Advertising Media Strategy

The democratization of advertising media and data computing technologies has opened up an extensive range of options for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). What used to be an affordable advertising domain only to large corporations is now available to a much smaller company with either a business-to-business (B2B) or a business-to-consumer(B2C) market operation.

Advertising Media

The available media and options for advertising include:

• The search engines (Google, Bing) – Google Ads, Featured, and People-also-ask (PAA) sections
• Display and video networks (for example, YouTube)
• Social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit, and other niche players)
• Over-the-top (OTT) TV advertising including targeted one-on-one TV ads using the addressable TV technology
• Email marketing – permissions based messaging to prospects that interacted with the company

3SG Advantage

The 3SG team helps SMB clients with:

• Market research and competitive analysis that can identify the right mix of media channels to select for advertising
• Optimum spread/break-up of the advertising budget across different media channel options
• An integrated system to measure the performance of advertising not only from each channel but also as an integrated system that can identify synergies between various campaigns
• Leveraging sales and prospects data for targeted advertising messaging over several advertising channels
• Re-marketing to build conversations and engagement using personalized targeting possible due to digital analytics technology tools – see, track, follow through with prospects when they start “conversation” by clicking through or visiting a website, a social media account, or reply to a message
• Creating synergies between sales strategy and advertising that can help with improved sales closing ratio and meaningful insights

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising enables a company to reach out to an audience of prospects matching a specific persona or profile.
Examples:

1. We would like to reach out to contractors focusing on interior products installation in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle metropolitan areas.
2. We would like to reach out to 30+ year married adults with young children.
3. We would like to target an audience of 50+ years age that like to plan annual vacation trips to remote locations.

The Data Management Platform (DMP) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) enables integrating the off-line data, the 1st party, 2nd party, and 3rd party data to create comprehensive lists for each of the targeted audience profiles or customer personas. This data can be used for automated bidding with the ad exchanges to dynamically show the advertising messages to a target audience through several different advertising media. There are digital asset management (DAM) and dynamic media tools that can optimize the content to adapt to the target medium: the content of an ad adapts to the medium, whether that is a social media account, search engine ad, a video ad, image-based ad, text-based ad, etc.

Data

A company has a list of prospects from the sales operation. They might have a list of connections on LinkedIn. They might have a database of contacts to which they are sending email marketing messages. In case of a retail operation, they might have point-of-sale (POS) information about their customers. A business probably has customer info in Quickbooks, PeachTree, or other accounting software. These are examples of off-line data that they have.

1st party data: A company has a list of followers and connections on its social media accounts. The company website has analytics data with a wealth of information about the website visitors (though not their names, location, or contact info unless they explicitly provide that in a lead capture form).

The 2nd party data is the information a company might get from partners and affiliate organizations with an agreed relationship to exchange the data and contacts.

The 3rd party data is the information from external sources. Most of this data used to be derived from third-party cookies. Many DMP companies now have specialized technology and networks to recreate anonymized lists that can establish people-based identities.

The 3SG team helps clients with crafting strategy and then executing the integration and advertising plan to tap into the advantages of programmatic advertising. Contact us when you would like to learn more about advertising and media options and how they can be customized to your specific business needs.