If you’re operating online and own a small or medium-sized business, there are a vast array of strategies you can use these days that can have a huge impact. And in your fight against the big guys, there is one form of advertising that can help an awful lot: programmatic advertising.
Programmatic advertising is a term used to describe the process of placing online ads via a bidding system, which removes the need for human interaction and manual insertion. Effectively, it’s automated, machine buying that gets your ads displayed on websites – and they can be hugely useful if you play your cards right.
Now, the art of successful programmatic advertising is a little tricky to grasp for rookies to the scene. However, the benefits will often outweigh the time, resources, and effort you put into learning how the game works. Let’s take a look at some of the key advantages of programmatic advertising, and explain how it can help your SMB compete.
Insight
Finding out about your customers is gold dust to marketers, and programmatic advertising gives you the opportunity to gain a fantastic insight into your audience. Using one of the many advertising platforms like Google DoubleClick Bid Manager can be used to obtain insights on everything from where your ads are placed through to the type of customer looking and responding to the ad. Everything you would want to know is there for you if you scratch the surface.
Measurement
Measuring the effectiveness of any marketing campaign is critical to its success. With programmatic advertising, you get real-time reports that describe precisely what is working – and what isn’t – so you can tweak and change things to your heart’s content. Compare this to something like paying a tremendous amount of money for a billboard – you just have no idea how well it is working.
Laser-focused targeting
Programmatic advertising allows you to drill down into your ideal customer’s keenest desires and reach them in the places they are most likely to be. Whether it’s through IP targeting, geolocation, category or sie interest, you have a lot of control over where your ads end up. Simply put, while programmatic advertising can be an expensive mistake if you get it wrong, with all the targeting tools and conversion advice at your disposal, there are no real excuses for not getting it right.
Huge reach
How many people do you have access to in your local community? A few hundred? A couple of thousand? Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands if you live in a big city? Well, when you are operating in the online space, there are somewhere in the region of 3.5 billion people on the Internet at any given moment. And all those people could be within your reach with a few well-placed ads at the right time with the right message. It gives you a level of range you just can’t achieve in the real world – and the impact it can have on your business is enormous.
So, there you have it – some clear benefits of using programmatic advertising technology to boost your SMB. Any more advantages to add?
