Got a burning question about digital marketing? We caught up with our Sales Director (ANZ), Laura Kleiman to discuss some of the biggest questions brands struggle with when planning their digital advertising campaigns. Sharing her experience and knowledge to help you navigate through these challenges, and kicking off with question number one…
1) How do you plan campaigns around your customer lifecycle?
These days, a lot of advertising focuses on retargeting, which is really important, but a lifecycle approach is more holistic.
A lifecycle approach looks at the entire purchase journey, rather than just focusing on customers who have expressed a strong purchase intent by adding products to their basket or viewing specific products, who would probably convert anyway without further prompting.
Narrowing your activity to focus too much on retargeting is a waste of impressions. At Crimtan, we split the lifecycle into three different stages including finding new customers, converting customers who have been to your site but haven’t yet converted, and re-engaging existing customers. All three stages require different approaches rather than the same blanket approach.
We also tend to spend more budget on prospecting new customers because, if you just focus on retargeting, you’re not increasing your retargeting pool.
It’s a lot harder to convert a new customer than an existing customer. So, once the customer is converted, we then look at growth strategies, which are often overlooked. We explore ways we can cross-sell and up-sell to drive repeat business, increase average order value and drive incremental revenue.
2) How do you personalise your ads (while remaining compliant)?
By using dynamic creative optimisation (DCO). This format uses a single creative template that populates automatically based on customer behaviour and other data signals, such as the weather or location. This allows us to show individual customers the creative and messaging that’s most relevant to them, which will always increase performance.
For example, if somebody has clicked on a Father’s Day creative, once they are on site they might spend their time looking at toys. So rather than retargeting them with Father’s Day creative, we’ll show them creative and messaging around toys, which is what they’ve demonstrated an interest in.
We also ensure that we are reaching real people in a brand-safe environment. As standard, we ensure that all our campaigns are fully globally compliant in terms of data privacy and legislation and use the best programmatic practices as recommended by industry bodies like IAB.
We also work with third parties like Grapeshot and IAS to ensure that every impression is served to an actual person in a brand-safe environment.
3) Why is media quality important?
Digital media can be challenging when you think about how expansive the digital environment is. There are billions of potential impressions, so it’s not easy to see your ad once it’s live, and it’s almost impossible to see it live in every environment that it may appear.
Measuring media quality provides a safety net to ensure that your ad is appearing in a quality environment. This means you’re buying ads that are shown to real humans, your consumers, within a safe and suitable environment.
If you are not buying quality media, you’re actually paying for ads that are not on the screen or being shown to bots and not in the right environment.
Let’s put this into the context of your advertising budget. If you’re paying for an ad that never appears on a screen, that’s like paying for a movie but you’re not allowed into the cinema. You’re actually just sitting outside while the movie’s playing.
If you’re paying for an ad that’s shown to a bot rather than a human, your dollars are inadvertently funding ad fraud. And if you’re paying for an ad that is unsafe or unsuitable, it could actually cost you money as it could erode the value of your brand.
If you think of the worst article that has been written about your brand or your category, and then choose to put your ad next to that, that’s essentially what happens when your advertising budget is being spent on unsafe and unsuitable media.
This becomes an even greater problem on platforms where there’s user generated content on a very large scale, and where safety in particular can be quite challenging. Media quality sets up your advertising for success, upon which you build your creative and your targeting strategies to drive better media and business outcomes.
As mentioned above, working with a brand safe partner like Crimtan means that you can rest assured that your brand will only appear in whitelisted locations.
If you’re keen to learn even more about retargeting and how to build brand-safe programmatic campaigns, let’s continue this discussion. Or have you got another digital marketing question you’d like to ask? Either way, get in touch and one of our experts will be happy to help.