Hit the Mark with These Insider Insights for 2019
You made it! Take a deep breath and give yourself credit for crushing this year’s goals. Great! Ok, that was nice, right? Now, let’s get real for a second, even though the always-on sense of urgency during the holiday season is almost over it doesn’t mean that you can turn off the lights. Keep your goal crushing momentum in this new year with our digital must-do’s. In this post, we break down our paid media must-haves for 2019.
Let’s start with perhaps one of the most misunderstood media channels, affiliate marketing.
Affiliate
Affiliate should be one of the most cost-effective channels in your marketing program. And really, affiliate programs can be a great customer acquisition channel, so leverage that. It is silly to overpay publishers for sales you would have gotten already. Right? Of course! Start by re-evaluating your affiliate commissions this new year with specific strategies for new vs. existing customers or purchase path position.
Here’s what you should be aiming for…your blended commissions should be dropping, your revenue from content sites should be from content sites and your programs revenue should be growing 20% – 30%.
Up next, pay-per-click. Also, lovingly referred to as PPC.
PPC
Invest in non-brand search across key product categories to drive new customer acquisition within relevant segments of the market. Limited budget? Take advantage of additional segmentation to refine the audience you’re trying to reach. These tactics capitalize upon existing interest to cost-effectively raise brand awareness and fuel consideration prior to purchase.
Leverage the right tools to efficiently spend your money. Look at in-market and affinity segments within the engines. Regardless if you think they’re applicable to your customer base or not, applying these segments to all to your campaigns provides multiple levers in which to bid against to help focus that ad spend.
Don’t neglect your demographic targeting. Layer on unique bidding based on device, gender, age, and household income. Measure your non-brand traffic via customized attribution models. Your new customers are those that are new to your site. So, adjust accordingly to something such as a first click-model.
Product Feed Optimization should be a priority for any retailer running shopping campaigns. This assures that any advertiser is putting their best foot forward in a competitive landscape to capture a user’s intent.
And finally, assess opportunities for customer acquisition in 2019. This will require investment in non-brand text ads as well as shopping. Paid search is an excellent channel to capitalize upon a user’s interest and raise awareness for new customer acquisition.
Humblebrag, our clients have the ability to layer on multiple attribution models to report differently on the incoming traffic and easily make the case for supplemental funds based on the value as an introducer eventually leading to purchases via other tactics.
On to shopping. And, like most things in the digital landscape, this isn’t static. So, stay sharp.
Shopping
This might sound simple, but sometimes optimizing gets pushed to the bottom of your ever-growing list. So, to appear for more shopping queries and boost campaign revenue, optimize your product feed on an ongoing basis. Set reminders for yourself if you know that this is something that can easily fall off your list.
Showcase shopping and local inventory ads with a local inventory feed. Support your physical stores via product listings by highlighting products you have in stock that are near the searching customer. It is no secret that “near me” searches have increased in recent years. But according to Google, over the last two years alone, “near me” mobile searches containing a variant of “can I buy” or “to buy” have grown over 500%. 500 percent they say!
Next, a channel that really needs no introduction, display!
Display
The race to the bottom of the funnel and ROAS tactics kill the opportunity for growth. But here’s the thing, display is the ultimate Introducer. Are you using it that way?
Ok, pro tip, suppress your existing customer base and introduce your brand to new users via programmatic. Use a robust, full funnel strategy including tactics such as programmatic, video, native, rich media, location ads, and dynamic product creative (to name a few) to grow your business. And, find out who you should be talking to, on a massive scale, with a 70% CPM savings (vs. using a 3rd-party).
All advertisers should be utilizing display to drive growth for their businesses. Good news, programmatic is still an opportunity for most advertisers to purchase premium inventory at much more affordable rates than direct buys. Winning.
Clearly, the latest player is this paid media mix is swiftly becoming more and more influential. So here it is, last but never least, paid social.
Paid Social
Do more in paid social. Yes, it is the newest addition to the paid media family, but that means that this is the perfect time to jump in and find out what works for your brand. Test new ad formats, changing targeting mechanisms, and expansion opportunities to platforms like Pinterest. These platforms offer more ways to capture and convert your users.
This could go without saying, but you need to be maximizing the heavyweights like Facebook & Instagram. These platforms provide ample opportunity to capture a user’s attention in a very consumable format. By utilizing all the available ad formats and targeting opportunities, an advertiser can successfully build brand awareness, consideration, and conversions.
Use Facebook to grow your customer file! Lead Ads on Facebook are an enormously cost-effective way to grow your email list. Bonus, you can target those new users across your marketing channels. What’s an active customer’s lifetime value? Facebook can drive a new lead for as little as $2.
Instagram ad spend was up 177% year over year! Brands have only a couple of seconds to capture a user’s attention as they scroll. Create a highly personalized and relevant ad approach for Instagram to grow your site traffic and support your full-funnel strategy.
All Media Channels
Any advertiser with a brick and mortar presence should be running ads geared towards driving users in-store. Reconsider how you’re geotargeting. Instead of capturing passersby, how are you talking to your CRM file in your stores’ cities? Create a dedicated cross-channel, multi-device strategy to invite users in. Get your customers lined up outside your stores!
Use in-store targeting. Meaning, basically any advertiser with a brick and mortar presence should be running ads to specifically target users to drive them in-store. A location measurement partner should be utilized to measure the impact. Because you don’t have time that.
All quips aside, Paid Media is a big deal and should be a big deal for your brand. Leveraging the right media mix increases not only brand engagement but drives awareness and purchase.
Have questions? Not quite sure where to start? We got you. Feel free to drop us a line.
