What is digital advertising? Digital advertising buys and sells media based on software and algorithms’ rules. This process is commonly referred to as programmatic advertising, which makes up 89% of all digital display advertising and has taken over how advertisers reach their target audience. 

Choozle has identified seven pillars of success to help you and other agency executives understand programmatic advertising. Each pillar builds on the previous one to create a strong foundation for implementing campaigns and delivering high ROI. For a deeper dive into these pillars, download the guide.

Pillar 1: A Clearly Defined Media Mix Strategy

Different channels play different roles in driving customers and prospects into the marketing funnel, so potential customers will be influenced by many digital and offline touchpoints, activities, and interactions before the prospect ends their journey with a purchase. 

The Marketing Funnel helps you better understand the customer’s journey so you can advertise to them successfully. The three stages of the marketing funnel include:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Conversion

“With a clearer understanding of consumer preferences and behavior at the early stages of their buying journey, companies report marketing efficiency gains of up to 30% and incremental top-line growth of up to 10% without increasing the marketing budget.” – 2021 McKinsey & Company

A self-serve programmatic platform can also offer the following benefits to your agency and your ability to manage digital campaigns in-house:

• More control over campaign setup and optimization.
• More flexible budgeting and revenue streams.
• Greater campaign management and reporting speed.
• Increased perception as a digital media thought leader.

Pillar 2: Holistic Performance Metrics and Relevant KPIs

Marketers constantly feel pressure to be accountable for their media investments. Still, measuring programmatic top-of-funnel performance is challenging, and connecting upper-funnel campaigns to bottom-line results is even more difficult. Let’s learn how to do it.

Different channels, different metrics, different values:

Full-funnel marketing is built on the idea that each stage of the funnel is connected to the others, with the upper-funnel channels heavily influencing the results of the bottom-funnel channels. Although this is true, the tactics that work at one stage don’t necessarily work at another, and the same is true for performance metrics. 

Attribution modeling is a tool that identifies the customer journey pathways that provide the highest ROI and deep insight into customer behavior. It enables marketers to optimize high-return conversion pathways to make them more customer-friendly. Downloading the guide will give you a more extensive look at this tool.

View performance through the lens of business KPIs and metrics:

Marketing metrics are the KPIs marketing teams use to quantify campaign results. However, viewing campaign performance through business KPIs is crucial to measure how each campaign contributes to big-picture goals like revenue or market share growth. 

• Marketing qualified lead (MQL) 
• Cost-per-acquisition/action (CPA)
• Effective cost-per-mile/thousand impressions (eCPM)
• Return on ad spend (RoAS)

Pillar 3: A Well-Defined and Validated Audience

Audience targeting is the one constant in every digital media campaign. Marketers must connect with the right person at the right time and place. Anyone who says audience targeting is easy probably isn’t doing it right. In this third pillar of our series, we explain how to define and validate audiences and execute successful programmatic advertising strategies targeting them. 

Targeting is based on these questions:

• What age are they?
• Where are they located?
• What are they interested in?
• What drives their purchase behavior? 

 

Pillar 4: An Extensible Content Foundation

Engaging, insightful, captivating content is at the core of effective digital advertising. No matter how exceptional your client’s product or service is, how great your landing page is set up, or how analytical your team is, no one will click on your ad unless the creative is eye-catching and compelling. 

Some insightful statistics include:

• It takes 50 milliseconds for a website or ad user to assess a brand.
• More than half of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds.
• Three-quarters of consumers say they judge a brand by its design.

Download the guide for Display Advertising Best Practices.

Pillar 5: A Timeline that Drives Momentum

Goal setting and timeline creation are some of the most critical steps in the marketing process. In this step, you’ll create reasonable timelines for each campaign and your overall strategy so you can track them and boost efficiency. In this fifth pillar, Choozle will show you how to build marketing timelines that can increase your runway for success.

Marketing results don’t happen overnight. 

It’s essential to always remember that your goals will not be met the day after launching a campaign or implementing a strategy.

How to build an effective marketing timeline.

The experts at Choozle recommend starting with the launch date and working backward from there. 

Overcoming timeline setbacks.

Even the best marketing plans and strategies can inevitably hit roadblocks. Here are some other potential issues that can negatively impact your marketing timelines:

• Poor teamwork
• Mismatched campaign types
• Unreachable goals

Pillar 6: Budget Consistent with Objectives

Because consumer behaviors shift, brands must allocate marketing budgets to reflect effectively. Choozle offers best practices for creating a digital marketing budget to reach target audiences at the right time and place, ensuring that your campaign efforts succeed. 

In pillar 6, we discuss looking back to plan ahead, implementing the full-funnel alignment, and using a programmatic platform to gain control.

Pillar 7: Resources Allocation for Effective Media Mix Strategies

Resource allocation is vital for successful full-funnel marketing strategies. This involves distributing resources such as budgets, personnel, and time across multiple programmatic campaigns. Challenges will likely arise, so resource management is crucial for ending the campaign with its expected performance and results. The Choozle team is here to provide best practices for optimizing resource allocation across these programmatic channels and helping to recommend solutions for any challenges that should arise. 

If you’re looking at a self-serve programmatic platform, be sure to ask these questions during the demo stage:

• How flexible is your pricing?
• Are there media spend minimums, added CPMs, or margins?
• How many different targeting tactics can we run within a single campaign?
• How much support do you provide?
• Will we have a dedicated account manager or customer support rep?
• What kinds of resources are available to educate my team about programmatic advertising?

Download the guide today to learn more about each of these pillars and how you can implement them into your marketing strategies and advertising.