing strategies.
Thanks to its highly effective targeting capabilities, programmatic advertising has fallen into the "below the line" category – it is considered a conversion engine.
As part of digital advertising, branding tends to be on PPC, SEO and social media. But to take advantage of the branding and optimization opportunities offered by the scheduled display, it is essential to adapt the strategies from direct display to programmatic use.
Better Targeting
Brand awareness strategies tend to be associated with advertising above the line because they have the widest possible reach for sharing the brand's messaging.
However, the strong point of programmatic is very effective for branding – a targeted targeting strategy is more affordable for small and medium-sized businesses and is very effective in reaching audiences with a potential for small business. commitment and conversions.
Get real-time learning that can be implemented immediately
Traditional advertising above the line offered little potential for actionable information, especially in the short time that the programmatic offer.
However, any brand-driven or conversational marketing activity can benefit from a real-time audience insight that immediately feeds optimizations and the development of future strategies. In fact, I encourage you to go further than you normally would with programmatic targeting, as prospecting for audiences without relying on existing information can help you better understand and understand. guide your future targeting approach.
Here are five ways to lead your branding and prospecting campaign to the following level:
1. Agree on the right KPIs for your brand.
The first step is to agree on the right key performance indicators in order to focus on their quantitative steering. Branding tends to be associated with unclear performance indicators, but a methodical approach is essential.
Reach is obviously important, but the main measures to follow from the beginning are CTR, visibility and site visits. Google brand surveys are very useful for measuring the uplift, but it's sufficient to manually measure the right measurements (and a lot less expensive) to understand how you are doing to increase engagement and reach the right people.
2. Focus on a top-down and bottom-up approach.
Everyone knows that programmatic is great for targeting audiences and generating conversions. For branding, however, you need a more proactive method. I recommend starting with a top-down approach: considering the customer, the audiences they can address and the competing sites they address, limiting their targeting to the most engaged audiences.
Then move to an ascending approach, choosing the most engaged audiences to create segments around and allocating them a dedicated budget. Using this approach, an insurance client has seen higher clickthrough rates of over 300% at the industry average and 60% at the CPA.
3. Use new targeting techniques.
It's obvious, but it's worth repeating. Making use of rapidly evolving advertising technology should be at the top of everyone's agenda. Experimenting with new features is really what allows you to tap the potential of programmatic use for branding.
DoubleClick's Custom Audiences feature allows you to associate keyword targeting, URL targeting, and app targeting to create hyper-focused audience segments. For example, this allows you to target the sites that your top performing audience attends, covered with keywords that specifically target them.
4. Invest in creative development.
Even with an emphasis on brand activity, it's important to keep an open mind on testing creatives and establishing new relationships with suppliers. It's easy to have a tendency to keep the old habits if they worked well – if it's not broken, do not fix it – but as in the use of new advertising technologies, the development creative should be an ongoing process.
One of the areas we have explored recently is the high-impact formats, such as home page covers and skins, which work incredibly well for branding. Just listen to the numbers: comScore research has shown that creative quality drives more than half of the sales changes for brands analyzed, four times more than the impact of the media plan concerned.
For branding strategies, it's especially important to know which audiences are interacting with the new brand identity. It is therefore essential to experiment with creations.
An insurance customer experiencing a change in brand identity and messaging was expected to improve brand awareness in a multichannel approach. They tested very personalized creations in their campaign and found that the representation of professionals in different sectors had varying levels of engagement. Their test revealed a lot of information about their ideal audience and allowed them to inform their videos and their social strategies.
5. Make the most of cross-channel learning.
A cross-channel perspective is obvious for any marketing strategy, but it is especially important for (re) branding strategies, where customers need to develop a global understanding of audiences while having broad reach to communicate about the brand . messaging.
If your agency runs a cross-channel campaign for a customer, I want to emphasize the importance of sharing ideas and integrating them into your programmatic strategy. We found that collaboration with the social team has been exceptionally successful in testing high-engagement audiences across different formats and in understanding and capturing the best-performing audiences for clients.
There is a lot more data that will help us learn how to serve good creations to the right people. Programmatic campaigns tell us what time of day and what day of the week people engage most, and can, in turn, inform the social strategy for further optimization.
In addition, the programmatic branding is much cheaper than some traditional advertising channels and is therefore very suitable for use as a test site. For example, you can try to show a few ads on YouTube to identify the ones that interest you most, and then use that data to determine which ones should be shown on TV. Few marketers use digital learning for non-digital channels, which is a huge missed opportunity.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. The authors of the staff are listed here.
About the author
Passionate about advertising and data, Grace Kaye has become an online programmatic display specialist where she uses programmatic as a vehicle to provide an excellent user experience while meeting business goals. Grace now leads a team at Brainlabs that offers high-performance display campaigns where precise audience targeting, data-driven optimization and high-quality content are at the heart of every strategy. .