Tag: Blogs

Retail Media Advertising Explained: Connected Commerce

Posted on by Coegi

What Is Retail Media Advertising?

Retailers are becoming ad publishers. They’re transforming their data and online platforms to sell valuable audience data along with advertising spots. Retail media advertising buys can be executed on retailer sites or programmatically on social and display channels. This data enables consumer brands to reach online shoppers. It can be activated by targeting ads based upon keyword searches, purchase history and other data collected via SKUs, purchase scans, and loyalty programs. 

The recent growth of retail media advertising has been astronomical. Amazon Ads alone is expected to reach $32 billion in revenue by 2023. Although many players are entering the market (Best Buy, Target, Kroger, Walmart etc.), Amazon still dominates with an estimated 76.2% of US ecommerce channel ad spending in 2021. Brands are leaning into this trend with 76% of marketers planning to frequently utilize point of sale data in 2022. With the CPG clients I’ve worked with at Coegi, we recognized the emerging trend of retail media and made sure we were incorporating this must-have tactic into our connected commerce strategies.

Reach Your Customers Wherever They Are With Retail Media

Retail media advertising empowers brands to be exactly where your customers are and deliver personalized experiences on and offline. 

  • How can you reach customers in-store? 
  • Where can you reach them when shopping online? 
  • How can you reach audiences when they’re scrolling through socials? 

Retail media lets advertisers be more data-driven and provides a reliable targeting solution. Targeting these shopper audiences creates the opportunity to deliver an efficient, personalized experience. The icing on the cake (or should I say cookie?) is that most retail data is cookieless. So, we are able to utilize it not only now, but into the future. 

With the landscape becoming increasingly cluttered, most CPG brands won’t have the budget to be present on every retail media platform, nor is that in their best interest. To make the most impact, brands need to research and test where their audiences are spending time. After making your selections, it’s also important to have unique strategies for each retailer. Your messaging and execution should look different on a Best Buy audience dataset versus a Wal-Mart audience. 

Connected Commerce Strategy

Connected commerce strategy is a concept developed by Skai. It means thinking about how you can connect all points of the customer commerce journey together. As retail media networks become more sophisticated, we are seeing more full-funnel implications. The Trade Desk reported that 39% of marketers surveyed use retail media advertising to drive brand equity scores and 44% use it to track sales growth. Take advantage of ecommerce site and programmatic placements to find prospecting audiences and track them through the funnel. 

For example, you could target an upper funnel retail media audience on social and display and then serve them a retargeted ad when they are actively shopping. Or, you could use Facebook conversion ads to drive to your Amazon product page and then develop a retargeting audience. For best results, I recommend strategically flighting media together and not having a standalone retail media strategy. Having supportive media across channels improves results for our clients at Coegi compared to solely running onsite retail media buys. 

Additionally, we recommend utilizing Amazon as a point of discovery along with Google Paid Search. When people start researching products, almost 75% start with Amazon. They are exploring, reading reviews, and connecting information to make a purchase decision. It’s important to look at the whole ecosystem of commerce and make sure all those puzzle pieces are connected. Understand what channels can help each other to incorporate a true connected commerce strategy. 

“Retail media presents retailers with an opportunity to better personalize their e-commerce sites, improve discoverability of products, and better monetize their first-party data. Likewise, it offers brands an opportunity to better reach their end customer and access more granular insights into marketing performance and effectiveness..”

– Forrester Now Tech: Retail Media Solutions Q2 2021, Colin Colburn

How To Measure Retail Media Advertising Success

The primary drawback to retail media, currently, is the segmentation from publisher to publisher. Wal-Mart data lives in one silo, Target data lives in another, and so on. Marketers have to be very mindful of where to invest for maximum impact. Using a trial and error method to test and learn is necessary. This allows you to see where your customers are responding because we do not see integration across channels with retail media. 

Look to outside partners who can aggregate data sets from multiple publishers and measure the big picture impact. Coegi works with partners so we can directly tag our in-market media and measure the direct impact of media on sales. These partners feed back real-time information so we can make optimizations and improve business outcomes. 

“For marketers wanting to take full advantage of retail media’s potential for reshaping attribution, and their overarching strategies for guiding consumers through the purchase funnel — or true “closed-loop marketing” — managing across retail data environments will be key”  – The Trade Desk

A more sophisticated approach is needed to ensure every dollar is spent wisely and effectively. This advanced insight from provides the competitive edge needed to maintain efficiency in this competitive market with rising costs and influx of demand. 

Key Takeaways

Retail media allows brands to: 

  • Utilize 1st party shopper data to reach customers wherever they are
  • Consider and understand the full shopper experience from discovery to purchase
  • Be data-driven and track closed-loop measurement, prioritizing cookieless solutions whenever available
  • Clearly understand the impact of ads on consumer behavior and sales 

At the end of the day, retail media is a must-have tactic for CPG brands, especially for challenger brands looking to break through. Explore connected commerce strategies for your brand to maximize the impact of your media spend and efficiently drive customers through the purchase funnel. 

Recommended Reading:

AI Optimization – The Paperclip Theory

Posted on by Jacob Amann

Paperclip Maximizing: Machine Learning And The Problem Of Instrumental Convergence

What do paperclips have to do with digital marketing and machine learning? Admittedly, pretty much nothing. The ‘paperclip maximizer’ thought experiment comes from Nick Bostrom at Oxford University. In essence, it looks at the idea that if you tell a machine to optimize to a specific goal it will do so at all costs.

If you told a machine to maximize the number of paperclips it produces the machine would eventually start destroying things like computers, refrigerators, or really anything made of metal to make more paper clips once other sources of metal run out. This concept has been coined as instrumental convergence. 

Paperclip vs Pay-Per-Click

If you transform the idea of paperclips into the idea of paying per click this becomes very relevant to digital marketing. Nowadays, almost every platform touts some version of AI or machine learning to revolutionize campaign performance, which is a boon to everyone.

By releasing control to machines, media buyers can focus on more strategic tasks such as identifying deeper insights for reports and understanding clients’ goals while campaigns continuously improve themselves. They do this by finding and optimizing for what works while avoiding the things that are not driving performance for the brand. 

See this in action on Our Work page. 

Defining Performance

What exactly is ‘performance?’ The easy answer is whatever your KPI may be. It could be clicks, it could be video views, it could be any trackable metric. However, this is already a simplified goal. If you are running a traffic campaign, the marketing goal should not just be to “get more clicks”.

The goal should be something designed to move the needle for the business – brand affinity growth, sales lift, etc.  For instance, driving qualified users from a target audience to an advertiser’s website and increasing brand favorability is a strong goal. This is something bigger than a single metric. A KPI can be a stepping stone and an important indicator of success, but it is not the final objective.

A truly successful campaign will not simply be the campaign that drove the most clicks at the cheapest price point. Success lies in the campaigns that drive true performance towards core business objectives.

Looking for a partner to harness AI technology and drive marketing performance? Reach out to Coegi for a discovery call today.

What Machines Lack

Context. Context is something that a robot has not yet mastered.

As a marketer, I know that increasing clicks, directionally, should push me closer to my goal. The machine knows this too, but this is all the machine knows. It will endlessly optimize to a single goal.

Maximizing the number of clicks given a fixed amount of budget. This can lead to unintended consequences – think back to the paperclip example.

A machine might say only run display banners and forget about high impact formats such as video and CTV. The machine might push 100% of impressions into in-app environments. It would say never buy another out of home ad again. The machine would never know to build brand awareness, because there is no optimization point it can use. 

Machines Need Guidance

We understand the role of the media buyer is not going away, but it is morphing. There is a new symbiotic relationship between buyer and machine which empowers them to maximize your brand as a whole. Successful media buyers do not need to spend 80 hours per week finding every winning media combination.

Most of these tasks can be done through harnessing technology and freeing up time to look at the media plan from a higher level.  These benefits of using AI go directly to our clients in the form of more time dedicated to listening to client needs, smarter digital media plans, and ultimately higher performing campaigns. 

How To Incorporate Smart AI In Your Media Buying

  • Release media optimization controls to AI machines and spend time on strategic campaign elements. 
  • Define performance success beyond the metrics by establishing meaningful campaign goals 
  • Use context to avoid instrumental convergence and potentially harmful optimizations from unattended machines.

Click the button to view our full YouTube playlist on AI for Marketers.

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Increase B2B Conversions Using Account Based Marketing

Posted on by Coegi

Account based marketing (ABM) is a focused strategy that blends sales and marketing efforts to reach high potential B2B customers. However, many brands struggle with achieving the level of personalization and automation needed for effective ABM at scale. Thankfully, there is a solution: programmatic ABM. Using automated buying tactics, brands can serve targeted ads to thousands of highly segmented B2B consumers within target organizations using technology and data for personalization. 

Why Account Based Marketing?

B2B marketing has historically emphasized quantity of leads generated first (Marketing Qualified Leads), with quality to follow (Sales Qualified Leads). Unfortunately, this method has led to 79% of leads never becoming customers, not to mention wasted media dollars. The account-based approach instead focuses on decision makers in target companies rather than mass outreach. By doing this prequalification, the sales funnel becomes shorter and every customer touchpoint is more intentional and personalized. This is why 77% of marketers believe ABM is their top driver of sales and marketing success. 

Zeroing In On the Target

Emarketer data shows that one key barrier to successful ABM is the inability to efficiently and effectively personalize marketing at scale.  We know this is a critical issue to solve as, “40% of company executives in e-commerce report that personalization directly affects their sales and company revenues.” Once you have your ideal customer profile nailed down, how can you make sure you are reaching these individuals?  Can you reach them at scale, with personalization and within your given budget? Here’s where programmatic activation comes in.

Programmatic Account Based Marketing: Powered By Technology

Programmatic advertising automates the ad buying process. Just because you are targeting individual business accounts, you don’t have to have massive teams calling or emailing accounts one by one to succeed. With proper campaign segmentation, you can tailor ads to feel highly specific and relevant to individuals within these companies.

AI-powered creative learning takes this one step further by determining which combination of imagery and copy will be most effective for different audience segments and adjusting in real time. Programmatic and AI also allow agility and flexibility across channels. You can take a social ad and run it on digital or test a top performing display video on CTV – all while being confident your media spend is serving ads to real, qualified decision makers. 

 

ABM Investment Across Digital Media Channels

Activation: First-Party First

When available, start by leveraging existing CRM data. Activate against this high value pool of leads who have already shared their information with you via content downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or other acquisition activities. Carefully segment these individuals so you can serve highly relevant and personalized ads based on their industry, level of seniority, interests, geography, etc.

  • Work with a programmatic agency to activate 1PD segments across various digital channels and media publishers.
  • Track user behavior and data trends
  • Use AI tools to create lookalike audiences to expand the targeting pool

Expand and Refine Your Ideal ABM Customer

To expand further, strategically incorporate third party data. Various data partners can be tapped to reach decision makers across digital channels. Keep in mind that with third party data in particular, it is important to have a smart targeting strategy. 

Start by refining your audience. Yes, you want to achieve scale and pack the lead funnel for your sales force, but the way to do that effectively and efficiently is by ensuring you understand what the ideal customer looks like. Your cost per lead may be higher when you narrow the targeting parameters, but you can expect a greater return by reaching audiences with the highest potential lifetime value and reducing wasted hours sifting through unqualified leads.

Layer your targeting with firmographic, job title, and seniority parameters that indicate a high potential account. Look at your best customers  – what do they have in common? Segment your target personas into specific buckets so you can tailor your creative and messaging accordingly – adding the personalization now expected by B2B buyers.

Some targeting tactics for B2B accounts to consider are: 

  • Intent targeting to identify individuals and organizations who are actively searching for a particular topic or solution
  • NAICS job title targeting to reach specific job titles or organizations 
  • IP/Geo-Targeting to target specific business locations or industry events
  • Social targeting by skill/title/industry/location across platforms

Using programmatic activation with a digital partner allows brands to reach these highly sought after audiences with efficiency of both budget and time. 

B2B Channel Strategy: Time To Diversify?

Companies are placing the highest investment for their ABM strategies into digital, with the majority of spend occurring on social media, paid search and e-newsletters. These are all key ways to reach buyers, however, other channels such as programmatic display, CTV and audio are gaining more share of wallet year over year. Consider some of these more untapped spaces to allow your brand voice to be heard without competing with the noise. 

When choosing your channel strategy, don’t put all your efforts into one high-performing channel, such as LinkedIn. Instead, activate ads across a variety of channels based on the media consumption habits of your target audience and other behavioral insights. Use data-informed programmatic placements to meet the audience wherever they are active online.

To determine the best channel mix, it’s critical to build a cycle of testing and learning into your measurement strategy. This enables ongoing learning and optimization to improve the lead nurturing process by identifying what is working and what isn’t. Ask questions and test various tactics to find answers so your brand avoids stagnancy and reduced efficiency in the sales cycle.

Key Takeaways

  • Account based marketing doesn’t have to be tedious. Taking a programmatic approach enables efficiency and scale for brands with large target account pools.
  • Refine targeting criteria and segment key audience groups to personalize creative accordingly. 
  • Capitalize on your first party data, then expand reach with high quality third party data to reach verified decision makers.
  • B2B brands can benefit from an omni-channel media approach and considering non-traditional B2B media placements

Start reaching hundreds to thousands of B2B leads today by working with Coegi to build a programmatic ABM strategy. Download our guide to B2B Marketing to learn more. 

B2B Marketing Guide
Download the Complete B2B Marketing Guide

Driving Leads Through Consumer Education for Finance Brands

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

Coegi partnered with a financial services brand to develop an education-based approach to lead generation using downloadable guides for home buying, auto financing and growing a business.

Highlights

240,227
Impressions

0.079%
Conversion Rate

Challenge

Making the decision to apply for an auto loan, mortgage, or even open a new checking account requires a significant lift on the consumer in terms of research and compiling information. Many institutions lean towards offering financial incentives for opening an account or emphasizing low interest rates. 

While offers such as receiving $200 for refinancing or opening an account can act as a compelling call-to-action, the consumer needs to be educated on the process ahead of receiving this messaging for it to be effective. Offering monetary incentives to an uneducated audience can lead to abandoned applications and a higher cost per lead. Educating your target audience with branded collateral positions your brand as an industry thought leader. This also builds trust with your audience and leads to greater conversion activity, and ultimately higher customer lifetime value. 

Solution

This financial services client regularly offers e-books on various financial topics. They observed the benefits of this educational approach to campaign messaging. This client promoted guides on home buying, auto financing, and growing a business. Coegi adjusted their target audience based on the topics to ensure relevancy. 

The campaign uncovered that paid ads related to e-book downloads outperformed campaigns focused on monetary promotions. In Q4 2021, their Fall Homebuyers ad was given a quality ranking by Facebook and served more frequently than its counterparts. Users were 125% more likely to download the guide and request more information compared to messaging offering a discount. This campaign positioned the client as an expert in their industry and built trust among their target audience. 

Messaging Homebuyer Guide Closing Cost Discount
Impressions 240,227 14,417
Conversions 190 5
Conversion Rate .079% .035%

Education-based advertising is often viewed as an upper funnel marketing tactic utilized to build awareness and inform potential users. However, this campaign showcased the down-funnel impact educational materials can have on conversions. Our client was able to use educational guidebooks to empower their customers when making financial decisions. It was effective in building trust among the core audience and leading them to request more information.  Brands in the financial services sector should prioritize educational materials to create trusting consumer relationships and efficiently nurture leads.

Understanding Implications of the Cookieless Future

Posted on by Lindsey King

Google’s announcement that Chrome will no longer support third-party cookies as of 2024 has many digital marketers concerned about their cookieless future. Marketers that have historically relied on cookies to reach their target audiences and measure success will be greatly affected by this change. Many are actively working on the next steps to avoid campaign performance declines. The actions taken by marketers in this pre-cookieless environment will help define the future of targeted advertising and performance metrics.

“Businesses and advertising professionals will need to better understand how customers make decisions, what actions are valuable for businesses and bring that all together when showing success.” – Maggie Gotszling

Why Are Cookies Important And How Do They Work?

Cookies are a backend line of code on a website. They help advertisers track a user’s behavior across the internet and include 3rd party tracking pixels from platforms such as Facebook. Tracking these activities makes it possible for advertisers to effectively deliver ads to their target audiences and directly measure and attribute conversions. With the deprecation of cookies, that tracking will no longer be viable, effectively blinding some targeting and measurement capabilities on which many marketers currently rely.  

What Does It Mean For Campaign Targeting Strategies?

The major impact will be on retargeting third-party cookie-based audiences. It is recommended that advertisers begin shifting overreliance on this tactic and begin testing alternative targeting options to fill the gaps. Gathering first, second, and zero-party data will be central to an effective digital market strategy in a post-cookie environment. Additionally, contextual targeting does not rely on cookies and provides brands with a strong opportunity to generate increased brand awareness when done strategically. As an additional benefit, the cost of contextual advertising is typically substantially lower than addressable impressions as data. However, costs depend on whether you are activating through a whitelist or a private marketplace deal.

Cookieless ID-Based Solutions For Targeting And Measurement

There are also multiple cookie alternatives in development that promise to bridge the addressability gap when cookies are deprecated. Here are a few of the options currently out there or in development.

Google’s Topics:

Google is developing a solution for targeting called Topics. Topics uses an individual’s browsing activity to tag them with broad interest categories. For instance, if a user visits Nike’s website, they may be tagged with an interest in fitness.  When ads are served to this user, their browser will randomly choose three of that user’s top five topics based on the previous three weeks’ browsing history. Those three topics are then shared with the advertiser to serve relevant ads to the user during their visit. This method allows the advertiser to target based on interest without using identifiers or other potentially invasive data points.

Standard Universal IDs: 

Originally used as a way to combat mismatched data when syncing cookie data across domains, companies like The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, and IAB have developed Universal IDs. This standardized identifier allows advertisers to buy into a community of shared data to track audience activity across the internet. The primary concern with Universal IDs, however, is that they still currently rely on third-party cookies, without which they are unable to set or recognize identifiers across domains. 

Encrypted Universal IDs:

Understanding the original design of Universal IDs would no longer be effective once cookies were deprecated, companies like The Trade Desk (Unified ID 2.0) started developing encrypted identifiers using email addresses instead of cookies to track user activity. The primary hurdle with email-based IDs is they require users to provide the same email across websites in order to build an accurate profile. If the user is unwilling to provide that data, or uses different emails for different sites, advertisers will be blind to their activity and be unable to target them accurately.

While all of these solutions have their pros and cons, they are worth monitoring as they continue to develop. They will be key in building targeting and measurement strategies in 2024 and beyond. 

Recommendations to Prepare for the Cookieless Future

  • Plan early & anticipate impacts to your measurement/attribution system. 
  • Benchmark your current performance. 
  • Apply business intelligence models to your analytics. 
  • Expand implementation timelines. 
  • Create new relationships with third-party, cookieless data providers. 

“Brands who have been targeting super-niche audiences will have to reestablish expectations for programmatic and be open to experiment with alternative targeting and measurement solutions.” – Colin Duft, Account Strategy Director 

Advertising on Reddit to Reach Niche Audiences

Posted on by Coegi

Reddit is not always the first platform that comes to mind when advertisers are thinking about paid social, but it should not be overlooked. Reddit is a fast growing platform that allows advertisers to reach a very niche audience at a reasonably low cost. The Reddit platform does have some downfalls though, such as a less advanced reporting platform as compared to competitors. Here, we discuss the benefits and challenges of advertising on Reddit and some helpful tips to create a successful campaign.

What Is Reddit And Who Uses The Platform?

Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. It is a discussion-focused platform and is often referred to as “the first page of the Internet.”

There are 52 million daily active users, which represents a 44% increase from October 2019. The platform sees 430 million monthly active users.

  • The vast majority of Reddit users are in the United States. 221.98 million users are in the United States, followed by Australia with 17.55 million users and India with 13.57 million users.
  • Two-thirds of Reddit users identify as male.
  • Reddit is most popular among the 25 to 29 year old age group. 64% of Reddit users are between the ages of 18-29.
  • The majority of Reddit users have a college degree or some college education.

Benefits Of Advertising On Reddit

  • Reddit ads can reach very niche audiences. There is a community for anything you can think of on Reddit. Ex: If you are selling liquor, you may consider targeting the r/cocktails or r/Bartenders communities.
  • Because Reddit has such a large number of users, CPMs are more efficient than some other social platforms.
  • Audience targeting is not only based on interests like other platforms, but also based on communities, also known as subreddits. These communities are often made up of very engaged users, so it is important to learn about the communities you are targeting and tailor your creatives to these communities.

Challenges Of Advertising On Reddit

The Reddit platform reporting capabilities are not as advanced as some of its competitors. It offers basic metrics, but does not go into as much detail as some of the other platforms, specifically with regards to engagement.

For example, users upvote and downvote on Reddit to express their approval or disapproval on a post, but this data is not available to view on the Reddit dashboard unless you are an admin. This would be important information for hands-on keyboard execution partners to have.

The Reddit dashboard only displays six months of data, so you are unable to see spend and performance for campaigns longer than 6 months ago. Because of this, we recommend Reddit campaigns run for less than 6 months.

Best Practices For Advertising On Reddit

  • Utilize community targeting and interest targeting in each ad set. When testing interest targeting vs. community targeting, we have found that community targeting tends to perform more efficiently when it comes to CTR than interest targeting, but combining interest targeting and community targeting in one ad set outperformed both.
  • Conduct research on the communities you would like to target. Look to see if these communities have many active members and what they discuss. Use this information to tailor your creatives to these users’ interests.
  • Use creative that feels authentic to your audience. Users of Reddit appreciate advertisers to meet them where they are.
  • Utilize both placement options (conversations and feed) at the ad set level in order to diversify where your ad will be seen.

Reddit is an excellent platform for reaching niche audiences at a relatively low cost. The platform is not as sophisticated as some of the others, but the ad performance on Reddit speaks for itself. If you are looking for a new platform for paid social, do some research on subreddits that your target audience may identify with and give Reddit ads a try.

Snapchat Swipe-Up Ads for Retargeting Teens

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

Coegi developed a social strategy for a higher education client using Snapchat swipe-up ads to target potential students. Despite tactical challenges of targeting restrictions, this social campaign resulted in benchmark-breaking performance.

Highlights

1.88%
Peak Swipe-Up Rate

0.91%
Avg. Swipe-Up Rate

6,345
Total Swipe-Ups

Challenge

For colleges and universities, advertising to potential students can be a tactical challenge. Most social media platforms allow targeting of individuals under the age of 18, but some severely limit advertisers’ ability to retarget to this key demographic. Potential students spend their time across several platforms. So determining where to most efficiently invest marketing dollars for this age range is not always clear.

With these challenges, higher education advertisers often pivot to target parents instead. While this can be effective, our client wanted to reach the students directly. 

Solution

After completing a strategic review of our options, we determined that Snapchat was the best option for two reasons. First, the platform allows advertisers to retarget the under 18 demographic, removing that tactical hurdle. Secondly, the target audience for our higher education clients are highly active on Snapchat. Beating out TikTok and Instagram, 35% of teens say Snapchat is their favorite social media app. With 87.3 million US monthly users, almost 30% of total internet users and 69% of teens and young adults, Snapchat quickly became the clear choice for this consideration campaign.

Snapchat swipe-up rates were the primary KPI. The benchmark for success was a swipe-up rate of 0.5%. With a budget of $3,300, the campaign generated 6,345 swipe ups, for an average rate of .91%. At its peak, the campaign generated a remarkable 1.88% swipe up rate. 

Part of this success was due to our use of lookalike audiences. This allowed us to scale and reach a broader audience and achieve a swipe-up rate of 1.05%, once again outperforming the 0.5% benchmark. 

Takeaways for Snapchat Swipe-Up Ad Success

An analysis of these high-performing campaigns leads us to believe that a significant portion of the success is attributable to the tactical strategy. The ads were being served to the right audience, at the right place, with the right technical execution. Both campaigns had different approaches to their creative design. This leads us to believe the visuals contributed less to performance than tactical execution. We hypothesize that with optimized creative strategy, similar campaigns would see even greater success.

To get started with Snapchat campaign optimizations, we recommend the following: 

  1. Focus on strong, front-loaded storytelling to hook the attention of the viewer. 
  2. Keep videos short. Snapchat recommends 0:03-0:05 seconds long. 
  3. Place your branding, offer and CTA in the first few seconds to ensure it is seen.
  4. Catch viewers’ attention with movement at the beginning of the video. 

 

Using Non-Media Data for Agile Tourism Marketing

Posted on by Coegi

The Brief

Coegi collaborated with sister agencies, RADaR Analytics and True Media, to create a proprietary tool that allowed our tourism client to shift marketing dollars in real-time based on COVID-19 infection rates and consumer reception to travel. This offered our client a unique data set to inform marketing decisions – maximizing their dollars and promoting safe travel.

Highlights

124MM
Impressions

3%
Lift in New Website Visitors

20%
Lift in Time Spent on Site

Challenge

COVID-19 had a substantial impact on the travel and tourism industry, including one of Coegi’s tourism marketing clients. Spring and summer, historically their largest promotional period, came to a rapid halt as COVID-19 rapidly spread in 2020.

The tourism client’s ongoing objective is to support the travel and tourism industry throughout the state. However, as a government-funded organization, they also had to avoid promoting unsafe travel that could contribute to the spread of COVID-19. As a result, they tasked our team with developing a targeting strategy that continued to grow the industry in a responsible and innovative way.

Solution

We collaborated to create a proprietary tool that responded in real-time to both the COVID-19 pandemic and consumer interest in travel to allow for effective decision making and dynamic campaign adjustments. The end result was the COVID-19 Scoring Model. This model crossed weekly CDC level data regarding COVID-19 (case levels, 7 day rolling averages, death rates) with real-time interest indicators (Google trends data, website activity, on-site conversions). This gave each county in the state a score from 1-4 that indicated the level of opportunity in each market. 

Using this tool, we had a unique data set to inform decisions regarding geotargeting, messaging, and frequency to ensure the strategy aligned with likelihood of travel as well as safety. Coegi and our traditional media sister agency, True Media, collaborated to automate information collection and efficiently apply it to our digital media buys.

We were able to continue our omnichannel approach and expand awareness against a general traveler audience, as well as passion audiences based on preferred activities in the state. We also placed location data on top of our persona targeting in lower-funnel campaigns to ensure we were not reaching users who were strictly isolating.

Despite these challenges, we were able to drive strong results for our clients in the second half of 2020, fluidly shifting audience, geographic, and messaging strategy as data became available. Our campaigns cumulatively delivered over 124 million impressions, 61% above initial projections. We were also able to achieve a 3% increase in new website visitors and a 20% increase in time spent on site. 

Nine Easy Ways to Stay Up to Date on Social Media Trends

Posted on by Coegi

Social media is an ever-growing and evolving landscape with new platforms launching and new features being released on a frequent basis. Being able to reach your target audience on the right platform with the right feature or placement is crucial. It may feel overwhelming to try to keep up with the continually changing social media advertising trends without committing significant time – these nine tips will help you stay up to speed without sacrificing too much time.

Spend Time on Social Media Every Day

Try to set aside 10 minutes every day to scroll through your brand’s social media feeds. This is a great way to see what people are talking about, what’s trending today, and what changes are happening.

Social media tips to use your time efficiently:

  • Customize your feeds so that you can easily see relevant and trending content/topics.
  • Save articles to read for later so you can revisit when you have more time.  
  • Ask your team to also spend 10 minutes a day on social media and then share interesting findings regularly.
  • Familiarize yourself with new social platforms in order to understand new consumer trends

Use SEO to Find Places Where Your Business Could Fill a Market Gap

Use tools like SEMrush, Keyword Hero, Screaming Frog, or SEOquake to see what your customers are searching for in your industry and vertical, analyzing their behaviors at various stages in the funnel, and understanding nuances between various types of consumers.  Using keyword and search research will not only help you stay on top of trends, but can also help guide your brand’s content creation and create best practices.

Utilize Customer Feedback

Solicit customer feedback via surveys and customer interactions on your business’s social media pages. Surveys and feedback will help you to better understand your audience, their needs, and their interests, allowing your team to provide even better customer support and service. Additionally, feedback from your customers and social media followers helps you identify what type of content resonates with/performs best. 

Ideas of questions to ask:

  • What’s one feature/product/service you’d like us to start offering?
  • What [BRAND/COMPANY] product can you not live without?
  • What kind of [BRAND/COMPANY] content would you like to learn about?
  • What’s your struggle with _________?

Of course, once you receive feedback, you need to apply it

  • Your customers have the best pulse on your products and services and may think of things you didn’t. Listen to their suggestions of how to improve current offerings, things they’d like to see, or new ideas.
  • Don’t ignore negative feedback. Negative feedback is an opportunity to understand pain points, make improvements, and improve customer service.
  • Incorporate feedback into your product roadmap.
  • Thank your customers who provide positive feedback. These people will become positive advocates for your brand.

Keep an Eye on What Your Competitors Are Doing

Set aside 10 minutes a week to look at what your competitors are posting and promoting. Ensure you derive inspiration regarding emerging trends in your industry, or even some of your personal favorite brands, but are not copying content. Share your unique POV and showcase the expertise of your brand.

Subscribe to Trade Journals, Publications, Newsletters and Magazines

Schedule time on your calendar weekly to read through your subscriptions to keep on top of the latest trends and changes.

Some good publications that frequently share the latest and greatest on social trends include:

Join LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are a great way to network with other business owners and social media enthusiasts. You’ll be able to ask questions of your peers to learn from their experiences and discover new social media sites/trends. Some great groups to join include “Social media Marketing Group by Connect365.io”, “Digital Marketing: Social Media, Search, Mobile, & more”, and “Digital Marketing.”

Attend Conferences Monthly or Quarterly (whether in-person or virtual!) 

Get the most up-to-date and relevant information about social media trends and advice from industry experts. Conferences are a great way to network and interface with other professionals in the social media industry who have different backgrounds.

Stay Current with Twitter and TikTok Trends

Twitter and TikTok function differently in terms of the type of content and algorithms than the other social media platforms. Here are some tips to help stay on top of what’s trending in both platforms:

Twitter

  • Create a stream on Twitter with hashtags such as #socialmediamarketing, #smchat, or #TwitterTip to help understand what to expect in the coming weeks.
  • Follow social media marketing influencers on Twitter and LinkedIn (sometimes discovered through hashtags!) and spend time reading their content.

TikTok

  • The “For You” page is a great place to start to see trendy and viral videos but this should not be the only place to look for trends.
  •  Hashtags help people find relevant content (think #mentalhealth, #prank, or #taylorswift). The most-used hashtags in video captions are the best place to see what is trending on TikTok. Many users will often use hashtags relevant to their niche in addition to one or two trending hashtags to help boost their content organically.
  • Keep an eye on challenges on the platform. Users are actively creating and engaging in challenges, which can create new trends. Many challenges include lip-syncing, dancing, or skits.
  • Observe what influencers on Tik Tok are posting. Influencers and celebrity posts on the platform will be popular in addition to clueing you in to what is trending.

Commit to Learning

The world of social media is always growing and changing. By spending time daily or weekly on social media platforms and news, you’ll be able to have a firm grasp on trends and changes. 

Staying on top of social media trends can be a daunting task. Using these 10 tips can help you use your time efficiently and stay in the know.

 

Further reading:

How to Moderate Trolls on Facebook Ads

Posted on by Emma Beverlin

Trolling is the act of leaving frequent, offensive/negative comments on social media posts. This can be done by a single person (troll) or a group of people (trolls). Having moderate trolls on social media can be uncomfortable. Here are a few strategies to help eliminate trolls on your Facebook page. 

Utilize Facebook Filters

  • Community Standards –  Facebook automatically conducts moderation on the Facebook platform as a whole. In order to use Facebook, users agree to the Community Standards. These standards ban things like nudity, hate speech, excessive violence, and fake profiles. 
  • Profanity Filter – Any page admin can implement the Profanity Filter setting on Facebook. When using this filter, admins have the option to set the filter to either “medium” or “strong.” The difference between the two settings is the allowable offensiveness of the profanity. Facebook determines this criteria.  
  • Keyword Blocking – Facebook allows admins to block up to 1,000 keywords from appearing on their pages. This setting is not case sensitive and will block variations of the specified keywords from appearing as well. 
  • User Banning –  In the case of an individual or small group of trolls, it could make sense to simply ban the offending users from the Facebook page. The banned user(s) will still be able to share content from the page, but they will not be able to comment, like, or post on the page. The banned users are also blocked from sending messages to the page’s inbox.

Additional Considerations

While each of the aforementioned Facebook settings can be incredibly useful, those filters are typically preventative. When actively dealing with trolling, consider the following recommendations: 

  • Responding to the Troll – In general, it is best practice to respond to comments on your posts. The same applies when it is a troll commenting. If possible, address the frustration or concern of the commenter and provide a solution. This could be through encouraging the user to reach out via personal message or phone call. Other users generally react positively to a brand being responsive and helpful by commenting back. Alternatively, ignoring the troll can give credence to the troll’s complaints and even encourage other trolls to comment. 
  • Deleting Comments– If responding to the user’s comment is unsuccessful or if the user’s comment leaves no room for a solution, it is possible to delete comments from your posts. This should not be the first course of action as it can lead to frustration from the commenting user. Deleting a comment can provoke the troll to leave another, more offensive, comment. It is also important to consider the fact all comments (negative or positive) play into an ad’s engagement rate. A higher engagement rate leads to better performance. 
  • Resetting Ads– If there is one ad causing the trolling, it is possible to reset the ad. This is not ideal as every time an ad is reset, all of the data and learnings associated with the ad reset as well. After resetting an ad more than once, it is worth considering sunsetting the ad in question and replacing it with a new ad. Resetting an ad is an extremely manual process and is not something you can do for all live ads frequently. 

Ultimately, having a troll target your page be a nuisance. However, there are multiple strategies and resources to help stop a troll. Inconvenient as it may be, appropriately responding and reacting to a troll can be a positive reflection of your business.

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