In this guide, we will break down campaign goals into three buckets—awareness, acquisition, and driving traffic—and offer some specific digital programmatic marketing strategies you might want to try to achieve each goal.
Awareness Campaign Strategies
Awareness campaigns are focused more on growing your brand visibility, using upper funnel messaging that increases consumer awareness or consideration of a product or service. Viewability, high-impact experiences, engagement and reach with controlled frequency are key awareness goals for marketers. Metrics used to measure these KPIs include video completion rate, CTR, site engagement, brand lift, and viewability.
When you are focused on raising awareness among a large group of prospective customers, here are a few strategies and tactics to consider:
Every advertising campaign is unique in strategies, creatives, and budgets. Whether you are running a political campaign to find new donors, or a back to school promotion to increase sales, the ultimate goal is to make an impact on someone with every impression. Even brand awareness campaigns that aren’t focused on a specific action are built to make your company more visible to consumers. But just as the goal changes for each campaign, so too do your strategies and tactics. How do you know which digital marketing tactic is right for your particular goals?
- Prospecting: Find new, in-market users who have never visited your site that look and act like your existing customers. This could include behavioral targeting or lookalike targeting based on an existing customer list.
- Cross-Channel Marketing: A cross-channel approach combining TV and digital video can lift brand awareness up to 36%, according to MediaPost. Targeting the same consumer across all of their devices increases scale and reach while delivering on awareness objectives. The good news is there are many channels to choose from, and chances are you aren’t using them all. The important thing is to have a cohesive, well thought out plan that works across all channels at the same time.
- 1:1 Marketing: We’ve entered the era of people-based marketing, and brands that embrace personalization will enjoy a real competitive advantage. Spray and pray advertising isn’t cutting it any longer, and display, search and social can be an effective part of an existing account based marketing plan.
- Contextual Targeting: Reach your target audience when they’ve already engaged with relevant content. Webpages are scanned to determine the contextual nature of a page, so you know that you are sending messages to the most qualified audience.
- 3rd Party Data Targeting: 3rd party data providers have captured and categorized consumer signals into thousands of audiences that can be utilized for targeting, including demographics, interest, intent, and beyond. Even if they don’t have an off-the-shelf audience ready for you to buy, most data companies will build the one you’re looking for. Just make sure they are GDPR and CCPA-compliant.
- Connected TV: Because CTV is powered by internet-enabled devices, it offers advertisers the opportunity to reach target audiences at scale through more precise and effective methods than linear TV advertising — no upfronts required.
Acquisition Strategies
Lead generation and acquisition of new customers is often top of mind for all marketers, as it is the easiest way to prove the immediate value of marketing. Cost per Action (CPA) and Cost per Lead (CPL) are two of the clearest metrics used to evaluate the success of lead generation campaigns, as well as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Here are a few lead generation strategies to consider:
- Robust Retargeting: One of the best ways to drive conversions is to retarget visitors who have already been to your site. You can remarket to audiences who viewed specific pages of a product to re-engage them and help drive them further down the customer funnel.
- CRM Onboarding: The first-party data in your CRM is a treasure trove of valuable audience data, and onboarding this data allows you to send effective cross-channel messaging to them to drive conversions online. The options for targeting here are limitless. For example, you can target past customers and try to bring them back to your store, or target your most loyal customers with special promotions to keep them shopping.
- Dynamic Creative Optimization: DCO refers to the process of automating the personalization of creative in your advertising campaign. When lead generation is the goal and you want your messaging to be precise, DCO can help. Think of a car dealership with many different makes, models, and locations. Any of these elements can be swapped out using artificial intelligence, creating hundreds or thousands of iterations of the same ad with personalized content to help drive engagement.
- Social Advertising: Many marketers find that Facebook and LinkedIn are effective channels for finding new customers and generating new leads. Both ad platforms have “lead generation” as a specific objective to choose when setting up your campaigns on their platforms to make this process easier. If you’re looking to reach the masses, social advertising is a smart buy, but the content you promote will vary based on the platform you are using and the audience you are targeting.
Driving Traffic
Driving traffic can mean a few different things in this case, either driving actual foot traffic to a brick & mortar location, or driving virtual traffic to a website. The metric used to measure the success of either version is the number of visitors, and to grow this number there are a few strategies you may want to try:
- Search Retargeting: Search retargeting is a form of retargeting based on a user’s past product searches. Unlike site retargeting, the goal here is to find and convert a new pool of in-market consumers who have never been to your site before. The benefit is that you already know someone is looking for a specific product, so as long as the search was recent, they are very likely still in-market.
- Hyper-local Targeting: Hyper-local targeting is just what it sounds like: targeting a very specific region with a marketing campaign that is more relevant to that area. For many local businesses, the ability to keep your target audience within a small area means you only serve that ad to the people near you, which translates into less ad waste.
- Historical Geo-targeting: Taking this hyper-local targeting one step further, historical geo-targeting gives marketers the ability to target campaign messaging only to people who have previously visited a specific location. An example of this would be if Moe’s Southwestern Grill wanted to target a specific promotion to anyone who had visited a certain Taco Bell location nearby within the past few months as a method of competitive conquesting.
- Display & Social Prospecting: Display and social both offer the ability to reach vast amounts of users, so if you are looking to increase volume, both channels are good options. Prospecting refers to finding new users who are not yet your customers, or have never visited your site, to help drive new traffic to your properties.
No matter what your campaign goals are—awareness, acquisition, or to drive traffic—there is a never-ending array of digital marketing strategies and tactics for you to try.
Looking for more help? AUDIENCEX runs strategic omnichannel digital marketing campaigns for brands and agencies in every vertical. Our team of campaign experts is available to help design an intelligent media plan to engage your audience and drive them further down the purchase funnel. We’d love to help you increase the performance of your campaigns. Contact us to schedule a time to talk.