In today’s “Attention Economy”, marketers are perennially faced with one question – how to connect with the consumers and hold their attention? There is intense competition and everyone is vying for a limited resource i.e. the consumer’s attention. How should the marketers stand out? Creating and delivering quality content is something that all marketers agree upon. Marketers put in a lot of time, money and resources to develop high-quality content. They have to constantly come up with fresh and unique content that appeals to the audiences. It is nothing less than the painstaking affair of product development as it involves efforts like market research, behavioural analysis and forecasting how well it will suit the audiences’ preferences. But many times, the decision on the type of content to be created depends on the marketers’ gut instinct and creative capability. However, just having a great content strategy is not sufficient, promoting that content to the right person at the right time is very important. After all, that is the way it will reach the desired audience and serve its purpose of creating brand awareness and boosting brand recall. Accomplishing all this seems like a daunting challenge, doesn’t it?
Well, there is something that can make your life a lot easier. That “something” is programmatic advertising. It is worth our while to begin by discussing the common and rampant misconceptions about programmatic advertising among content creators. Many content creators believe that ATL advertising like radio, television and print yields more returns as compared to BTL advertising. This belief highly undermines the power of individual targeting. Many content creators also believe that digital, and especially, programmatic advertising is good only for getting clicks and views at a cheaper rate. However, the reality is something completely different, and today, I am going to try and clear out some of these prevalent misconceptions.
Programmatic advertising is not just about buying and selling inventory. It goes well beyond that. Programmatic advertising helps brands reach their real consumers. It helps brands unleash the power of targeting. Every piece of content that is created for a particular brand or a product, is made keeping in mind the target audience. This requires tons of data. This is where third-party data providers like Data Management Platforms (DMPs) come into the picture. DMPs are huge store-houses of data. They use this data to build a complete user-profile using more than 2000 data points captured, reviewed and analysed by the experts. With the help of DMPs, advertisers can not only precisely target the desired audience, but also get their look-alike audience, to expand their TGs. There is a deluge of content-hungry audience online. In this increasing clutter of audience, it is crucial to reach out to the ones that actually matter to the brand. Programmatic advertising helps you achieve this.
Its niche targeting capabilities include behavioural targeting, demographic targeting, psychographic targeting, geo-targeting, and so on. Depending on the type of content, marketers can come up with the right targeting combination to reach the right audience at the right time. Moreover, as the content suits their preferences, it is likely to gain more traction from the audience and go viral, which in turn increases brand awareness. Further, targeting the right demographic also helps prevent the wastage on irrelevant impressions.
Let’s understand this better with the help of an example. Let’s consider a brand that produces content in some regional language, for instance. Programmatic advertising can help the brand promote it only to the audiences who consume the content in that particular language. It is crucial to create highly relevant and personalised content. These days, the ad copies are not merely translated from English to regional languages. Brands create a completely separate ad copy for each region, using relevant creatives, delivering relatable brand communication, so that the audience connects better with the ad, and thus with the brand. Programmatic advertising has a major role in bolstering this strategy.
What’s more? Programmatic advertising also helps brands quantify their advertising efforts. Through granular reporting, programmatic advertising allows marketers to track customer engagement metrics like audience profile, viewability matrix, and bounce rates. In addition, through other means, marketers can also get reports on onward clicks, dwell time, scroll velocity, average scroll depth, hours in view and so on. By optimising these metrics, brands can pull the customers further down the funnel to generate more sales. This results in a substantial increase in the ROI.
These metrics also help brands to understand which content best connects with their audiences. Using these insights, brands can create a content strategy to suit the consumption patterns and preferences of their audiences. Thus, programmatic advertising indeed complements content strategies. Once the brands understand what content strikes a chord with their audiences, they can also go a step further and deliver a personalised experience. Programmatic techniques like Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) enable brands to display personalised thumbnail images, trailers and headlines. Brands can change the creatives dynamically during run-time depending on the users’ real-time preferences, making the users more likely to consume the content.
Also, these days it is quite common for the consumers to own and utilise multiple devices for content consumption. The omnichannel targeting capabilities of programmatic advertising enable brands to be present across all devices, platforms and channels and deliver the content, wherever their audience may choose to consume it.
It is a fact that the online space is flooded with unimaginable volumes of content. This is especially true in today’s digital world. As a result, the audiences have no dearth of content options to choose from. In this situation, brands need to work out a way to stay highly relevant to their audiences in order to gain brand loyalty and make a lasting impact. Programmatic advertising is the right tool to accomplish these objectives. An array of powerful programmatic techniques awaits out there to be explored. It’s time brands and content creators see programmatic for its true value and realise its potential, to not just complement, but also influence their content strategy.