Over the past few years, our industry has seen significant growth in digital adoption and in the advancement of new technology. As more and more people are headed online, it has become clear that there are new channels for retailers to leverage when it comes to executing highly deliverable ad campaigns. Traditional advertising methods alone cannot deliver maximum reach, so marketers are exploring new advertising channels.
Today, more ad dollars are being allocated to digital and advertisers are working with retailers to develop campaigns that can be executed across all channels. Creating “cross-platform” campaigns can be difficult, however, when it comes to buying different types of media and integrating them into a single plan. From campaign creation to optimization and reporting, working across multiple platforms takes a great understanding of how to properly execute a campaign on every level.
At the recent ad:tech event held in San Francisco, there was a lot of discussion around the growth the digital advertising industry has seen and the challenges advertisers run into when executing “cross-platform” campaigns. A few of these challenges include:
Reducing complexity. When it comes to buying different types of media, there’s a concern for reducing the complexity of digital advertising and moving towards... Read more
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Creating “Cross-Platform” Campaigns: What Works, What to Avoid
Tags: digital advertising; cross-platform campaigns; retail marketing; localized ad targeting
Posted in Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Targeting | No Comments »
Grow SMB Revenues With Buyer-Based Marketing
This is part 3 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer-based modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.
The sheer size of the SMB makes for a daunting task for any organization intent on marketing to the SMB segment. When you consider some Fortune 1000 or Global 2000 organizations can have in the 10’s or 100’s of thousands of companies in their customer bases, the expression of zeroing in on your target buyer can sound near impossible. It is a dilemma however that cannot be ignored. The U.S. Small business Administration estimates that the SMB segment accounts for better than 98% of all businesses in the United States.
In the previous article in this series, How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer, I touched upon the means to get to know the SMB buyer. Marketing to the SMB segment and buyers should first start with visiting the segmentation issue a little deeper. There have been many means tried for SMB segmentation whether it is by size, type, vertical, products, solutions, and etc. To some degree, they have helped to... Read more
Tags: buyer behavior, buyer experience, buyer insight, buyer journey, buyer persona, buyer persona development, buyer persona marketing, buyer personas, buyer strategy, buyergraphics, buyerology, content, content marketing, Digital Marketing, small business, small business marketing, Strategy, Targeting, Tony Zambito
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Email, Emerging Platforms, Opinions, Search, Social Media, Targeting | No Comments »
Travel: Come Fly With Me
The following statement may seem to be fly in the face of economic sense at first. It’s a great time to be in the travel business. Now with American Airlines filing chapter 11 just two months ago, and a sluggish economy holding consumer-spending hostage, it might seem to be just the opposite. However, if all digital marketing verticals had the momentum and forward-thinking strategies that the travel vertical has shown, we’d all party like it’s 1999.
Full disclosure: We’re in the travel business. But it’s not our only business. We saw substantial increases month-to-month for our audience-targeting platform over the past 12 months. In fact, we have almost 250 million individual customer data profiles. But this not an individual success story. This is a vertical success story. The success of the travel ad vertical can be duplicated, and should be duplicated as brands like P&G, Unliever and GM increase the acceleration of their overall budgets from offline to online spend. Kantar Media reported in November, “the display spending gain of 12.9 percent and 8.6 percent spike in search (for 2011) were driven by travel, local service and insurance categories.”
We know from other data that offline spending for travel was flat. The... Read more
Tags: brand loyalty, Data, loyalty, Targeting, travel
Posted in Ad Networks, Targeting | No Comments »
How To Get To Know The New SMB Buyer
This is part 2 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base.
In the first article of this series, we visited two new realities. One, that many Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 organizations are turning a focused eye towards growing their SMB customer and revenue base. With revenue growth potential shrinking in larger strategic accounts due to budget and pricing pressures, many are dedicating attention and resources with more determination than in the past. The second reality is that they are finding a very different buyer this time around than in the past. Simply put, SMB buyers are more social, more sophisticated, more connected, and are transforming their buying behaviors at an accelerated pace. New technologies opening their world to advantages only once afforded to large enterprises.
Waking up to these new realities has set up another challenge for executive leaders. That is of how to get to know the new SMB buyer. Here’s how one sales executive put this to me recently:
“One of the things we realized is that we have got to... Read more
Tags: buyer experience, buyer modleing, buyer persona, buyer persona development, buyer persona marketing, buyer personas, buyer research, buyergraphics, buyerology, content, predictive buyer modleing, small business, small business marketing, social marketing, Tony Zambito
Posted in Creative Best Practices, Email, Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Search, Social Media, Targeting | No Comments »
Creating an Effective Lead Generation Program
Online lead generation, an effective and growing digital marketing solution for brand advertisers, has seen some recent media coverage with the acquisition of the preeminent lead generation conference, LeadsCon to Access Intelligence last week. With online lead generation registering an impressive 20% growth rate in 2011 and continuing to grow in 2012 according to an IAB/PwC study, lead generation is a great way for brand advertisers to acquire new customers or build a database.
Successful across multiple verticals including consumer services, financial, retail, insurance and automotive, lead generation is a win-win for both the buyer and seller since the consumer is requesting information on a product that they are interested in and the brand is pitching their product to somebody who is already interested and has granted permission to the company to send them more information.
Since lead generation is a cost effective medium to acquire new potential customers, following are eight steps to creating a successful lead generation program:
Step #1- Establish a comprehensive plan that ties in sales and marketing goals and then establish goals for the lead generation campaign. While lead price should be a factor in measuring success, it should not be the sole metric but rather there should... Read more
Tags: Digital Marketing, lead generation, remarketing
Posted in Media Planning & Buying, Opinions, Targeting | 1 Comment »
