Social Media Advertising
Article | July 14, 2022
Many marketers today don’t know what OOH stands for, though it’s been a highly used marketing medium for decades. Out-of-home advertising consists of anything from billboards, blimps, and bus signage, to street furniture, event advertising, and connected TV, and can be as small as a window poster or the back of a street bench or larger than life, covering a wall or wrapping an entire building. OOH is now being seen as an emerging technology channel, but why?
For starters, during the surge of online advertising over the last 15 years, Facebook and Google ads have seemingly gotten all the attention. Today, many marketing teams have been so focused on online marketing they no longer have much time to spend thinking out-of-the-box. But OOH is upping its game with a technology lift that is allowing marketers to highly target their audiences as well as improve the impact of their online advertising campaigns.
And we’re not just talking about Pepsi and McDonalds. OOH advertising has long been effective for countless brands, known and unknown, and the possibilities are endless. We are seeing everything from wrapping an ice cream truck with your message and parking across the street from an event to highly targeted ads on TV screens in bars, restaurants, banks, and hotels.
People take action after seeing OOH advertisements, doing online searches and visiting websites. In fact, Nielsen’s Out-of-Home Advertising Study 2019 edition reported that 66% of smartphone users took some type of action after seeing a OOH advertisement in the past year, and over four in 10 used online search to look up information. OOH drives more social and digital interactions than any other medium.
If you aren’t in the OOH game, here’s why B2B marketers should be considering it as part of their marketing mix:
1. Build brand trust
According to a survey conducted by Freeman, CMOs, brand managers, and event planners are putting more stake in in-person brand experiences. Billboards and OOH real world advertising are not only for the big brand names. If someone doesn’t know you, you can add significant trust and credibility to your brand as well as add more impact to your online Facebook and Google ads. And, OOH advertising is always there for audiences to see. It’s not invasive, block-able or frustrating as digital ads can be.
2. Hyper-target your audience
Tech advances are allowing marketers to hyper-target out in the real-world. For startups, challenger brands, and anyone looking to target a specific group of people, it’s possible to zero in on the roads people drive on every day for work or the bars and restaurants they go to afterward. Mobile devices pinged at various locations are looked at like inbound links, as if coming from your website. If you want to reach people who work at a certain place, in a certain location, you can identify who’s driving by your billboard.
3. Generate leads
You can then get that feedback, like who’s driving by, of those driving by, who went to your website? What are they searching on? Who converted to a lead?
4. Endless use cases
With technology advancements, the possibilities in OOH are endless – mobile billboards on LED trucks, wall murals, TVs in countless public facilities and arenas, and billboards of all kinds that can be enhanced digitally.
5. OOH advertising is always “on.”
Your OOH advertisement is there 24/7, delivering your message to every passerby during peak target times and all other times, broadening your reach without additional cost. And unlike digital advertising, OOH does not appear and then quickly disappear. It has staying power, displaying your message constantly and consistently around the clock.
6. Stand out at events:
Though in-person conferences and events are coming back to life, the days of “host an event and they will come” are long gone. There is fierce competition for the hearts and minds of attendees. To dominate the competition, OOH is a great way to give you visibility, driving traffic to your event, to your booth, to your website – to network, make real-life connections, and generate leads.
While online advertising has its place, we have taken a break from being creative. OOH allows an opportunity to get back into exercising your creative muscles. The challenge for marketers is to take their years of internet marketing experience and figure out how to create interesting brand experiences offline.
From a tracking standpoint, OOH advertising today is looking more like online advertising. However, instead of tracking people, we are watching places as groups of people move through and pass by billboards or other signage. It’s a powerful “old” tool that marketers can combine with new tools to generate brand awareness and drive inbound interest from highly targeted specs.
During the online advertising surge, while we have been wrapped up in tracking and measuring performance clicks, many companies have under invested in their brand. Plus, when integrated with digital marketing, OOH extends both reach and frequency, allowing you to leverage other marketing, online and offline, for maximum results and ROI. Marketers should now be thinking of OOH as one of their viable performance channels.
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Social Media Advertising
Article | July 13, 2022
Nate Burke, CEO of Diginius, a London-based technology company, who specialise in digital marketing and ecommerce solutions, discusses the growth and exciting future prospects for video advertising, particularly for those seeking unique ways to promote products in a saturated online marketplace.
Over recent years, there has been increasing focus on the use of video in just about every marketing context. And as it would seem, all the events and shifts in the market that have occurred ever since have only played into the success of the audio visual format.
Take the coronavirus pandemic as a prime example. Lockdown restrictions and stay at home orders across the globe have catalysed our consumption of video content. For anyone sceptical of this statement, just take the sweeping influx of TikTok users, and consequently, development of Reels, Livestream services IGTV and Stories features across social media platforms.
These video-based formats often provide a more entertaining and engaging way to consume content. And at a time when we have been looking for just about any way to fill gaps while stuck at home, videos have offered moments of escapism and connectivity, despite people never being so physically far apart.
The video content we have consumed has varied from DIY tutorials for making face masks or home renovation projects, through to product reviews and demonstrations for items we would typically like to see in person and in store.
And although restrictions are beginning to ease and these in store experiences can resume, many consumers will have adjusted to the new way of doing things, particularly with regards to online shopping and decision making.
Therefore, no longer is it enough to simply enable the purchasing of your products through an online channel. Rather, brands need to be supporting every step of the customer journey through their digital offerings, including the awareness, research and post-purchase service stages.
And thanks to the continued development of online advertising tools, this is now more viable than ever. For example, the social media features mentioned previously can all be used for advertising purposes too. Whether it’s enticing brand videos posted to your own feed, or promoted via each platform’s advertising network, or even an influencer partnership, whereby a famous face shows your product in action, there are countless ways to get word of your product out there with video.
Similarly, YouTube ads have long been praised for being a cost-effective way to earn greater digital reach through better engagement and creativity. As the second largest search engine in the world in terms of number of searches, it’s easy to understand why video advertising on the platform is so beneficial.
But while it might be one of the largest, YouTube certainly isn’t the only worthwhile search engine to be advertising on. In more recent times, the sophistication of other search engines, including Google and Bing, have created a strong case for businesses to include video consideration in their SEM strategies too. For example, we’re probably all familiar with the increasing favourability and better integration of YouTube videos displaying on results pages. And although this is separate to PPC advertising, it does require considerable effort in terms of SEO in order for videos to rank.
However, more recently, and we suspect moving forward, there is room for the use of video in these traditional PPC search advertising platforms too. In fact, Bing is currently rolling out a video extension feature to its ad accounts, allowing advertisers to include a 6 - 120 second clip in their search ads. On desktop, a thumbnail for the video will be shown to the right of the copy, which when clicked, the video plays in an overlaying window. On mobile, the video simply plays in the frame with ad copy still visible below.
As well as helping to secure greater real estate space on the results page, these videos make ads more engaging and can even enable businesses to provide more information about the brand, product or service beyond what is permitted in the copy.
Therefore, for businesses looking to implement a strong video strategy, Bing can help you maximise the return on investment required to produce such pieces of content. As well as making use of video to improve PPC efforts, the search engine definitely appears to prioritise the format more than other platforms do. Just a quick search for big name brands, such as ASOS and Sainsbury’s, will show you just how easily the search engine integrates branded and user generated video content, when compared to the likes of Google.
Again, with videos that are appropriately optimised, there is great potential to increase the space taken up on the all important first page of results. As well as this, you can provide searchers in the awareness and research stages with greater information and a better brand experience through content in a more engaging format to increase the chances of a conversion.
In terms of PPC advertising, the use of video is at no greater expense to the business. Video clicks are charged at the same rate as call to actions or website click throughs, and like in the traditional form, only the initial click incurs a cost. Therefore, users can click to watch the video, and then press the button to call, enquire or visit your website, and despite having spent more time immersing themselves in your brand, there will be no additional price to pay.
Undeniably, video advertising is becoming increasingly intelligent, providing businesses with much more opportunity to showcase their products in an engaging way, which can help break through the white noise of the saturated online marketplace. But interestingly, I believe this is only the beginning of what is possible with the format, particularly when it comes to PPC in search.
As the retail world recovers from the disruption of the pandemic, and businesses really begin to home in their strategies to accommodate users’ new found preferences in the age of post-lockdown, the creative use of video will become an ever-growing key tactic in advertising.
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Retargeting
Article | July 20, 2022
When it comes to PPC advertising, it’s not uncommon to think: Bing Ads vs. Google Ads. On top of that: Which platform has more reach? Is Bing less expensive? Which has more targeting capabilities? Which will produce more conversions and revenue? While many PPC advertisers view the two platforms as competitors, they actually work best hand-in-hand. Google undoubtedly has the majority of the search market, but Bing advertising certainly shouldn’t be forgotten. Rather than Google Ads vs. Bing Ads, marketers should be thinking Google Ads plus Bing Ads.
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Advertiser Platforms
Article | August 2, 2022
Measuring the ad performance on your website is critical for understanding how well your revenue stream is optimized. Ad sizes, placements, and color are common measures, but they may not necessarily work for you. As a publisher, you must focus on four prime metrics that give you a clear idea of an ad campaign’s performance.
Let us take a look at them:
4 Ad Performance Metrics You Should Track
CPM (Cost per mille)
CPM stands for advertising cost per thousand views. It is the benchmark used to calculate the approximate cost of an advertisement or ad campaign across various media. CPM can be calculated by dividing how much it costs to place an advertisement by the number of impressions (in thousands) that it achieves. This metric helps compare the difference in ad opportunities based on efficiency and to evaluate the overall campaign cost.
CTR (Click-through rate)
CTR is the ad click-through rate that measures how well an online ad campaign is progressing on a website. It is denoted as a percentage and is calculated by how many times an ad is clicked divided by how many times an ad is shown.
RPM (Revenue per mille)
RPM is the revenue generated per 1000 ad impressions. It is similar to CPM but instead of cost, it measures revenue. It is an especially important metric for publishers. If the RPM of a campaign is low, you should replace the campaign with one that earns a higher revenue and RPM rate.
RPC (Revenue per click)
RPC is the revenue generated per click. It tells you how much the average revenue is for every click on your ads and PPC (pay-per-click) keywords. You can easily understand how much you earn every time someone clicks on one of your ads. Comparing RPC and RPM values can give you insights on your ad spend and the money you earned through the ads.
Streamlining Ad Campaigns with Ad Performance Measurement
Here are some tips to streamline your ad campaigns with the insights your ad metrics provide:
Use the right data: First-party data can help you optimize your programmatic ad campaigns along with your content.
Capitalize on returning visitors: Play with ad location on pages with returning visitors. Mix and match to maintain the interest of the visitors.
Optimize your content: Find out the type of content that attracts your visitors and optimize your content strategy based on your findings.
Maintain optimal ad placement and size: Place your ads in the middle of the page, use in-image ads at the bottom of mobile web pages, experiment with different ad sizes and positions to check how users react.
Final Thoughts
Data-driven optimization is the secret to getting the ad revenue you expect. Testing and improving with the help of data insights can help you identify the areas that need attention.
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