If you’re not including programmatic advertising in your strategy, chances are you’ll be facing some seriously tough competition this year.
Programmatic advertising is on fire, especially in business-to-business markets. With machine learning and artificial intelligence on the rise, programmatic ads are growing, too. Even established businesses who traditionally relied solely on sales teams and “old school” marketing methods are discovering that it brings in new customers and saves time and labor costs.
With 2019 well under way, businesses need to make sure their digital marketing strategies aren’t better suited for 2009. Here we’ll introduce the basics of B2B programmatic advertising and give our outlook for the rest of 2019.
What Is B2B Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising is an automated process that bids on ad placements in real time — as a page is loading — to deliver the best asset for the right user at the right time. This approach is common with videos and display ads.
The process may seem complicated, but back-end scripts process everything before the page is even loaded. When you open a web page, information like your past buying habits, interests, search history, and any other relevant information is fed into the system. Then, something from the available inventory of ads will be matched to whatever is most relevant to your persona.
Bids are automatically set when the ad gets put in the inventory, so the highest bid will “win,” and that’s the ad that gets served when the page loads.
Centro Institute Webinar Series – Gauge Your Programmatic Readiness
Beyond Display: Native, Video, and Mobile Opportunities
About three-quarters of all video ads today are programmatic. While display ads were the primary medium, native ads continue to be one of the most effective tactics, and programmatic ads make them even more effective.
When you use programmatic advertising with your native video ads, you can set certain prerequisites for where your video gets displayed and who will see it. These prerequisites should include the characteristics (age and location, for example) of your ideal audience. In B2B marketing, keep in mind that business leaders may be more responsive to videos than to a page of text (the C-suite doesn’t have a lot of time to read your sales pitch, unfortunately).
Native mobile ads are another great opportunity for programmatic ads. The average person spends several hours each day on their mobile device—most of that time in apps. Since most people don’t like paying for their apps, they’re going to encounter a lot of ads during their activity. It might as well be yours.
Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning
People have been talking about the rise of artificial intelligence for years. While the technology is being constantly improved, predictive analytics and machine learning are already playing a huge role in programmatic marketing. Machine learning is the key to improving your campaigns because it more effectively automating the bidding process based on consumer profiles.
Collecting the data required to accomplish this means using AI programs to parse through customer patterns, online activity, preferences, and more. This data can be as specific as the amount of time someone looks at a page before deciding to make a purchase.
With this collected data at its disposal, the AI can use predictive analytics to determine where ads will be the most impactful. These tools can determine what stage of the marketing funnel any particular user is at and show them the ad that is most applicable to their unique situation, ensuring maximum impact of all your advertising efforts.
In case you haven’t figured it out already, advertising is going to get EXTREMELY targeted in the months and years to come. And predictive analytics and machine learning will make this high level of granular targeting possible.
Make 2019 The Year You Turbocharge Your B2B Sales
Machine learning and B2B programmatic advertising are already remarkably advanced, but 2019 leaves plenty of room for these algorithms to excel further. If you want to make sure your marketing strategy is up-to-date, Symphonic Digital will match experts to your goals and use data-driven strategies to formulate and optimize your digital marketing efforts. Contact us today to learn more.
cover image courtesy of bonadza.com
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