What is programmatic advertising, and how does it benefit your business?
Here are the top benefits that programmatic advertising can bring to your business.
Programmatic advertising is an effective way to target customers – a lot of customers. It’s essentially the process of automatically buying of advertising to help automate your marketing efforts and maximize your reach. While most targeted marketing campaigns can end up only reaching small clusters of potential customers, programmatic advertising is a way that helps reach your audience through several different mediums, including web display ads – including mobile, tablet, and desktop – radio and podcast ads, plus outdoor digital, like billboards, and even TV.
Alex Kantrowitz of Buzzfeed notes, “Ad buyers can use programmatic buying to fan ads across the web and then, mid-campaign, evaluate what’s working best — which geographies, times of day, audience segments, publishers — to narrow their target accordingly, so they’re paying only for highly effective ads. This is a radical change from traditional ad buying, where a buyer agrees to run a certain number of ads with a publisher and is locked in to the contract.” This certainly seems like a more efficient way to buy ads and reach customers, but what are the other benefits for your business?
Flexibility
Because of the ability to access and use campaign data mid-campaign and adjust marketing efforts before the end of a campaign, businesses can change direction to be more effective in their efforts. This flexibility offers businesses the chance to meet their customers at the mediums that are performing well and get more exposure for their brand.
Better Budgeting
Relatedly, programmatic advertising tools help businesses spend their budgets more wisely. When campaigns can be optimized with relevant and real-time data, brands are able to more effectively use their budget by only spending on the channels and campaigns elements that they see working in market. When marketers understand what is creating conversions in their market, they can better ROI on their campaigns and spend their budgets more effectively.
Benefits of Programmatic Ads According to Senior Ad Buyers Worldwide, Dec 2017 (via eMarketer)
Reduced Risk
Because of the automated nature of programmatic advertising buying, there is reduced risk of error. There is also less guesswork and more informed decisions being made from both past campaign data, but also data on the campaign as it runs. Plus, while there are plenty of channels and media types that you can run programmatic ads in, they can also be highly targeted to focus on audiences by type, such as location, business or industry, etc. This can lead to more relevant organizations being exposed to your brand ads.
Greater Reach
As stated above, programmatic advertising platforms help businesses reach a lot more customers than traditional advertising. In an increasingly data-driven world, with more and more customers getting their exposure to brands through the internet in the form of social media ads and Google searches, programmatic ads help businesses reach customers where they are, every day. Maximizing this reach is another way to help companies maximize their marketing budget and ultimately their ROI.
Programmatic Advertising cartoon (via Marketoonist)
Better Personalization
Establishing a long-term relationship with customers is a crucial part of a marketer’s job. This helps to grow repeat business and position your company as a resource for your customers’ needs over time. One way to ensure your business is growing relationships with customers – as opposed to just trying to sell them a product or service – is marketing personalization.
Personalization and customization are at the heart of the marketing experience for customers. It’s one of the primary messaging keys to indicating to customers that you understand their needs. With programmatic advertising, marketers can understand what works with their customers faster. This means they can update messaging or consider changes throughout their campaign to make sure that they’re reaching their customers.
The benefits of programmatic advertising help give businesses more power over their marketing. It helps to take a significant amount of guesswork and waiting out of the marketing process and allows companies to create campaigns that are more flexible, more customizable, and ultimately, more impactful.
