Best Practices to Keep You Ahead of A Dynamic Market

If there’s one thing that’s constant in a marketer’s life, it’s change, and to keep up with that constantly shifting marketplace, smart brands create omnichannel strategies that target their customers wherever they are. However, that’s easier said than done when the channels they operate on are consistently in a state of flux. This year, it will be critical for advertisers to stay on top of the challenges posed by the dynamic digital landscape to ensure they’re reaching customers in an ever changing environment.  

Embrace Selling on Social 

When talking about dynamic advertising channels, social media is toward the top of the list. Social platforms are notorious for their ever changing algorithms that force brands to continually play defense as new developments such as Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops become available. It’s important to try and stay on top of each platform’s consistent changes as they evolve and develop new ways for brands to reach and influence audiences. 

The best part about social media’s continued growth is that it is no longer a channel just for the top of the funnel and brand awareness campaigns. Your social strategy should be targeting customers at every stage, from discovery to conversion to retention. With an increased interest from consumers in shopping directly on social media, it’s important to invest time and resources in social advertising and selling.

Get Specific with Video 

Programmatic CTV advertising spend has been steadily increasing for years, even while the supply for video impressions staggered behind demand. As consumers have spent more time at home in the past year, impressions on CTV ads have skyrocketed. It is expected that by 2022, more than 80% of internet traffic will come from video content.

Now is the time for advertisers to ride this momentum. With this many eyes on video content, granular customer data and precise targeting will be critical for reaching the right audience at the right time. When planning programmatic CTV ads, advertisers should use multiple layers of targeting, in various combinations, to reach every different customer profile in their audience while also considering their stage of the buying process. With the vast scale of video impressions, specificity will be key to finding out the clearest path to conversion. 

Embracing A Cookieless World

Cookies may be the current currency of digital advertising, but they won’t be for much longer. The future of advertising is about to transform as organizations take steps to protect consumer data privacy. With the combination of CCPA in 2020 with Google Chrome, the largest web browser, pledging to phase out third-party cookie usage by 2022, advertisers must embrace the future of a cookieless world. 

Brands must closely evaluate their first-party data and apply it to their strategy to be successful. The good news about this shift in focus is that brands have more control over the data they access making it more reliable and relevant. The users who are opting in to share their personal details are indicating that they want to learn more about a brand, giving marketers access to their better qualified audiences; and as more users opt-in, the data will only become more powerful, leading to a stronger connection and heightened trust between customers and brands. 

Display and mobile ads create an additional data challenge for marketers to overcome. As the sales cycle elongates, particularly in the B2B space, standard metrics, such as click-through rates, are losing their value. Display ads have proven their value as a top-of-funnel strategy that relies less on clear calls to action. Metrics such as brand recall or website traffic can give advertisers a better understanding of how well display ads are generating awareness. Even for bottom-of-funnel ads, metrics such as cost per lead are better measures of success. Now is the time to figure out which measurements are simply vanity metrics and which are proving the true value of your work. 

Improve Search Performance With Data 

Ecommerce in the United States grew 44% in 2020, with consumers spending over $800 billion online—ultimately raising the stakes for search advertising. As search engines continue to embrace machine learning to support their smart campaign systems, the stakes are also raised for the quality of the data supporting search ads. 

Platforms like Google Shopping’s Smart Shopping automatically place bids for ads based on a brand’s CRM’s data feed. While that sounds like a powerful tool, it’s only as good as the data it’s powered by. To ensure maximum return on investment, the first step is optimizing internal data feeds so each ad is created based on precise, clean data. Search engines will continue to transform their advertising platforms, but solid customer data will always keep brands ahead of the curve.