By Martin Stockfleth Larsen
Use of programmatic, triggered campaigns such as ad retargeting, abandoned cart efforts, ad exchanges and more have skyrocketed. Here are six tips for improving your triggered marketing efforts, both locally and globally.
1. Capture and reuse campaign data
Data is useful for both brand and performance marketers. In fact, brand campaigns can generate a lot of campaign data, and you should plan on capturing and reusing it for future initiatives. To ensure your campaigns generate useful data, design them so they promote specific awareness-raising goals, such as “likes” on Facebook, or downloads of coupons or offers. You can use this data to retarget consumers who’ve showed an affinity for your brand in futher brand and performance-based campaigns.
2. Use Video
Video is hot not only in the U.S. but throughout Europe, the US, Asia, the Middle East and even Latin and South America, and is an excellent vehicle to capture the consumer. In Europe, banners with videos and video ads outperform all other banner formats in every metric, including engagement rate, engagement time and CTR. Pre-roll video ads on publisher sites and YouTube were particularly hot in 2013, and a favored tool by marketers during the holiday season.
3. Use standardize rich media ad formats to get scale
Local publishers offer a variety of unique rich-media ad formats, but be wary about using them, particularly as you’re just starting out and testing the waters of a local market. It’s both costly and time consuming to build multiple creatives to meet individual publisher requirements. Besides, you can’t really compare performance across markets if your ads had different sizes and locations.
Pick a standardized format for your ads—such as the IAB Rising Stars—to ensure consistent branding across markets, to establish benchmarks, and to make your life a whole lot easier.
4. Consider partnering with an ad tech partner.
Doubtless you can purchase multi-national inventory at scale from most global ad exchanges, but think twice before going it alone. Local publishers have tremendous quantities of first-party data that will help you pinpoint your best audience, and shed insight into your best responders.
5. Establish Benchmarks
How do you measure success? Start by looking at exiting benchmarks for your target market and vertical. In some markets, programmatic marketing is a brand new concept; in others, both marketers and publishers have tremendous experience with the tactic. In-market experience will affect your campaign results.
Once your campaigns are underway, you can set your own benchmarks for your brand.
6. Think Multi-Screen
All too often marketers rely on display ad campaigns to test the waters of a new market. This is a mistake. In Europe, parts of Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, mobile and tablets are far more important than laptops and computers. And video offers the best performance across all devices. Think multi-screen from the beginning, and choose standardized formats that are easy to benchmark.
Programmatic is making the world a smaller place for marketers. By following these tips, I’m confident that you can achieve your brand goals for 2014.
Martin Larsen is CMO of Adform.
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