Four ways to make the most of your marketing

As we navigate our way through a post-pandemic, post-cookie era, many brands and their agencies are seeking new ways to reach customers. Here, we explore four ways marketers can run effective campaigns and ultimately build more meaningful relationships with their audience.

1. Get creative with contextual

With third-party cookies potentially on the wane, contextual relevance can offer a solid alternative as it can make ads more engaging and memorable. In fact, almost half of marketers (49%) are looking towards contextual to replace cookies, with 56% acknowledging it as a "key solution to the post-cookie environment". 

Contextual targeting can also be significantly enhanced. First-party data, AI and advanced algorithms can enrich impressions whilst driving greater outcomes for advertisers. Our AB testing has already yielded some fantastic results, demonstrating that cookieless targeting can be just as, if not more, effective than cookie-based targeting. We are currently conducting numerous tests with key partners to analyse cookie and non-cookie based targeting results, and we will share our independent research here in Q2. The essential factor for brands is to select an advertising platform with these optimisation capabilities at its core.

2. Move beyond attribution to the metrics that matter

Attribution has become an important part of the marketing mix in recent years, with opinion divided on whether to focus on last-click (ie a customer's last interaction with the brand before they made a purchase) or whether to measure engagement across the entire customer journey.

The problem is that there are too many moving parts and too many blind spots throughout the customer journey to answer the attribution question accurately. Instead, advertising platforms should provide brands with visibility into specific campaign metrics so that they can see an impact in the areas that are most important to them. In addition, we try to place greater emphasis on the creative itself. It is frequently overlooked, but we have discovered that it can be the number one lever to enhance performance. We are even testing how we can measure and report on attention. Your ads may be viewable, but do consumers see them and like them?

3. Supercharge your campaigns with social

In a world of interconnected devices, social is increasingly seen as a natural extension of the traditional display advertising environment. Marketing campaigns become much more effective when we add social to the mix.

With consumers interacting through more and more social platforms, today's advertising platforms - through data exchange and creativity - should be able to feedback on every single interaction to better inform the marketing strategy.

Fundamentally, a marketer's role is to build brand awareness, utilise that awareness to create a 'fan club' around their offering, and produce a compelling call to action (eg subscribing to a newsletter or buying a product). And of course, encouraging customers to follow their brand on social media is another effective CTA to engage them across multiple channels.

Social provides an additional input of potential links that aren't visible on the open web, but you can also analyse which social platforms your audience is using. For example, for some brands, analysis shows that audiences are, in fact, shifting from Facebook to TikTok as their primary engagement channel.

Brands should think about social as an awareness channel, used to gather information and feed it back into the loop to inform the overall advertising strategy. For instance, it could be used to inform your display ads and enhance contextual relevance throughout a campaign.

4. Connect the dots across the customer journey

All the above channels are effective in their own right, but the key here is connectivity through data. It's not enough to analyse channels in isolation - your data should be giving you the answers you need based on a customer journey built around all the touchpoints in relation to each other. And your partners should be more, not less, transparent.

Despite this, many of today's largest advertising platforms fail to address the issue of getting the right creative in front of the right audience at the right time, and they don't provide feedback during or after a campaign. A truly integrated platform will harness richer, more granular data - across all channels - to provide far deeper marketing insights.

As we head towards a (third-party) cookieless world, advertising platforms will need to provide differentiated audiences with transparency. They'll need to use their data capabilities to move beyond the realm of ad tech to power a brand's marketing activity - to achieve more cohesive campaigns through the right mix of paid and earned channels. This is where brands will see the most success in 2022.

Copyright 2022. Sponsored article made possible by Peter Birch, Managing Director, Hybrid Theory, EMEA.

Also published in: Marketing Donut

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