Advertiser Campaign Management
Article | July 19, 2022
Are you new to audience campaigns, or looking to expand your existing presence on the Microsoft Audience Network? Using Facebook Import, it’s now easier than ever to get audience campaigns up and running by importing from Facebook Ads. Now rolling out to all advertisers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany, this new feature is designed to save you time and maximize ROI by seamlessly bringing over your campaigns from the Facebook Audience Network into the Microsoft Audience Network. Facebook Import can be used as a standalone tool, as well as a powerful complement to any existing Google Import strategy.
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Display Advertising
Article | July 8, 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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Advertiser Platforms
Article | August 2, 2022
While brands have dabbled in augmented reality (AR) for years, 2020 marks the tipping point where it’s becoming an integral part of marketing strategy, helping create meaningful and emotional consumer connections.
AR has finally grown up; once infamous for gimmicks such as face filters on social media, it’s now a cross-platform tool to build truly interactive environments, compared to VR which requires a headset to create computer-aided stimuli. The figures tell us that the global market is expected to grow substantially from $13 billion this year to more than $67 billion by 2024. The technology is graduating from being used solely for entertainment to providing real-world value and utility for marketers through immersive and experiential opportunities. So – in the midst of a global pandemic – what makes this the perfect time for AR to come of age, and how can marketers make use of its unique attributes?
Extensive investment in the ecosystem is laying the foundations for AR’s long-awaited, mainstream emergence. Google and Apple’s mobile tech stacks, ARCore and ARKit, mean more than four billion smartphones across the world are already AR compatible, and Google now includes AR in mobile search. In addition, the imminent arrival of 5G will dramatically boost mobile connectivity, enabling developers and content creators to use approximately 100 times the bandwidth of 4G to build a new type of experiential, 3D environment where users can intuitively interact with the people, objects and information around them.
Alongside these tech developments, the global COVID-19 context is inevitably changing consumer needs and behaviors, increasing demand for the virtual, contactless experiences that can be achieved through AR. And in the near future, wearable tech such as AR spectacles will also join the party to propel evolution in the space even faster.
Here are four ways AR can be a game-changer for marketing in 2020:
Enabling product visualization
In a world where consumers order everything from clothes to cars online, marketers can harness AR to help shoppers visualize products in an interactive and immersive way that goes far beyond a static image or video. This could mean experiencing what it’s like to sit inside a dream car, watching AR panoramas unfold through the virtual windscreen, or seeing what a jacket looks like on the actual shopper, without them having to leave the house.
Augmented Reality enables consumers to explore customization options and the unique elements that a product can offer. Brands that utilize the technology witness up to 8x longer dwell times, as giving consumers control over their digital experiences boosts engagement levels. For instance, participants at an AR smartphone launch can virtually see and interact with detailed specifications and features of the device. AR is certainly not restricted to just online browsing – it has a real benefit in the physical world too, for instance helping shoppers in stores discover how and where the product was made, just by scanning a code –subsequently helping move them along their purchase journey.
Future-proofing education and development
AR enables a more sophisticated, discovery-based form of learning. For example, students in a classroom can engage with virtual, 3D objects to help grow their understanding of certain topics. Teaching concepts such as orbits in the solar system can be optimized using AR-powered, interactive models. Additionally, AR allows for the gamification of learning experiences, helping to boost knowledge retention through educational puzzles and treasure hunts.
The learning benefits of AR also extend beyond the classroom. In mechanical fields especially, the technology can train people how to complete tasks by superimposing the end result on the version the trainee is practicing with. Implementing AR in professional development cases has shown significant improvements to learning curves, creativity, and spatial awareness. In fact, according to a study by the National Training Laboratories, “learning by doing” has shown to increase learning retention rates by up to 75% compared to simply listening to a seminar or lecture. By progressing education onto understanding and experiencing, as opposed to reading and writing, AR offers huge benefits across the industry.
Invigorating interactive advertising
Product visualization, along with other attributes of AR, can be used to deliver interactive advertising experiences that truly connect with consumers and boost conversions by 40%. AR ad units drive far more engagement and dwell time than conventional media and can give digital display advertising a new lease of life. What’s more, the real-time interaction between user and ad enables advertisers to effectively measure the impact of their campaigns and optimize accordingly.
Advertisers have cautiously experimented with AR for years but they have largely added minor elements to traditional campaigns simply to ‘tick a box’. To make the most of AR’s capabilities and deliver real engagement, marketers need to take a different strategic approach and put this disruptive technology at the heart of their ad campaigns.
Superseding live events
At a time when social distancing makes live events and product launches problematic, AR can be used to digitally create immersive and emotionally-charged experiences that generate buzz around a brand. In fact, AR improves upon the in-person experience by allowing marketers to scale events beyond the natural boundaries of any physical location and enable hundreds of thousands of participants from all over the world to share the experience simultaneously. This will revolutionize how audiences engage with live music and sports events in particular, enabling unique forms of interaction.
By augmenting the user’s immediate environment with a digital presentation layer, AR allows users to interact with players and performers in a way that is not possible with a traditional passive offline event, and to be true participants rather than simply viewers. AR reduces the need for traditional physical events and paves the way for a new era of participative, immersive and scalable online experiences, with visceral and emotional engagement.
The perfect combination of tech evolution, advanced connectivity and contextual circumstance means this is the year AR really comes into its own. By taking advantage of product visualization, interactive advertising and immersive digital events, brands can leverage AR as a game-changer for marketing in 2020.
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Advertiser Campaign Management
Article | December 11, 2021
Just like with any small business, advertising an Etsy shop can seem like an overwhelming task. There are so many options, learning marketing strategies on your own is time-consuming, and many advertising methods can get expensive fast. But don’t worry! This article is a complete guide that will break down all of the different ways you can start advertising or promoting your Etsy Shop cheaply or for free. How Does Etsy Marketing Work? Advertising an Etsy shop can be very different from advertising other online businesses. For example, you don’t need to have your own website to run an Etsy shop. This is convenient in many ways, but it also limits your ability to use traditional advertising methods. Ad platforms like Facebook Ads Manager are a great way to get exposure, but without a custom domain, you’re advertising Etsy instead of your shop.
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