In the 2011 movie Moneyball, baseball scouts employed a technique known as sabermetrics to uncover the hidden value of players based on less than obvious performance metrics. The results of this statistics-based approach to team selection were surprisingly positive and changed the sport forever.
In the world of online marketing, a similarly analytical approach to ad spending and content usage when wooing consumers is quickly gaining popularity. As you’ll see shortly, programmatic marketing has already become a linchpin of successful online promotion.
What Is Programmatic Marketing?
In a nutshell, programmatic marketing is the use of Big Data aggregation to more accurately target potential customers. By gleaning valuable insights from said Big Data, advertisers can satisfy the needs of individual consumers more quickly and efficiently. Essentially, it’s marketing automation on steroids.
Thanks to ever more powerful and accurate web analytics, it can significantly boost advertising ROI and decrease Cost Per Acquisition for companies of all sizes. Using programmatic marketing tools, even a single marketer on a tight budget can massively expand their reach and effectiveness.
Programmatic Tactics & Techniques
At present, programmatic marketing can be divided into two general camps: site retargeting and search retargeting. Site retargeting is all about optimizing content, offers and advertisements for viewers that visit your site regularly. A good though rudimentary example would be Amazon’s product recommendations.
Search retargeting, on the other hand, is a more expansive technique that follows your desired target demographics wherever they roam online using their search query keywords as input. Both disciplines make use of RTB or real-time bidding exchanges to serve up display ads.
Tools of the Trade
When you get right down to it, programmatic marketing is all about carefully chosen algorithms that determine what a consumer sees and when. Knowing how to present the right information to consumers at the right time either on your own site or in ads on other domains can be tricky.
That’s where Data Management platforms come in. DSPs like Chango, Magnetic, Simpli.fi, Google Remarketing and AdRoll assist merchants and marketers in budgeting their ad spending most effectively. Most commonly, they rely on ad exchanges such as the Facebook Exchange (FBX), which allows advertisers to either optimize ads on their own sites or on others and track highly specific niches who’re interested in their products or services.
Future Consumer Targeting Trends
We’ll continue to see an increase in programmatic marketing in at least three key areas: campaign strategizing, market niche segmentation and content creation. In the strategy department, dynamic ads and the feedback data they elicit can help you to plan more effective promotions. Furthermore, programmatic marketing will make it easier and easier to identify and target lucrative consumer demographics.
Finally, increasingly sophisticated programmatic marketing tools will be used to customize content for individual users for maximum impact. If you’d like to know what the future of content marketing will look like, look no further than apps like Flipboard that deliver totally unique experiences to users.
A Final Thought
How you choose to adapt to the increasingly algorithmic nature of web marketing in the near future will largely determine your e-commerce success moving forward. Regardless, the most critical aspects of web marketing can’t be boiled down to simple formulas no matter how much data you churn through. After all, the human element is still the most important piece of the puzzle. As such, you’ll always need a live marketer with finely honed instincts to steer the ship and oversee operations no matter how complicated the tools become.
