Category: Channels and Tactics

The OTT/CTV Advertising Opportunity | Webinar

Posted on by Coegi

OTT/CTV advertising has officially met the reach of broadcast television. Streaming and connected TV devices exploded in 2020 as more consumers stayed home and cut the cord. In 2021, there were nearly 214 million connected television users, and that number is projected to increase to 230 million by 2025.

If streaming TV ads are new to you, you likely have many questions about the landscape. 

  • How are users consuming television today? 
  • Who is streaming versus watching cable? 
  • How do you address cross-device streaming? 
  • How do you measure and test connected TV ad performance? 

You’re not alone. These questions are top of mind for many marketers. CTV is constantly changing and capabilities evolve seemingly overnight. To clear up some of that uncertainty, we answer these and many more questions in this webinar. 

Coegi partners with leading industry experts from TheTradeDesk, Magnite, and iSpot.TV. In this webinar, the panelists clearly explain the immense opportunity available to advertisers in streaming TV. You’ll come away from this webinar with a much stronger understanding of the advertising opportunity on CTV and how to leverage it for maximum marketing ROI. 

In addition, you’ll learn: 

  • The latest trends in OTT/CTV advertising for brands and consumers
  • Ways to strategically incorporate premium CTV inventory into your campaigns
  • Recommendations on how to effectively measure CTV

For more resources, download our free CTV Advertising Guide.

Using Facebook Lead Ads to Drive a Sales Pipeline

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

Using Facebook Lead Ads to Drive a Sales Pipeline

Our client, Grit Moto Adventures, came to us with a unique opportunity to drive sign ups for an exclusive backcountry motorcycle tour. Their unique audience would be given the option to sign up for various tours in a wide time frame. Given the time commitment and niche experienced biker audience requirements, we set a goal of driving 320 leads using Facebook lead ads.

 

Highlights

707
Leads

$0.83
CPC

0.11%
Lead Conv Rate

Challenge

Due to the advanced level of riding experience needed to take part in Grit Moto Adventures tours, the target audience was niche. Interested individuals needed experience in off-road motorcycle riding, the lifestyle flexibility to travel throughout the week, and funds readily available to book a tour. Additionally, Grit Moto Adventures was a newly formed brand with little brand awareness at the time the campaign launched. Our strategy needed to include ways to build scale despite the targeting specificities, and take interested users from awareness to conversion as quickly as possible.

Solution

Our team navigated the audience restrictions by making custom third-party data segments with the largest US consumer panel, Resonate. This tool allowed us to develop and activate a scaled audience within our two primary audience personas: general Motorcycle Riders and Retired Riders with the income required for these trips. For media activation, we chose Facebook for its ability to scale, built-in lead generation functionality, and comprehensive interest targeting.

The resulting campaign drove an engagement rate of 4.54% with an impressive cost-per-click of $0.83. At the campaign’s conclusion, 707 Facebook lead ads were filled. This was a 200%+ increase from our original goal of 320 leads. These metrics demonstrate our success in reaching highly interested people at the right time.

We learned that strategically curated audiences, paired with informative creative, drove numerous leads. This found candidates for the tours while also expanding their email list. As we plan for cookie deprecation, tools such as Facebook lead generation campaigns will be important for building first-party data. This information will be extremely beneficial for Grit Moto Adventures moving forward.

Social Commerce 101: What Marketers Need to Know

Posted on by Allie Haupt

During your leisurely afternoon scroll through social media, you may have come across a post with a shopping feature prompting you to purchase a product within the app. This is social commerce at play – the ability to buy and sell a good or service within a social media platform. 

Why Is Social Commerce Important?

The pandemic permanently changed consumer shopping behaviors. 62% of US consumers are shopping more online now and 48% of US social media users have bought something on a social platform. 

Brands, now more than ever, should explore social commerce to meet the consumers where they are. Let’s explore ways you can leverage social commerce by platform to meet campaign objectives and business goals.

Meta: Facebook and Instagram

Meta makes it easy for brands and consumers to engage in social commerce. In Facebook Business Manager, a business can upload and manage their inventory and even provide customer support via Commerce Manager. To get started, create a Commerce Manager account where you’ll be prompted to link your business account, set shipping options, create a return policy, and assign a bank account for payouts. You can upload as much inventory as you desire to the Facebook catalog because there is no limit on product uploads.

Facebook also introduced in-app shopping features in 2021 including: Shops in Groups and Product Recommendations in Group. 

Likewise, Instagram added Shopping from Creators which allows users to purchase products that influencers tag in their posts. Users can also research and purchase products on the Shop Tab which is located on the Search and Explore Page in the Instagram app. Instagram is really driving the user experience and optimizing the algorithm to become the go-to hub for product discovery. 

Twitter

Twitter recently introduced a new shopping feature, Twitter Shops, that allows brands to create an inventory list of up to 50 products that can be displayed on their profile. Users can then peruse the brand’s products and click a “View Shop” button that will direct them to the brands website to complete the transaction. 

It is important to note that the transactions do not directly take place in the Twitter platform. This means users will be driven to your external site and your brand does not need to develop a new transaction process for payouts.

Pinterest

Pinterest was one of the trailblazers for social commerce, introducing shoppable pins in 2019. Within the platform, there are a plethora of ways a consumer can engage with a brand and purchase products. This includes the Shopping List feature, which automatically saves all of the product pins a user has pinned in one location so they can easily come back and shop. It also notifies a user when a product price has decreased to entice them to purchase. 

Additionally, Pinterest has an AR shopping experience that allows users to virtually try out products, such as placing furniture in their home, before purchasing. Check out this article for more Pinterest advertising tips. 

Snapchat

Snapchat may not be the first platform that comes to mind when thinking about social commerce, but it is helping brands drive efficient sales. Through Snapchat’s AR lens product, Try On, brands’ product catalogs are pulled into the platform to allow for user interaction. 

Major makeup retailer, Ulta, has seen significant success using the AR lens feature. They generated $6 million in sales by allowing users to virtually try on makeup in the app.

TikTok

TikTok is also beginning to enter the social commerce space. Brands can promote their products in the app by adding a Shopping Tab to their profiles. This allows users to look at products and prices, and then redirects the user to the website once ready for checkout. Two prominent brands successfully utilizing the Shopping Tab are Kylie Cosmetics and Sephora. 

If you’re unsure how to adapt your marketing to fit on TikTok, follow these Do’s and Don’ts of TikTok Advertising. 

Which Social Commerce Platforms Should You Use?

When planning a social commerce strategy, first define who your target audience is and identify which social platform(s) can help you reach them efficiently. Also consider the different social commerce offerings and capabilities each platform provides and how they can best meet your brand needs. Use this information to choose the platform(s) that can most effectively promote your brand’s products and create a positive user shopping experience.

Social commerce is a great way to align with shifting consumer shopping behaviors and meet the next generation of shoppers where they are active online. The volume of new shopping tools we’ve seen roll out in the first half of 2022 alone indicate this is only the beginning. Now is the time to get familiar with and start testing different social commerce applications to find what sparks the greatest results for your brand. 

For more on social commerce and other emerging topics, view our top 5 Social Media Trends for 2022. 

4 Ways to Drive Greater Impact with Your Media Investment

Posted on by Coegi

Brands, now more than ever, are seeing the benefits of digital marketing: flexibility, addressability, and scalability. This is resulting in continuous growth in media investment, especially as more consumers are increasing their time spent on digital channels. 

However, the more amateur marketers who fail to drill into the details of digital buying, yielding ad fraud, poor brand safety, and ineffective placements are undoubtedly wasting dollars and, in some cases, causing harm to their brand. These issues range from blatant criminal activity to troublesome contextual environments to sky-high ad frequency. 

At Coegi, we have strict standards in place to ensure that we are treating our clients’ media investment as if it is our own. Here are the key factors to make your dollars work harder when setting up digital campaigns:

1) Reflect On The Past And Plan For The Future

It’s time for digital advertisers to take a look in the mirror. The last decade of explosive growth needs to be peeled back and examined. In its infancy, digital advertising was a marketer’s dream world. Everything was measurable and targetable – in other words, it felt easy. Marketers were able to reach anyone, anywhere. 

Then entered increased regulation and walled gardens. Regulation, although needed for consumer protection, broke the original execution method. Programmatic is no longer the wild, wild west. Many have tried to continue operating as if nothing has changed, which has left massive vulnerabilities in the industry for ad fraud to enter the picture, often undetected. With this came wasted dollars, brand safety implications, and fear for the future of digital advertising.

2) Diversify Your Marketing Dollars

Marketers need to have a high degree of inventory accountability and transparency. Direct and private marketplace placements will help, as you know exactly where your ad is being placed. However, it’s important to diversify in order to expand reach against your target audience. 

Open exchange placements can be equally effective when carefully curated whitelists and blacklists are applied. Aggregate all media metrics within one dashboard to avoid siloed analysis, and ensure brand dollars are being used efficiently across your marketing tactics. 

3) Invest In High Value, High Visibility Inventory

In today’s environment, inventory quality is the key driver of media success. If you want to be seen in a high impact medium – whether it’s a high traffic billboard, premium CTV spot, or something else – you have to invest the dollars. 

No, I’m not here to tell you to just increase your media budget and everything will be great. You can also improve performance by leaning into channels which provide rich data and reliable, compliant targeting. Retail media, for example, is an excellent source of cookieless second party data and provides directional metrics to track down-funnel results. Direct publisher buys can provide access to contextual placements and premium audiences as well. 

4) Go Back To The Basics Of Measurement

It’s not just the cookie that’s dying, it’s last click attribution, IP tracking, and more. It’s time to substitute antiquated attribution models for more tried and true incremental measurement tactics to showcase actual marketing ROI, such as media mix modeling. 

This will allow you to better define optimal budget allocation by stitching together sales-related data and media metrics – and also keep you focused on the data so fraudulent activity does not go unnoticed.

Paving The Way For A Stronger Future In Digital Marketing

The digital world has changed in drastic and permanent ways over the past decade. We can still benefit from the gains in automation and efficiency the industry has made.  We will not go back to writing dozens or hundreds of IOs for a single campaign and trafficking ad tags to each publisher directly.   

But, it’s due time to put more guardrails on the media buying process in terms of the publishers we leverage and the way we measure results.   

The DOOH Primer – Digital Out of Home Advertising

Posted on by Coegi

Interested in DOOH advertising?

This primer gives you everything you need to know before launching a digital out of home advertising campaign. 

What Is Out Of Home Advertising? 

Out-of-home advertising (OOH) traces back thousands of years, with the earliest civilizations using it to publicize laws and treaties. The first large-format American poster originated in New York advertising the circus in 1851. 

OOH has since expanded to placements on park benches, transit, restaurants, and more. In 2005, the first digital billboards were installed and forever changed OOH advertising. 

What Is Digital Billboard Advertising? 

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is a subset of the larger OOH category. This format provides an automated, targeted, dynamic and interactive way to reach on the go consumers in public places.

DOOH ad spend accounts for roughly a quarter of all US OOH spending. Growth can largely be attributed towards an increasingly mobile consumer, which in-turn increases the visibility of out-of-home media.

According to the OAAA, Americans now spend 70% of their time outside of the home, an increase of 50% over the past two decades.

Furthermore, consumers consume 60% of media via their smartphone or tablet on mobile web and apps. This lends to advertisers’ ability to connect with on-the-go audiences across touch points, including DOOH.

Download the full primer below to start leveraging this key advertising channel for your brand today. 

What You’ll Learn: 

  • How DOOH advertising is bought and then measured
  • When you should consider out of home advertising
  • Digital out of home content strategies and best practices
  • Available environments and ad inventory 
  • The major players in the industry

If you have any further questions, contact Coegi to learn more!

Digital Out of Home – A Brief History

Out-of-home advertising (OOH) can be traced back thousands of years to early civilizations. The first large-format American poster, measuring 50 square feet, originated in New York advertising the circus in 1851. By 1900, a standard billboard structure was established in America. 

With more products entering the market over the century, new and creative ways of reaching consumers became necessary. OOH expanded to park benches, transit, restaurants, etc. In 2005, the first digital billboards were installed, forever changing OOH advertising. 

What is Digital-Out-of-Home?

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is a subset of the larger OOH category. DOOH markets to consumers when they are on the go in public places. Instead of interrupting a user’s online experience with an ad, it meets them in real life. Also, rather than traditional billboards, these placements can be dynamic and interactive.

The Growth of DOOH Advertising

Various eMarketer studies suggest DOOH ad dollars account for roughly a quarter of all OOH spending in the US. Growth is largely attributable to increasingly mobile consumers who are in turn increasing the visibility of OOH media. According to the OAAA, Americans now spend 70% of their time outside of the home. This is an increase of 50% over the past two decades. Plus, consumers consume 60% of media via their smartphone or tablet on mobile web and apps. This lends to advertisers’ ability to connect with on-the-go audiences across touchpoints, including DOOH.

How is DOOH Inventory Bought?

Direct – Sign individual IOs and contracts with OOH vendors to secure space upfront using specific parameters. Space is usually secured on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis.

Open Exchange – Purchase inventory at auction within seconds before the impression is served. The buyer gains control of when and where their ads will be shown. However, publishers reserve some inventory for direct buys. Advertisers can engage in private marketplace deals to secure more premium inventory through programmatic channels.

Private Marketplace – Secure priority access to premium inventory like airports and roadside billboards through private marketplace (PMP) deals. This offers greater control of creative messaging, ad timing and data usage, while still giving publishers higher yields. PMP inventory is typically higher in price than open-exchange inventory.

How to Measure DOOH Campaign Results?

As a one-to-many medium, multiple people can see an OOH ad at once. Nielsen and Geopath provide US industry standards for measuring impressions using variables such as speed data, traffic, on-site counts and audience distribution data. 

Geopath does the majority of roadside billboard measurement. Nielsen assigns each type of signage a multiplier based on average views per ad play. If using a DSP, advertisers can use 1×1 tracking pixels to track how many plays an ad receives.

High-Impact Use Cases for Digital-Out-of-Home Advertising 

DOOH for Lower-Funnel Campaign Objectives

Programmatic technologies allow for more targeting controls throughout the day. They allow a creative digital media buyer to control spend only when and where a user is most likely to convert.

Examples: 

  • A coffee brand only advertises before 2 pm.
  •  A food delivery app optimizes spend towards areas where drivers aren’t getting rides.
  • A pharmacy only serves to DMAs where allergy counts are high. 
  • A sports team pauses a campaign when tickets sell out.

DOOH for Targeting Niche B2B Audiences

Many B2B marketers view out-of-home as a mass-market medium, rarely leveraging it outside of industry events. However, with smart use of customer data, planners can confidently buy screens when their niche audience is most likely to see them.

Example: A trade group targeting architects want to geofence a four-day conference in Las Vegas. They can buy the DOOH signage within a radius of the conference and at the airport. Additionally, they can upload attendee data to continue the campaign after the conference to reinforce messaging.

DOOH for Testing Multiple Creative Messages

With static billboards, the same creative often is deployed for 6 or 12 months at a time. Programmatic creative is deployed with an ad server, allowing for more robust creative testing. By pairing this technology with an intelligent measurement strategy, brands can test messaging. Additionally, by porting other data points, creatives can be dynamic and change in real time.

Examples: 

  • A hospital shows current ER wait times
  • A sports team displays a countdown clock to tip-off
  • An auto shop displays weather conditions and alerts

How to Design a DOOH Advertisement

You should approach your DOOH content strategy differently than typical display or video campaigns. These placements truly reach people on the go, so you must capture the attention of onlookers immediately and leave them with a memorable message.

Consider these design elements for your DOOH assets: 

  • Loop or slot length (if applicable)
  • Physical display size
  • Resolution of display and aspect ratio
  • Whether or not sound is available
  • Motion types accepted
  • File type and maximum size accepted
  • Video codec type (if applicable)
  • Capabilities: linear, dynamic, data-driven, real-time optimization, etc
  • Content restrictions such as adult content, alcohol, violence, drugs, etc.

DOOH ad content should be relevant to both the brand and the display location. Also, make sure the brand name is present and viewable to drive awareness and make the brand connection with viewers. 

How to Access Digital Billboard Advertising? 

Contact Coegi to get a full list of venues available in your target geo and the accompanying creative specs. Creative opportunities differ by venue and can include static and animated ads, large format ad sizes, sound-off or sound-on creatives and more.

To achieve maximum scale, DOOH advertisers should send creatives that can scale across multiple venues. Your Coegi account team can advise on which venues are best for your audience and goals and provide creative requirements accordingly.

To see DOOH advertising in action, view our case study. 

You can also read our DOOH FAQ article with Vistar Media, one of our industry-leading technology partners. 

Why Digital Out Of Home Advertising Will Gain New Life in a Cookieless Future

Posted on by Coegi

Digital out of home (DOOH) advertising came into fashion for marketers back in 2017-2018. Coegi was an early adopter of the channel, understanding its potential in driving mass scale with greater flexibility than traditional billboard activations. 

In its infancy, the targeting capabilities were limited to demographic visitation propensities and locations such as gas stations and taxis. This meant that it was primarily relevant for brands targeting metropolitan areas. Now, as more locations have adopted digital screens, digital out of home has become a valuable tactic for a wide variety of brands. 

The pandemic’s stay at home orders brought DOOH ad spending to an abrupt halt. But, now that consumers are gaining confidence in traveling again, digital out of home needs to make its way back into marketing plans.

How can marketers create sophisticated digital out of home strategies? Hear perspectives from Coegi’s Director of Operations, Julia Wold, and our tech partner Vistar’s Director of Client Service, Jared Reiner. 

#1 Choose Your Locations Wisely

Julia: How should brands select which DOOH advertising locations they target?

Many marketers are seeking out ways to add new tactics into their media plans as they prepare for the deprecation of the third-party cookie. DOOH has become one of the key tactics brands have turned to, capitalizing on a population that is more hungry than ever for outside experiences. Marketers should leverage venue locations in the same way you would leverage publisher specific partnerships, in a contextual manner that best resonates with key audiences. 

With Vistar’s vendor transparency, you are able to not only see the venue type and location, but also the media partner for an additional layer of brand safety. And, unlike traditional out of home, you aren’t limited to an always-on strategy. Instead, you can daypart, reaching consumers at the time that is most relevant for your messaging. 

For instance, consider reaching business professionals with placements at transit stations, office lobbies, skyways and Ubers at peak commute times. If you are messaging to families, consider waiting room screens, movie theaters, malls and recreational centers. We executed a college game night promotion for our NBA client with a presence in gyms, bars and transit hubs at the colleges and universities near the stadium.

Jared: How has Vistar expanded upon their location targeting since 2020?

There are a variety of ways to take advantage of location targeting in digital out-of-home. The Vistar platform has best-in-market POI data from Foursquare built in for seamless activation of proximity-based targeting. We have also on-boarded over 4,700 location-based audiences that are now available, including full taxonomies from Factual and Epsilon.

#2 Implement Post-Exposure Mobile Retargeting

Jared: What success have you seen from brands incorporating mobile retargeting on OOH buys?

OOH is one of the most trustworthy formats of media. It has been around for over 100 years! But what some people aren’t aware of is how well OOH interacts with other media channels. With mobile, we have the unique ability to capture audiences that were exposed to an OOH campaign and then continue the conversation on a channel where they can interact with trackable engagements. 

Brand marketers have seen great success in using high-impact OOH to convey messaging that resonates emotionally with consumers, followed by retargeting on mobile with a specific call-to-action. For example, advocacy campaigns seeking donations, universities encouraging students to request a brochure or schedule a tour, or brands promoting a discounted offer.

Julia: What’s the benefit of incorporating mobile retargeting on OOH buys? 

Mobile retargeting is an amazing way to re-engage with consumers who saw your original messaging. It’s also an efficient way to extend your media buy across new inventory opportunities on the device that 90% of the population spends an average of 4.5 hours per day on. 

For one of our tourism clients, we promoted digital out of home messages about an upcoming summer golf tournament in areas with an abundance of golf courses. Not only were we able to re-message users after they left the event, but we were also able to retarget that same audience the following Fall to remind them of late season golfing opportunities. This audience was the most highly engaged across the campaign and drove the highest conversion rate of golf trip guide downloads.

#3 Incorporate Advanced Measurement Studies

Julia: Why are advanced measurement studies important for DOOH buys?

Out of home, as with other forms of more traditional media, for a long time lacked a solid measurement foundation. Even if you could roughly estimate reach and frequency, it was harder to justify ROI to key stakeholders. Digital out of home takes the guesswork out of proving effectiveness with in-platform advanced measurement solutions like foot traffic, brand lift and sales lift. For a large tech client, Coegi leveraged a brand lift survey in tandem with DOOH delivery. We measured a 4% increase in brand consideration and a 7% increase in purchase intent. Without this study, these significant gains would have gone unnoticed. 

Jared: What advanced measurement studies are available through Vistar?

Vistar’s advanced technology allows us to capture OOH exposure which enables a wide array of attribution studies. For CPG and automotive clients, we partner with IRI and IHS, respectively, to provide sales lift. For clients with brick and mortar locations, we deploy foot traffic studies to understand an attributable number of store visits. 

An exciting new offering focused on online performance is our partnership with MIRA, which allows us to connect real-world exposure to OOH with online conversions. Finally, many advertisers choose to run brand studies. These are excellent not only for measuring the impact of your messaging and media strategy on consumer awareness and intent, but also asking research questions to learn more about your audience, your competitor’s status, creative impact and more!

#4 Test Dynamic Creative Messaging

Julia: What success has Coegi seen from dynamic creative messaging?

While dynamic creative just launched at scale in the Vistar platform in April 2022, Coegi has been using dynamic creative on other programmatic platforms for some time. The flexibility can’t be beat. You are able to reach the right audience at the right time, with a message curated up to the minute. This capability on out of home media will allow us to scale data driven messaging to every available screen, anywhere in the world.

Jared: How does Vistar envision dynamic creatives impacting the effectiveness of  DOOH advertising?

We just released our universal dynamic creative solution for DOOH and believe this will be a game changer for the industry. By unlocking the power of dynamic, we can deliver messaging that changes within a person’s environment in real time to be more relevant. This will create better conversations between brands and consumers leading to significant investment in the space.

Finally, what are some best practices that marketers should consider when activating a digital out of home campaign?

Jared:

Programmatic DOOH advertising unlocks the ability to take the targeting and messaging techniques we have developed in the digital space and apply them to the oldest format of media. It’s critical to consider both the media strategy (what time should your ads show? In what contexts? With which audience segment?), as well as your creative strategy (does this creative match the physical world context where it will be shown? Is my brand name visible if someone is just quickly passing by during a video?) Taking the time to curate the right audience, then having simple, relevant messaging goes a long way in the OOH space.

Julia:

Forecast, forecast, forecast. Venue availability and inventory is constantly changing, and with demand fluctuations, so can anticipated CPMs. In order to make sure your DOOH advertising plan is solid, take these steps. 

  • Create a plan prior to launch. This is especially important in smaller geographic footprints and less densely populated areas.
  • Develop assets in all sizes dictated by the DSP’s media plan to ensure proper scale at the most efficient cost. The plans will always tell you the available impression percentage by spec size.
  • Lastly, understand the format and scale that your message will be delivered in. Clear font and simplicity of the message is key when you consider you only have 3-6 seconds to make an impact. 

 

Interested in exploring digital out of home from your brand? View our comprehensive digital out of home primer here to learn more!

How to Drive D2C Sales with Digital Marketing

Posted on by Maggie Gotszling

Brands of all sizes are exploring how to drive CPG product sales through a D2C model. This is no surprise as US D2C sales will surpass $197B, with a rapid trajectory in 2024. While this only accounts for 2.6% of all retail sales, brands cannot ignore this emerging growth channel.

D2C models offer immense value for brands beyond just profitable sales due to the opportunity to collect consumer data and establish brand loyalty. 

However, with convenience as a leading factor driving purchase decisions, how can you steer your audience away from mass retailers as the default and generate interest in your direct-to-consumer site? The key is to add value with a seamless, personalized, and memorable shopping experience. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a successful D2C commerce experience by optimizing your omnichannel strategy at each stage of the purchase funnel.

Maximize The Shortened Purchase Funnel

How can you make sure the right individuals are finding your brand and, once they have, ensure they complete the purchase? 

Understand the purchase funnel is becoming shorter as information is available at our fingertips. Consumers can search for a product, read reviews, compare brands, and make an informed purchase in a matter of minutes. Take Carvana for example – they transformed the lengthy process of purchasing a new car into a quick, digital transaction. 

Knowing this, marketers need to create compact omnichannel marketing campaigns that align with the user journey and product life cycle. A well-tailored digital media strategy accounting for each stage of the consumer journey is paramount to driving D2C sales. Let’s explore how to accomplish this for your brand. 

Create Brand Awareness And Product Consideration

We start at awareness – testing and amplifying messaging within well-researched prospecting audiences. Then, by activating a flexible, omni-channel approach, we can learn who our best audience is. We’ll also learn what channels we can reach them on and what messaging resonates best with them.   

An important part of establishing awareness for D2C brands is using SEO and PPC to show up in product search. Combine PPC search ads with organic SEO to optimize your efforts. Once you’ve reached users in the discovery phase, deploy smart retargeting to stay top of mind until purchase. 

Move Seamlessly From Consideration To Sales Conversion

As a consumer nears purchase, machine learning and algorithms need to get to work. Use AI to predict and serve the right messaging at the right time. Also, use technology like dynamic creative optimization to tailor messaging to complement previous touchpoints (e.g. add to cart or don’t forget the items in your cart for abandoners). 

At Coegi, we bring together over 20 technology integrations, alongside certified experts on all digital platforms, to deploy advanced retargeting focused on recency and frequency analysis. As a result, we are able to deliver more efficient results, creating greater ROI for brands. 

Establish D2C Brand Loyalty

To build loyalty, find ways to delight users with unexpected incentives, promotions, or gifts. Utilize the first party data collected from their initial purchase to re-message in a personalized fashion. Email marketing is a strong tactic to keep that ongoing pulse without fatiguing your customers with ads. But, serving ads for complementary items to previous purchases can be effective with sufficient buffer time post-purchase. 

Ironically, if you hyper-focus on selling, you’ll miss out on sales opportunities. Instead of constantly pushing for purchases, also explore ways to create conversations through your marketing. Engage with your audience and establish a brand community. This authentic relationship is what creates loyalists who will continue to support your brand for years to come. 

To learn more about how to create a successful omnichannel digital marketing strategy, view our CPG Digital Marketing Playbook here. 

Targeting Tourism Audiences With CTV Advertising Campaigns

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

A state tourism client tapped Coegi to implement a CTV advertising campaign with the primary goal of driving awareness. We used a test-and-learn bidding strategy to identify optimal bid numbers across platforms. This allowed us to allocate the client’s budget across the most impactful CTV channels. Using this strategy, we achieved more even spend, higher unique views, and improved cost efficiency.

Highlights

2.75MM
Total Views

470,867
Unique Reach

$0.31
Cost per Unique Reach

Challenge

In programmatic CTV advertising campaigns, platforms will often optimize spend distribution towards total views. This oversimplification causes premium placements like Hulu to consume a disproportionate amount of the budget.

That risk was actualized when early reporting showed 99% of campaign spend going to Hulu and only 1% driving views on other high-indexing channels. As a high-impact platform, Hulu was important, but we wanted to ensure we were using other channels to expand the audience reach and maintain cost efficiency. 

Solution

Our specialists manually adjusted and optimized bids across different channels to create an even spend distribution. The goal was to identify the “sweet spot” that would give each strategic channel an appropriate amount of the budget.  Once the optimal channel mix was identified, the spend evened out to be 60% in Hulu and 40% distributed among other channels.

By serving ads to more niche channels such as Travel Channel, HGTV, and Discovery, we were able to reach key audience segments and boost overall ad performance. This generated 2,750,490 total completed video views, a cost-per-view of $0.05, a unique reach of 470,867 and a post-per-unique-reach of $0.31. 

Premium CTV channels can consume a disproportionate amount of budget. Correcting these standard optimizations with a manual test-and-learn strategy is necessary to find the ideal budget spend and maximize cost efficiency.

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Social Media Marketing for Food and Beverage Brands

Posted on by Julia Read

Food and drink is inherently social, whether you are sitting around a dinner table, sharing a recipe with a friend, or meeting a date for cocktails. Social media marketing for food and beverage brands allows you to lean into this element even further. It has proven to be a highly successful tool for driving viral food trends (think avocado toast, macaroons, shaken espressos, etc.). 

But you don’t have to go viral to see the benefits of social media. Food and beverage brands can drive results by identifying and targeting their core audience on their preferred platforms with highly ‘craveable’ content, using tactics like influencers and shoppable ads to showcase their products. 

Understanding Your Core Food/Bev Audience

The first step to finding your audience is to understand who organically engages with your brand. What specific niches are they involved in and how can you share your content with them? Audience research will lead you to a deeper understanding of your likely brand advocates and loyalists. Once a clear audience is defined, creating ads and messaging becomes intuitive.  

Search for the answers to these three questions in your audience research process: 

  1. Who is your core demographic? 

Identify basic demographics such as age, gender, education, geographical location and socioeconomic status. These variables will give you concrete indicators on your key audience profiles – what life stage they are in, what they could be interested in, and more. Age, for example, gives you tips on what kind of content they will likely resonate with. Younger ages tend to enjoy emotional posts (funny or tear-jerking), such as the recent Gushers TikTok campaign. In comparison, older audiences tend to prefer informative, trustworthy content, such as this Clinique campaign. 

      2. What does your audience value? 

Are they more likely sharing food to present an image of prestige or luxury, or to share a special family recipe? These internal motivations should inform the ad creation process. Creating messaging that resonates with your audience’s core motivators and/or beliefs make them more inclined to click or convert.

      3. Where is your audience active online?

The medium in which your ads run is critical to the success of food and beverage digital marketing campaigns. This ensures each dollar you spend is going towards a platform where your audience actually spends time. Use platform data as well as third party data research platforms to identify your audiences’ media consumption habits. 

Identifying Social Media Influencers

Once your target audience is defined, you can make them come to life by creating personas. Or better yet, finding an influencer online that matches your brand’s beliefs, values and aesthetic. Brands that have a strong image and story can easily find influencers that complement their mission. 

Food and beverage social media marketing is primed for influencer partnerships. There are endless YouTube cooking channels, food review websites, and food bloggers across all social media platforms. The creators have a huge impact on consumer purchase decisions. In fact, 49% of consumers depend on influencer decisions. This virtual word of mouth is extremely influential in the consumer journey. 

Adding influencers into your strategy can also drive conversions, not just awareness. This is particularly helpful for food and beverage brands with an ecommerce presence. Use affiliate links and coupon codes to link POS data back to influencer campaigns in addition to awareness metrics, such as reach and engagement.

Creating Compelling Content

Food and beverage brands have a unique opportunity to engage audiences with user-generated marketing content on social media. People are eager to share recipes or new food explorations online, which is a win-win for brand and consumer. Brands are able to capitalize on authentic content that builds trust, while consumers are fulfilled by interaction and admiration. 

Beyond UGC, there are many ways brands can create compelling content on each unique platform. For example, how-to/recipe videos, Instagram Ready Images, and short form videos are all popular ad variations. Keep your audience learnings in mind and tailor your content to each unique social platform to resonate with consumers. 

Measuring Food and Bev Social Media Marketing Success

To measure the impact of advertising you can first look at granular, platform-level data. These metrics show campaign-level data, such as video completions, ad clicks, and site visits. Additionally, brands can utilize tactics like coupon/QR codes, flash sales, and hashtag challenges to track media’s success in driving immediate conversions and online buzz. 

However, the majority of food/bev sales still happen in-store, so it is important that brands keep themselves top of mind during that experience. Also, brands need a method of tracing media’s impact on in-store sales. Whether in a grocery store or a restaurant, brands can utilize CRM connections to track offline data or offer coupon codes/QR codes that translate both in-person or online. 

To better understand marketing’s impact, consider advanced measurement studies. These are surveys that can measure the incremental lift in metrics such as foot traffic and in-store sales due to marketing campaigns. 

Eating and drinking is, and has always been, social. Food and beverage brands should lean into this and explore the vast opportunities social media platforms offer to create and build community. Get creative with your media execution to stand out from competitors and drive sales. 

Recommended Reading

The CPG Digital Marketing Playbook

Connected TV Advertising | The Comprehensive Guide

Posted on by Coegi

Ready to get started with connected TV advertising?

To many brand advertisers, television is the ultimate brand-building and storytelling medium. The TV is the largest screen in the house that rightly commands the lion’s share of the advertising budget.

Programmatic TV buying is beginning to take hold and will become a dominant buying procedure in the not so distant future.

Why Connected TV?

A key differentiator of CTV is in its use of audience data, allowing for addressability that can’t be replicated by linear TV.  Advertisers can use can first and third-party data, lookalike modeling and retargeting to connect with consumers across tactics and at every step in their journey.

This is possible because of cross-device mapping. This allows a user’s audience profile from other devices to integrate with their connected TV.

Unlock Coegi’s comprehensive guide to automated buying strategies for the new era of connected TV advertising.

The CTV/OTT advertising market is rapidly growing and ever-evolving as more and more consumers move to streaming services. Many marketers have questions such as: 

  • What is programmatic TV buying? 
  • What are the best buying tactics for CTV advertising? 
  • What are the emerging trends for the future of CTV/OTT advertising? 
  • How to determine your ideal TV advertising strategy? 

In this guide, we answer these key questions and more to enable digital marketers and media buyers to tap into the lucrative Connected TV opportunity. 

Download the guide

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