Bloom is a digital marketing agency that specializes in Paid Search, Display, Social Ads, SEO, and Digital Strategy. Since 2007, Bloom has been building, managing and optimizing digital campaigns, driving growth and creating value through proven digital tactics and innovative solutions.
Diversifying Marketing Channels
It goes without saying that a multi-channel approach to digital marketing is the only way businesses can thrive in our current digital landscape. Competing for our audiences’ attention has never been more difficult—there are just so many media outlets to keep up with! Making sure that we’re reaching our prospective customers at the right time—and at the right place—means we need to branch out and approach business objectives to align with the user’s intent and behaviour.
Let’s dive into how programmatic is a great addition to our digital marketing strategies and how it has enabled our agency to effectively reach more users, at the right time.
Programmatic and Brand Recall
Because of its premium placement, its granular targeting possibilities, and its low cost, we often incorporate programmatic advertising in our digital marketing strategy. We use programmatic advertising as an upper-funnel tactic to help drive brand awareness with current customers and also find new users. It’s critical to have the right messaging and visibility to acquire net-new customers. And by balancing brand awareness, we’re able to go after new users while reiterating and reinforcing brand messaging—which keeps it consistent.
Pro Tip: By considerably increasing your initial audiences, you are also expanding your audience pool for prospect nurture, therefore, increasing your chances of driving more conversions. To enhance your digital strategy, be sure to include mid-funnel and bottom-funnel tactics, such as remarketing and search engine advertising, for the best performance.
Brand Awareness Targeting Strategies
Targeting the right audience is a key factor when it comes to digital advertising. To grow brand awareness with programmatic advertising, our digital specialists use a variety of targeting strategies such as 3rd-party audiences, lookalike audiences and custom audiences.
3rd-Party Audiences
Third-party audiences aggregate data from various sources on the web to create segments based on specific demographics or interests. Third-party audiences in programmatic are ideal to broaden the reach of your top-funnel campaigns because of their ability to target based on micro-details. We rarely see this amount of granularity in other advertising networks.
Lookalike Audiences
Your website collects data on your most loyal customers. By leveraging programmatic advertising tools, we can target new users who share similar interests or demographics with your site’s visitors. Lookalike audiences let advertisers serve ads to new users who are most likely to be interested in their service or product. You can create lookalike audiences of past purchasers, engaged users (those who have spent more than X minutes on your site or visited at least X pages), users who added-to-cart, people listed in your CRM, etc.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences, or Custom Segments in StackAdapt, are 1st-party data sets that target individuals based on the content they’ve engaged with, read online and/or purchase intent. Custom audiences are great to build brand awareness with users actively looking for your product.
Pro Tip: When advertising a product to a more general audience it is best to use a broader targeting approach, such as custom audiences rather than 3rd-party audiences. The eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of 3rd-party segments tends to be higher and therefore increases the cost-per-acquisition. Niche 3rd-party audiences perform best when a target is very specific and well-defined, and that’s when it is worth paying a higher eCPM—because those users tend to have a better conversion rate.
Find the Most Engaged Audiences
Without ever running a campaign, it’s hard to determine exactly which audience will provide the performance you’re looking for. At Bloom, we suggest testing out various audience targeting strategies to see what works best for your brand. Plus, the three audiences mentioned above aren’t mutually exclusive. Use a combination of targeting audiences to fill your upper funnel and reach as many qualified users as possible.
Programmatic Formats Used to Drive Awareness
Programmatic advertising offers 4 main advertising formats: native, display, video, and connected TV (CTV).
Native
Content marketing is widely used by marketers to drive new users to their website and increase conversions. Although content marketing is often associated with search engine optimization (SEO), native advertising can also amplify your content marketing efforts.
In fact, it can often take quite a while to witness the benefits of content marketing and reach a massive audience. That’s where native advertising comes in. By investing a small amount of media budget, a brand can, almost instantly, reach a whole new audience and share valuable information about their product or services. Native advertising tends to be highly effective at driving traffic to a website because users are familiar with the context in which the ad is shown, and are more inclined to click. Plus, with native advertising, your content doesn’t only appear on search engines, it also appears as suggested content on different websites.
Pro Tip: Incorporating native campaigns into your upper funnel strategy can help boost engagement metrics and overall health of your awareness campaigns. In our experience, native ads tend to have a higher click-through rate, a lower cost-per-click, and we have seen users spend more time on-site than other programmatic formats.
Display
Display ads are a common advertising format highly used across the web. By using the audience targeting options mentioned above, we have been able to drive qualified traffic to a brand’s website. Display allows us to increase the number of users navigating to a website, and enables us to build larger remarketing audiences on other advertising channels, including search and social. A larger remarketing pool usually means more conversions in the end.
Video
According to Hubspot, 88% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI and 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. Video ads are a great way to connect with a new audience and quickly share your brand’s story.
Pro Tip: Leverage video ads to engage your audience in a brand story. Video does an excellent job of entertaining the viewer, while also appropriately evoking emotion—often linking a positive feeling with the brand being advertised.
Connected TV (CTV)
Connected TV ads are one of the best ways to leverage the power of video advertising. We use connected TV advertising to serve our clients’ video ads in premium content for much cheaper than if we were to go directly through the publisher.
Pro Tip: As online streaming continues to get more widespread, CTV is a great way to secure attention when users are watching streamed content. Since users are already captivated by their TV show, chances are they’ll pay more attention to your video ad as it plays in-stream, rather than a standalone display ad.
So, which formats should you use in your next programmatic campaign?
The easy answer to this question would be “the more formats the better”. For example, using native and video ads as prospecting formats and retarget users with display advertising has shown great results for our clients. That being said, brands usually don’t have the resources or the capacity to create every declination for their campaign. Native advertising and display ads are the easiest content to produce and require less time and money. But, video ads have shown to be more effective to build brand awareness. And of course, if you are already running video ads, the transition to connected TV is essentially seamless—as the same creatives can be applied to both campaigns.
We would recommend testing different formats and messaging to see what works best for your brand. Each of these programmatic, upper-funnel tactics will allow you to build and reinforce brand recall, and find new prospects while simultaneously generating sales. By capturing users on all channels and devices they are using, you are ensuring the brand is seen and remembered. A natural result is an increase of traffic to your site, which can only result in more sales.
Want to run exceptional programmatic campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
