5 Ways to Maximize Programmatic Dollars Amidst Economic Uncertainty

As economic uncertainty looms, marketing dollars matter now more than ever. However, this challenge presents an opportunity for brands to re-evaluate their programmatic marketing strategy and discover innovative approaches to maximize media investment. While it’s critical to continue on with proven marketing strategies that consistently deliver against business goals, refinement and experimentation is the name of the game within the programmatic ecosystem to position the brand for success and drive growth well beyond the downturn. 

Here are five tips to ensure your investment in programmatic channels is efficiently driving brand goals and positive ROI:

#1 – Prioritize high-value audiences

Advertising to a broad and undefined audience often results in reaching users who are unlikely to convert. An important first step of media planning is gaining a deep understanding of the audience you are trying to reach and what motivates them. 

• Conduct Audience Analysis: Utilize data-driven research tools, analyze existing customer data, and review past campaign performance. This approach helps identify users demonstrating interest and intent, setting the stage for a highly targeted audience strategy. 
• Focus on Likely Converters: Prioritize your programmatic media spend toward audiences with a high propensity to convert. This strategy reduces ad waste and ensures your media budget is invested in segments most likely to generate significant impact.
• Balance Your Retargeting Efforts: While retargeting can yield strong results, it’s crucial to balance your investment in this area. Over-relying on retargeting can lead to spending unnecessarily on users who would likely have converted anyway, and will be a recipe for disaster with third-party cookie deprecation. Diversify your approach to capture new potential customers without neglecting those close to conversion.

#2 – Eliminate inventory inefficiencies 

One of the benefits of activating programmatically is accessing inventory across the entire open web, enabling efficient reach and scale. However, not all inventory is created equal and investing in poor quality placements may inhibit ROI goals. Platform algorithms use ad engagement metrics, such as clicks or video completions, to assess the quality of an inventory source. However, it lacks human logic by not considering the user’s intention with the engagement, such as accidentally clicking on an ad. Therefore, it’s critical to incorporate supply path optimization (SPO) into your media approach to have a granular understanding of where your ad dollars are being spent and how it contributes to the overall campaign’s success. SPO analysis highlights which inventory sources drive the most efficient conversions, informing optimizations of media spend toward the most valuable placements. This translates into a campaign that uses each ad dollar effectively to maximize ROI.

#3 – Leverage AI for operational efficiencies

In times of economic uncertainty, every resource counts. To maximize the impact of your media investments, AI can augment your team’s capabilities and streamline operations enabling you to do more with less. AI-powered solutions, like dynamic creative optimization (DCO), reduces the human hours needed to manually develop and assign each creative since DCO automatically generates and assigns the most effective creative variation in real-time. Delivering highly personalized and performance-driven creative can improve engagement and messaging resonance for each individual user, leading to overall stronger media results.

It’s critical to roll out AI to your teams with a focus on responsible usage and governance. The upfront investment of AI training and policy development will set your team up for success. 

#4 – Optimize user frequency 

Frequency metrics tend to be overlooked due to focusing on metrics that ladder up to business goals, like ROI. However, it’s important to actively monitor frequency to ensure media spend is not resulting in wasted impressions. Oversaturating users with brand messaging can lead to ad fatigue or a poor user experience potentially creating negative brand associations. High user frequency can also indicate media dollars are being spent on reaching users who have already performed the desired action.

Utilize frequency as an optimization lever to ensure your media dollars are efficiently invested in creating valuable brand engagement and driving results. Every brand’s customer journey is unique, so there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to optimal frequency. Consider the steps and length of the audience’s journey to set realistic goals. Then, continually monitor the frequency compared to performance and utilize conversion path analysis to hone in on the optimal level of brand interaction with your audience. 

#5 – Embrace omnichannel strategies

Users interact with brands across multiple touchpoints throughout their journey, including traditional and digital channels. To maximize the impact of your media investment, develop an omnichannel approach tailored to your audience that provides a holistic and streamlined brand experience. 

• Research Your Audience’s Behaviors: Assess which channels highly index with your audience’s behaviors and preferences to align media with how users consume content. 
• Optimize Channel Mix: Strategically select the channels that ladder up to the overall marketing and brand goals. For example, if your audience has an affinity for video and the goal is to increase brand awareness, leveraging a high reach channel, such as Connected TV (CTV), is an efficient way to capture attention. 
• Develop an Integrated Strategy: Once the optimal channel mix has been identified, create a strategy that maximizes the strengths of each channel to amplify a consistent brand message.

As marketing leaders navigate economic challenges, leaning into innovative and data-driven approaches will ensure every media dollar invested efficiently contributes to brand and marketing goals. Through continuous campaign optimizations aimed at reducing impression waste to prioritize investment on the audiences that matter most, brands will be well positioned for continued growth.