Every business, irrespective of its size and nature, needs customers. And the best way to reach out to these customers is by advertising. Advertising involves buying advertising spaces. If you want to buy the right kind of advertising space for your business, you have to try programmatic advertising.
Unlike Google’s Display Network (GDN), Programmatic Advertising is not exactly a free auction platform. You have to go through a programmatic advertising platform to access programmatic advertising sites. Although you have to spend some money on buying the advertising space, the kind of returns you can get through Programmatic Advertising make all your efforts worthwhile.
In case you are still wondering why you should try programmatic advertising for your business, here is something you should understand. Programmatic Advertising automates the entire process of buying and selling advertisements. By automating the process of buying advertisements you can save a lot of time and money.
You won’t have to place your bid through several ad exchanges. You can streamline all your advertising activity through one single platform. By leveraging algorithms, you can decide where to place your ad and increase your reach and scale.
Here are a few steps you need to follow if you are ready to try programmatic advertising for your business.
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Set Your KPIs
Before you try programmatic advertising, you should first implement your key performance indicators (KPIs). For this, you need to know whom you are targeting and what you want to achieve. You must set goals you can achieve through programmatic advertising.
Here are a few goals you can achieve through programmatic advertising.
- Increasing your brand awareness.
- Reaching and targeting new audiences.
- Retaining and retargeting existing customers.
- Boosting your ROI and your advertising metrics.
- Increasing the visibility of your ad.
- Decreasing your overall ad spend.
- Increasing your efficiency in reaching out to your target audience.
Choosing your goal is very important to determine the KPIs you should be tracking. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, your focus should be on impressions. Other KPIs you should be tracking include the following.
- Clicks.
- Conversions.
- Cost-Per-Conversion.
- Revenue.
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
- Reach.
The KPIs you choose should align with your business goals. Through your goals, you will understand which KPI you need to give maximum priority to.
Get Creative with Creatives
The best part about programmatic advertising is that you get to create different types of campaigns. You can choose from traditional banner ads, video ads, native ads, and in-app ads; you can even choose a combination of these depending on your specific goals. You can also use DCO or Dynamic Creative Optimization if you wish to generate unique ads for every customer.
Pick Your DSP
Selecting a DSP or Demand-Side Platform can help you control your ad spend, to a great extent. You will have to specify a bid when you launch a campaign on the DSP you select. This will put you in competition with other advertisers for the inventory. The impression will be won only by the highest bidder.
A few top DSPs you should focus on include the following.
- Amazon DSP
- Media Math
- adform
- (DV360)
- theTradeDesk
By partnering with the right tech expert, you get to choose the right platform while trying programmatic advertising for small business. Make sure you check targeting options, analytics, interface, tech support, inventory, and deal management before picking a tech expert.
Use Data to Target Customers and Drive Sales
Every programmatic ad requires quality data to work well. There is the first-party data or the data you get directly from your customers. This includes information about customer interests, behaviours, and actions, feedback if any, survey results, social data, and also information about their CRM and subscription. You can use this to personalise your ads and content, gain insights, and make predictions.
Another type of data you can use in programmatic advertising for small business is second-party data or data you purchase from someone who has collected first-party data. This data can come into use when you want to reach out to new audiences. You can also buy third-party data from large data aggregators who pull data from multiple sources. This can be very useful when developing and advertising new products.
Define Your Targeting Options
If your ads are not reaching out to the right people there is no use for programmatic advertising for small business. Therefore, it is very important to define your target audience. Determine what kind of creative you will be used for each customer persona. Consider the location and language. See if you will benefit from these geo-specific campaigns. You can even change your settings to target different devices, operating systems, and browsers.
Get Ready to Launch
Now that you have completed all steps it is time to launch programmatic advertising for small business. Make sure you select your traffic sources, upload your creatives on your DSP, set the required attributes, and adjust your targeting settings. You can launch your campaign after double-checking your work.
Fine-Tune and Optimize your Campaign.
You can keep optimizing your campaign as long as it is alive and running. You can access the real-time reports through your DSP and analyze all the data you find in those reports. You can also track or measure your KPIs such as the conversion value of your campaign, CPC, CTR, and your overall spend. This should make it easy for you to identify problem areas if any and solve them using the data you have gathered.
Use frequency capping to experiment and test your outcomes. You can even consider reducing your ad spend by restricting the number of times your ad is shown and increasing the unique reach of your campaign. While changing your frequency capping, see the kind of impact it has on your ROI and CTR. If you find any sweet spots, you can maximize your conversions without increasing your costs.
When it comes to programmatic advertising for small business, nothing is perfect. There is always room to adjust and fine-tune. Keep updating your campaign regularly and reviewing your operations.
Conclusion
In conclusion, programmatic advertising enables small businesses to target particular demographics and interests, optimize their ad spending, and monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns in real-time. Although using programmatic advertising can initially seem intimidating, small businesses can greatly benefit from doing so to increase traffic, engagement, and revenue. Programmatic advertising is, in the end, a crucial tool for small firms trying to maintain their competitiveness in the digital era.