Are they finding you?
Many of your ideal clients neither know you by name nor realize they need what you offer.
How do you help people find you online that aren’t searching for your product or service with intent?
Introducing — Programmatic Advertising
If you haven’t heard about Programmatic Advertising, then buckle up!
This powerful tool allows you to deploy a multitude of tactics, some in unison, to target your ideal audience whenever they are online.
In this blog, we are going to explain the tactics involved in Programmatic Advertising. But, remember, tactics are just the beginning with the software, and there are so many ways to take these tactics further by combining them.
Better Audience Targeting with Programmatic Advertising Tactics
Mobile Geo-Fencing
Geo-Fencing allows us to customize an ad audience based on specific geographic parameters and measure both online and offline conversions. Previously, you probably thought of location targeting as maybe zip codes included in a pay-per-click campaign. That’s JV benchwarmers compared to what we are talking about here.
There are two ways to think about this tactic: conversion zone and event targeting.
Conversion zones refer to location parameters plugged into the system that creates the virtual fence. We trace out a location on a map, targeting people entering that zone and recording visits to this location as offline conversions because of their mobile phones.
If someone goes into our targeted zone, we can send them ads. Or, if they’ve seen or interacted with our ads and then visited our targeted area, we can record them as a conversion!
Let’s give you a real estate example. We have a client looking to get more people to an open house they have this week. One of their strategies is targeting competitor open houses in the area. We can draw out location parameters around the other open houses in the area, targeting people who visit those locations. We then draw out the area around our client’s open house, allowing us to see how many people that were served ads came to their open house within our target zone.
Hopefully, this other one will get its shine back soon! Event targeting involves targeting users attending an event within a specific time frame. While many businesses could never afford to advertise on the Green Monster at Fenway, they could afford to target every mobile phone that went to the game. And let’s be honest, even at the ballpark, people are still glued to their phones. Even better is the ability to continue to target that audience for 30 days after they have left the ballpark.
Addressable Geo-Fencing
This is a bit different from the mobile geofencing described above. Here, we are talking about targeting specific households or businesses with digital advertising.
Targeting is incredibly precise and based on plat map data from property tax and public land information.
Up to 1 million physical addresses can be targeted per campaign and offer better reach than IP-based targeting, which is limited by truncated IP addresses.
There are two ways we can execute. We can either use an existing curated list of addresses or curate the addresses for you. Using the curated route, you can access over 500 data variables from credit bureau data to customize, create, and configure your own audiences. The platform will find them and tell you how many households and devices within your target geo match your desired audience.
This is an incredible way to get around inflated audience bidding on platforms like Facebook during an election year for example.
Again, unlike the above mobile geo-fencing, this is cross-device targeting with audiences update on a daily basis based on the foot traffic of that location.
You can think of this as a standalone product or an extra boost to other location-based campaigns like direct mail or addressable tv campaigns.
Search Retargeting
This is different than your regular website retargeting. Keyword Search Retargeting combines the effectiveness of intent-based search campaigns (Google Ads or Bing Ads) with the reach and brand visibility aspects of display advertising.
You can retarget anyone that logs a search query across the internet – not just major search platforms like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
One way I like to explain this is, it gives you the ability to target people up the river from your product offering.
If you’re an insurance broker, you could use Search Retargeting to find people searching for an Employment Attorney to sell EPLI policies better. Or, a title attorney could target all types of queries around local home buying in their area.
There are a few things that Simpli Fi allows you to do that you could never fulfill on your own when running these campaigns.
- Keyword level optimizations. This involves looking at the specific building blocks of the campaign not just the segment as a whole. The team at Simpli.Fi put together an awesome illustration showing how this works for the auto industry. Check it out and come on back!
- Variable Recency: We are able to provide variable targeting and bidding based on the recency of the keyword search. Your ad can be served to users within 10 seconds, 10 minutes, or 10 days from the keyword search. This plays a major role in the optimization of KPI (Key Performance Indicator) goals like Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Click Through Rate (CTR), and Cost Per Click (CPC).
Native Programmatic.
Have you been on a website like Forbes and seen articles from a company instead of an author? They look like they’re a regular post on the website – the ads match a particular publisher’s content and design, but there’s something a bit different. Maybe the business name is where the authors should be, or there is a tag Sponsored Content. These are Native Ads
It’s estimated that by the end of 2020, 63% of mobile display ads will be Native Ads.
Why would your business want to use them? Well, for one, they’re less intrusive. They look like a typical article, and if they apply to what I find relevant, I’m more likely to click on them than a banner ad.
And that’s not just my gut instinct. Native ads have a 6x higher response than traditional display ads.
These ads are personalized in real-time for each publisher’s site and the individual user.
Think about this tactic outside of the vacuum. Let’s say you spent a lot of time and research writing a cornerstone piece of content. While it has a lot of value to users who find it, the article isn’t getting much traffic. Well, with Native Programmatic ads, you can dramatically increase the visibility of your article outside of people finding that article from Organic Search or Social Posts. You can get that article placed on publisher platforms like Forbes, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur.
Contextual Targeting
Maybe intent-based search around your product is low. I know there are some products like EPLI or cyber insurance that don’t get a lot of search volume for our clients. With contextual targeting, you can find and engage with people on the content they are already consuming.
Contextual targeting understands the category of the content and the keywords on the current page someone is on and serves ads that are relevant.
There are two ways (and a combo of the two) that we can deploy contextual targeting.
- Keyword Contextual targeting allows you to create your own contextual category by uploading a list of keywords. We deploy ads to pages that have these keywords. It then gives us the ability to bid, report on, and optimize based on each keyword to get better performance.
- Category Contextual Targeting allows us to utilize one or more of the 300+ contextual categories defined by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). They provide an incredible wealth of research into media targeting and without them, programmatic agencies would be flying blind in targeting online users.
Site Retargeting
This tactic should be deployed with almost every other marketing tactic you are using. Site retargeting allows companies to continue to target users after they have been to their website. Almost all programmatic campaigns are paired with some level of site retargeting. For example, if a user navigates to a landing page from an ad, they get cookie’ed and are later marketed to throughout their online journey.
For most B2B companies that do not convert users in one or two interactions like B2C companies, retargeting is a must! It allows you to nurture leads further, give them additional context to pages they’ve already been on, and prompt a logical next step based on where they are in the buyer journey.
We focus on generating a sizeable retargeting pool, which is the accumulated people associated with pageviews that we can continue to market to. Traditional marketing cannot compete with this incredible digital marketing tactic.
Programmatic is quite literally the future of advertising. We are seeing once staple campaigns, like Facebook ads, being eclipsed by programmatic. Having the ability to target someone across the internet rather than on individual platforms dramatically increases our ability to manage campaigns and stay in front of the ideal audience wherever they may be.
The tactics are just the beginning!
If you’d like to know more about programmatic advertising, please reach out to us in the live chat or via the form in the upper right-hand corner of our site.
