Being an agency, one of the most top priorities include securing optimum results for your clients to supercharge their advertising efforts. Now as common as it may sound, it’s not the easiest thing to do, especially belonging to the industry where new updates and technology keep getting introduced in a blink of an eye. And what’s more to it? You’ve to constantly keep yourself updated about the changes and new introductions. This means you cannot neglect the booming programmatic technology which is a new introduction in the digital advertising world and already redefining its landscape. It’s projected that programmatic advertising will grow by nearly $20 billion by 2021. (1)
To simply put, programmatic is an automated process of buying and selling inventories not made available via any SEM networks. This whole ad-buying mechanism is made possible by demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), ad networks, ad exchanges, and many more. Programmatic technology offers a multitude of advertising solutions like branding ads, location-based ads, retargeting ads, audience extension, PMP deals, multicultural marketing, etc. In this blog, you’ll gain more insights on why you should include programmatic advertising in your strategy and how you should communicate the benefits to your clients.
Why Should You Add Programmatic In Your Ad Strategy?
What was used as a mechanism to put an end to the frequent back and forth between publishers and advertisers has come a long way to redefining the landscape of digital advertising.
Today, programmatic advertising has revolutionized the world of media buying with its impeccable offerings like brand safety, transparency, real-time bidding, targeting options, and lots more. Coupled with a touch of human optimization, programmatic technology has also helped to combat banner blindness to a greater extent.
For a fact, programmatic technology was invented to help publishers when they grew in numbers exponentially due to the onset of the internet. This was to help them get their inventories sold by automatically connecting them to the pool of ad buyers with an array of targeting options for them to target their prospects.
It certainly has come a long way now. Programmatic technology hasn’t remained limited to only publishers but also advertisers. It provides countless benefits to advertisers who’re ambitious to try something new and acquire a wide reach of prospects. Programmatic is the fastest-growing addition to the digital advertising ecosystem.
As an agency, if you’re interested in helping your clients target accurately, maintain higher relevance, display ads on specific ads or to a specific category, trying new ad formats, and earn better ROI, then programmatic advertising is for you. And now, we’re going to elaborate more on the benefits of programmatic advertising, getting started with it, and more.
What Can Your Clients Expect From Programmatic Advertising?
Owing to the hyper-targeted nature of programmatic advertising, one of the major benefits your clients can expect is that they’ll be able to reach ‘the right audience’ which alone increases the chances of conversion.
Clients can also make use of prospecting, wherein they can target broadly at first and as they collect the data, based on the same, can build ad groups on the best-performing formats and inventory types. They can expand their reach notably by creating a look-alike audience to mimic their target audience.
Advertisers, i.e, your clients can also expect an informed allocation of the budget across all channels since programmatic advertising is rapidly being included in every businesses’ marketing mix. Now, this is not it, we’ll discuss more highlighted features of programmatic advertising ahead in this blog.
Communicating Benefits To Your Clients
Now that you’re convinced that programmatic advertising could be a compelling technology that can set your agency to success, how can you make your clients understand the same?
You can achieve it by clearly laying out the highlighted features of programmatic advertising in depth so they can have a look at the broader view and be receptive to the information.
So let’s look at more features that programmatic advertising offers in detail.
Benefits Of Programmatic Advertising For Your Clients
1. Advertise efficiently and effectively
Programmatic advertising provides advertisers with the opportunity to make better use of their budgets. It allows them to target their prospects on a granular level so they can reach their ideal customer at the right place and time. What this means is that you’re using your ad budget smartly on the relevant users and skip targeting users who’re not relevant and hence unlikely to convert.
2. Advertise in a brand-safe environment
Brand safety is one of the major concerns that advertisers have. The majority of the advertisers are bothered about their ads being displayed alongside the content that can harm their brand image. Marketers should be aware of where their ads are getting placed and who’s viewing their ads. With a programmatic platform, the risk of ads being run in an unsafe environment is minimized considerably.
3. Run Campaigns on Various Devices
It’s not unknown that we use multiple devices throughout the day. This may include switching between laptops, smartphones, tablets, TVs, etc, or sometimes using multiple devices at the same time. This means there’s a great opportunity for advertisers to run ads across multiple devices at the same time which in turn increases the chances of an ad being seen. Advertisers can even analyze which devices their advertisers used to view their ads the most.
4. Ads are more relevant – Uninterrupted experience to the users
India has the second-highest audience using some form of the ad-blocking tool after China. (2) This increased number is due to the poor hygiene maintained by advertisers in terms of displaying their ads. There are several factors responsible like neglecting consumers’ privacy, enabling auto-play audio, etc. However, irrelevant ads are one of the top reasons. Programmatic advertising ensures relevance so users are not interrupted.
5. Advertisers get more transparency
Since digital advertising is such a widespread industry, it’s possible to get your ads being viewed and clicked by the bots or even appear alongside undesirable content as discussed above. There can also be an issue of magnified prices which programmatic advertising offers solutions for. Transparency is extended to both publishers as well as advertisers as to who’s buying the ads and where the ads are being placed and more.
Okay, so now that you know what and how to communicate the benefits of programmatic advertising to your clients, let’s move on to getting started with programmatic advertising.
Implementing The Programmatic Strategy
Okay so now let’s say that your client has given a green signal to adding programmatic to their marketing mix, how do you actually go about it. Here, we’ve provided a brief structure or steps to get started with programmatic advertising.
Before going any further, remember that programmatic, like any other advertising platform, is dynamic in nature. So while it’s important to have a plan ready with you, you should always be prepared to adapt and change based on the campaign performance.
1. Decide goals clearly with your clients
Goal-setting is one of the most crucial initial steps while getting started with programmatic advertising. This does not only define the motive of your strategy but also how will you track and measure the results. With the help of right KPIs, your performance will be measured accurately.
2.Set an audience
Now that you’ve your goals clearly defined, it’s time to set an audience that your clients are looking to target. This can be examined by the owned data a client may have. It will help you determine the channels your clients’ prospects use the most, the cost incurred in acquiring them, etc.
3. Setting the budget
It’s generally a good practice to set the budget before starting a campaign from scratch. Although AI and ML will get the job done, it’s important to be flexible with your budget to make the most of new opportunities as they arise. What you can however do is decide a CPA you and your client are comfortable with depending on your goals.
4. Track the performance
Now, assuming that you’ve launched your campaign and it is now live, the next important step is to track the performance of the same. The KPIs that you and your client had decided earlier are the ones you’ll keep a close eye on. The budget flexibility that we had discussed will come to use now. Depending on the results you’re getting, you’ll be required to optimize the budget, creatives, etc to ensure maximum returns.
Conclusion:
If you’re keen to adopt newer technologies and securing better results for your clients, programmatic advertising is certainly worth your attention and investment. It will not only reap benefits for your clients but will also help you create a better and consistent revenue stream for your agency.
Start with a pilot project and consider communicating this with the clients you’ve relatively better relationships with. Once you get a hang of it, you may consider rolling it out as a new service to all of your clients. There are two ways you can get started with programmatic advertising – in-house and managed services.
In-house is when you buy the whole platform, rebrand it, and run campaigns in-house. Managed services are when you hire a third-party DSP to manage the campaigns of your clients on your behalf. Both of them have their unique benefits to offer. You can choose the one that fits your requirements and goals.
