Very few brands have the budget of the P&Gs of the world. But proactively planning the core components of your brand marketing strategies and building continual learning into your day-to-day will help the team accomplish more with less. Coegi’s Elise Stieferman shares eight mid-market brand tips to gain market share from enterprise brands by using a flexible advertising strategy:
Tag: Marketing Strategy
The Impact of Content Marketing on Your Brand
Now more than ever, consumers desire a more meaningful connection with the brands they follow. Your audiences crave behind the scenes videos covering meaningful origin and philanthropic stories, the colorful, entertaining brand voice on social media, and highly personalized written content that feels truly authentic. There is no better way to do that than investing in a content marketing strategy. From everyday people to celebrities to brands both large and small, everyone is realizing the power that content has over driving action along the customer journey. If your brand is not investing in thoughtful content today, read on to learn more about why every brand should be incorporating this into their marketing strategies.
Why Content Marketing?
Whether you yourself are the brand or your business is the brand, content marketing is important to invest in – especially in the digital era where content is constantly consumed across multiple platforms for both personal and professional reasons.
Here are some of the key reasons to believe in content marketing:
It’s lucrative
Content marketing can boost conversions leading to higher sales or traffic to your website, all the while signaling to google that the domain has high authority and increasing your rank in search engines. More content + more exposure = higher ROI. Invest in high quality content and your audience will invest in you.
It’s a relationship builder
While content marketing may ultimately lead to higher sales, it shouldn’t be about selling, but rather helping. By taking this approach, content marketing can help you increase loyalty thus building trust and creating a sense of community surrounding your brand. Make sure you are tailoring your content to your audience’s biggest questions and what they value.
Your competitors are using it
97% of businesses use content marketing, and that includes 73% of marketers.. Don’t fall behind and let your competitors get the upper hand. Use multiple different types of content to be seen as a thought leader among similar brands and meet business goals at each stage of the customer journey.
Choosing Your Content
The process of choosing which content types to lean towards looks a little different for every brand. There are a vast number of content types like social media posts, infographics, blogs, podcasts, videos, and paid content marketing with reputable publishers. It’s important to start by assessing what makes the most sense for your brand.
Take a look at the infographic below to begin aligning your content marketing goals with your overarching brand goals.
Defining Your audience
Your audience should play a large role in determining your content. Start by narrowing down your audience’s potential topics of interest and looking at which platforms your audience is conducting the most research or spending the most time engaging with.
Developing your message strategy
It’s important to set content goals to measure how well your content is performing. This can help you decide which pieces of content or messaging themes are performing well to refine your strategic approach moving forward.
Aligning brand goals with content formats
As you pinpoint your target audience and set content goals to develop a sound messaging strategy, you need to identify your brand goals. Pinpoint the primary KPIs you’re looking to measure to determine which types of content best serve your purpose.
Overcoming Tricky Hurdles
While there are many reasons for brands to invest in content marketing, it is important to understand that there are a few hurdles to overcome to see the ROI brands desire.
Benefits aren’t immediate
If you’re thinking about tapping into content marketing with expectations of immediate success such as high engagement and conversions, you need to temper your expectations. Building a content strategy is a time consuming period marked by trial and error. It takes great time and resources to discover what makes sense for your brand and for your audience in particular. Don’t rush the process.
Maintaining originality
With 97% of businesses already using content marketing, it’s clear that the industry is highly competitive. This can make it difficult to differentiate your brand from your competitors. Your competitors are often creating similar types of content on the same platforms and channels, trying to capture the attention of the same types of consumers. Make sure you aren’t spending too much time trying to “keep up with the Joneses” and are instead focusing on creating content that creatively showcases how your brand can make the consumers’ lives better. Tap into your creative juices based on consumer insights to find ways to make your content standout.
A shortage of ideas
Constantly coming up with new content ideas can leave marketers feeling burned out. But while the instinct may be that new content is better and more exciting to your audience, it’s important to think smarter not harder. Find ways to revamp your existing content, and find ways to make it more valuable – both to your audience and Google.
Overall, content marketing is a great investment for your brand. It’s lucrative, builds that connection you’re looking for with your audience, and allows you the space and opportunity to grow your brand like never before. So begin exploring content marketing efforts today – whether you’re handling in-house or outsourcing through a trusted partner.To learn more about content marketing, be sure to check out:
Simple Strategies for Sustainable Marketing
The digital advertising community is facing a growing imperative to face our own carbon footprint. For decades, talks of the environmental impact of advertising have largely focused on tangible waste produced by old vinyl billboard wraps and extravagant PR mailers, much of which ends up in landfills. However, with recent estimations that a typical digital ad campaign emits around 5.4 tons of CO₂, the industry is stepping up to promote sustainability, develop best practices, and build greener technologies. With even more sustainability solutions expected on the horizon, it would be premature to overhaul your entire digital strategy. But if carbon-consciousness is one of your businesses objectives, here are five innovative approaches to think through now:
Build Your Sustainability Roadmap
Sustainability transformation requires a holistic understanding of where your brand stands today.
Before you make large changes, plan time to reflect on historical advertising practices, discuss which areas of sustainability you would like to prioritize as focal points, receive alignment across all relevant teams – ultimately determining what a transformation engine could look like at your company and what it would take to empower action and collaboration across teams and partners.
Building this roadmap prior to tackling any specific changes will increase likelihood of long-term success.
Choose a Trusted Measurement Partner
Take it from performance marketers: you have to plan your strategy with measurement in mind.
Currently the best solutions for understanding your campaigns’ carbon emissions are outside of your performance platforms, so you’ll need to evaluate the sustainable ad tech landscape and determine the ideal partner to challenge and support your transformation. Organizations like Scope3 and Good-Loop have been vocal drivers of ad industry change; Good-Loop has partnered with IAS to enable the seamless tracking and viewing of end-to-end carbon emissions alongside other crucial metrics such as brand safety, fraud, and viewability.
Ultimately, partnering with a reliable measurement provider, like some mentioned above, helps mitigate the risk of greenwashing and ensures your sustainability claims are backed by robust data.
Establish a Baseline and Set Benchmarks
Before establishing goals to minimize your carbon emissions, you must understand how your current approach measures out.
It’s become essential for you to answer this question: can we accurately gauge the impact of our efforts on reducing carbon emissions in a significant way? To effectively address this question, you must possess a holistic view of the data points emitting carbon emissions throughout the entire lifespan of your digital ad campaigns. Gathering this information sooner rather than later will allow for the identification of necessary benchmarks to properly evaluate future sustainable marketing efforts and ensure progress is being made.
Ensure Existing Tech is Minimizing Waste
Your commitment towards sustainability means having to consistently assess and enhance your technological framework and operational procedures to ensure movement towards the reduction of your carbon footprint across digital advertising.
The good news? Cutting back on impression waste should lead to more cost-efficient performance. Aim for highly viewable impressions, whether through programmatic viewability minimums, programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals with these guarantees, or via environments that are naturally more likely to be seen and watched to completion, like Connected TV.
A greener future represents the need for a collaborative effort between yourself and each stakeholder within your supply chain.
Experiment with Attention and Engagement Metrics
By optimizing to look beyond what viewability and reach can offer, you can prioritize “attention time” for a more definitive view on who actually saw an ad. This will help you maximize your understanding of consumer engagement while also increasing ad quality.
According to a study by WARC, successfully optimizing toward “attention time” can have additional environmental benefits without putting your overall marketing results in jeopardy. This is achieved by eliminating between 20% to 25% of the highest carbon-emitting domains and by placing online ads in destinations where messaging and context align.
In the end, this approach makes attention measurement a win-win for performance and sustainability. As the consumer demand for brands to address environmental concerns intensifies, our industry has the opportunity to enact meaningful strategies to make our efforts more sustainable.
Moreover, in reevaluating the status quo with a strong roadmap ahead, marketers can contribute to building a future that creates value for brands and their audiences while minimizing the impression waste contributing to our collective carbon footprint.
For hands-on guidance in crafting your brand’s marketing sustainability plan, reach out to a Coegi strategist and download the white paper to understand more about the key steps for building a sustainable marketing practice:
- Form a Holistically Supportive Transformation Engine
- Establish an Understanding of Your Baseline Emissions
- Choose the Right Measurement Partner
- Build Your Roadmap Toward Sustainable Transformation
- Ensure Your Existing Tech is Minimizing Waste
- Experiment with Attention and Engagement Metrics
4 Reasons Why Your Brand Needs Dynamic Creative Optimization
Gone are the days where brands can get by with subpar or generic advertising content and yield positive return. Consumers are savvy – they expect brands to tailor their messages and offers to their target audiences, and failure to do so can quickly have a negative impact on both brand perception and sales.
The challenge for many marketers is that doing content “right” can be a massive undertaking, both in terms of human and financial resources. Fortunately, there are tools available that combine creativity with machine learning and artificial intelligence to simplify the creative production process. This is most commonly known as dynamic creative optimization, or DCO. As stated in this source from Amazon, “…DCO technology rapidly builds multiple iterations of an ad using the same base creative, while tailoring parts of the ad based on audiences, context, and past performance.” While there are native tools in platforms like Amazon and Meta that make dynamic creatives widely accessible without a great deal of investment in new base creatives or technologies; however, there are other third-party tools that also facilitate this capability in non-walled garden environments to allow for the full-range of benefits.
Here are the top four reasons why your brand should consider tapping into the power of dynamic creative optimization (DCO):
#1: DCO offers a lot of efficiency
I think most marketers understand that having high quality content to support advertising is all but mandatory to achieve ideal marketing results. But the reality is that what is “ideal” is not always realistic, especially with smaller marketing teams and diminishing budgets. DCO helps make content best practices more feasible, by using technology to reduce man hours needed to produce content, increasing the speed at which new content iterations can be created, and avoiding having to start from scratch to test new creative ideas. Speaking of tests…
#2: Dynamic creative optimization provides a great platform for ongoing testing
Have three good creative ideas and are struggling to determine which one is the “best?” Or do you have a primary concept that you’re aligned on, but are unsure which version of the copy will drive the best response? Dynamic creative optimization allows you to try multiple versions and use the data to evaluate the best creative rather than gut intuition or time consuming focus groups. Furthermore, this technology enables your team to make small changes along the way based on the results, allowing for streamlined application of these data-driven learnings.
#3: DCO provides greater flexibility to adapt to shifting platform technology
It’s no surprise to any marketer who has worked in digital that online platforms, especially social platforms, love to make changes. Surprise! You can now have 50% more words on your ad description. Surprise! Our algorithm is now going to put preference toward our newly announced placements because we just know users will love it. Surprise! Our ad policies have changed and the creative you’ve run for the last three months now goes against our community rules. You name it, marketers have experienced it. Dynamic creatives can help marketers pivot with greater agility, adapting creative sizing, orientation and even message to better meet platform specifications. Pair this with the power that generative AI can bring to creative production and you can move more easily with the speed of your business needs and rapidly moving industry norms.
#4: Dynamic creative optimization allows for increased relevancy and personalization
This is arguably the most important use case for dynamic creatives. Consumers are inundated with ads on a near constant basis – so having your brand stand out in its advertising is no small task. However, you most certainly don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons – with content that is self-serving, irrelevant, or just downright bad. Dynamic creative optimization ties creatives more closely to data, both in terms of activation and placements as well as with post-impression analysis, helping marketers have a greater likelihood of reaching the right person with the right message in the right environment and informing adjustments in creative strategy based on performance metrics.
To continue optimizing your approach to creative content, check out:
The Drum – The Concept of a Marketing ‘Funnel’ is Flawed
The traditional marketing funnel no longer works for the modern customer journey because it makes assumptions about consumer behavior that are great in theory but not reflective of reality. In this article on The Drum, Coegi’s Elise Stieferman explains why it is time to drop one of advertising’s favorite concepts and how your brand can strategically drive performance in the modern marketplace.
The Drum – Prepare for the ‘Trough of AI Disillusionment’: H2 2023 Predictions
As we hit the second half of 2023, The Drum brings you a tasting menu of Drum Network leaders‘ predictions, from AI disillusionment to… fungal growth and changes for pet owners. Elise Stieferman, director of marketing and business strategy, Coegi predicts that “AI will be H2 2023’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: both hero and villain for marketers, depending on expertise and perspective.” Learn more from Elise and other industry leaders in this article on The Drum.
Do’s and Don’ts of Using Generative AI for Creative
Few innovations have so thoroughly dominated cultural obsession quite like Generative AI. In the past year, hundreds of companies have emerged offering their take on what this technology can do — in the marketing world this is either an easy button for more sales or the end of the world as we know it, depending on who you ask. And while in the programmatic buying world working alongside a machine-learning copilot is nothing new, many branding teams are currently having to build their playbooks largely from scratch when it comes to using AI for creative.
With this in mind, we’ve identified broad tips for experimenting with the latest tech without accidentally landing your brand in hot water.
Do: Use generative tools to more tangibly express loose ideas
For those of us who can’t even draw convincing stick figures, generative AI can assist in communicating the general ideas in our heads. They can be useful for quickly storyboarding concepts, giving examples of dynamic or sequential messaging during high-level conversations, and communicating the style type a brand would be looking for from its internal teams or creative partners. In this way, generative AI can be used similarly to temp scores in film editing: a temporary placeholder meant to communicate the general tone-and-feel of the scene to help guide composers’ original work.
Don’t: Launch a campaign with images pulled directly from AI products
Though we may be amazed with tools like DALL-E or other art generators, using generated art for profit is a tricky legal gray area. The current consensus is that AI-generated work is public domain, but this is being actively challenged. As companies like Getty Images and DeviantArt have asserted in lawsuits, these AI tools have been trained on others’ intellectual property — therefore calling into question who AI-artwork really “belongs” to. A collective of artists frustrated by use of their copyrighted works as training materials are trying to bait Disney into a lawsuit by prompting tools into generating versions of Mickey Mouse.
With these legal questions in mind, if you’re still eager to leverage AI for improved efficiency, consider the straightforward yet cost-effective offers from Google Performance Max, Meta Advantage+, and TikTok SPC. While their templated style isn’t likely to “wow” an art director, the performance perks are worth testing while we wait for these tools to roll out additional creative personalization offerings and for regulations to be standardized.
Do: Experiment with AI-driven efficiency in the creative process
While generative AI tools aren’t sophisticated enough to produce something original for your brand, they can ease the burden of the more repetitive or menial tasks like resizing or touch-ups. As Adobe beta users have already learned, Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature should also tremendously aid artists in the process of generating backgrounds, removing objects, or refreshing existing branded content into something that will work in different environments. Features like Generative Fill also carry less risk than free generative tools as they were trained on Adobe’s own Stock photos, resting the fears of their new branded content looking remarkably like a Pixar cartoon.
Don’t: Frame use of generative AI as your “big idea”
Many brands were likely inspired by the earned media coverage of Mint Mobile’s Chat-GPT Ad, which heavily leaned into the novelty of generative AI and echoed the general public’s excitement at its potential. While it may seem odd to imply something from less than six months ago is already passé, media coverage has since shifted away from novelty and toward critique and the moment has truly passed. Brands grabbing attention now are the ones complementing generative AI’s output with a strong human voice, like Burger King’s tongue-in-cheek response to McDonald’s “Answered by Chat-GPT” creative.
Do: Implement guidelines for generative AI usage
The adage of “with great power comes great responsibility” most certainly applies to Generative AI as it can do a great deal of harm if left to its own devices. Before rolling out AI tools in your organization, it’s critical to first establish what purpose AI will serve and how it will be utilized. The question is not what AI is able to do, but what AI should do to improve efficiencies in your organization. Once use cases are established, work internally to create a set of guidelines and policies on how to responsibly engage with AI tools so that they are used for the right reasons.
Don’t: Allow generative AI to operate on autopilot
It’s important to keep in mind that the core function of Generative AI is to produce an output in response to a user’s query, even if the tool doesn’t have the necessary or accurate information to do so. Generative AI tools are largely trained by the data that users feed it, which can be problematic as some data inputs are inaccurate, outdated, or biased. ChatGPT, even after a January 2023 platform update aimed to improve accuracy, still only has accurate data available up until September 2021. Bias results from training data as well. Tidio, a customer service software company, conducted a series of experiments to test the level of bias in AI. They asked one AI tool, StableDiffusion, to generate pictures of a doctor, and it wasn’t until the third try that the tool eventually produced an image of a female doctor. As a result, it’s critical to do your due diligence and both fact check and gut check the output of your AI query to ensure that it does not support the spreading of misinformation or hurtful biases. Treat Generative AI as your co-pilot that works in tandem with human logic and reasoning when producing assets.
Generative AI presents many opportunities to streamline efficiency and spark ideas, but there is still much to unfold as the technology continues to be developed and regulated. The do’s and don’ts above aim to be a general guide to follow, but each organization should proactively discuss how to best experiment with this growing technology — there is a lot of uncertainty, but you don’t want to be left behind as new industry norms develop. For now, using these tools to better define your big ideas, drive better communication across teams, and improve the efficiency of more monotonous tasks is a great place to start.
This space is moving quickly, so keep a pulse on the latest rollouts to understand what tools are available for your consideration.
To learn more about AI, listen to this episode of The Loop Marketing Podcast:
The Drum – Attribution Matters: Navigating an ‘Uncomfortably Complex Topic’
Attributing results to particular channels or campaigns is arguably digital marketing’s most dogged problem, with an array of approaches mutating as platforms change. Coegi’s SVP of Marketing and Innovation advises that “it’s not just GA4 that will upend your attribution models. The latest iOS17 update will reportedly strip link trackers from being passed through message, mail, and private browsing. It’s yet another action chipping away at the scale and effectiveness of last-click attribution and website analytics.” Learn more from Ryan and other experts here.
The Drum – Stop Making Ads, Start Creating Content
Our industry has come a long way from the days of every banner flashing ‘Click Here’ or ‘You’ve Won a Free iPod’, but true creativity is still being shackled by the perception that ads meant to drive performance have to look and feel a certain way. In reality, everything a brand releases to the internet plays a role in how that brand is perceived, so why is there still such a disconnect between brands’ organic and paid content? Coegi’s Savannah Westbrock argues the real future of creative is not ads but content – performance-driven, consumer-centric, and driven by cross-discipline teams.
Understanding Audio Advertising
Audio advertising – through podcasts, streaming platforms, and various radio formats – is in vogue. It’s essentially the mom jeans of digital media. But this time, it’s less about catchy jingles and more about authentic, engaging content.
Coegi is enthusiastically leaning into this space, adding new programmatic audio capabilities and publisher-direct relationships to our repository of digital solutions., We connected Coegi’s Director of Innovation, Savannah Westbrock, to answer some key questions about the latest trends and technologies within audio advertising.
What are the primary benefits of audio advertising?
The biggest advantage I see with audio advertising is the ability to meaningfully reach engaged audiences anywhere. Consumers spend an astonishing one-third of their media time with audio content. Over 424M individuals tune into podcasts worldwide – that’s over 20% of all internet users! And with 85% of audio listening being done on mobile devices, it’s a great way to reach users on the go and feed into a mobile-first marketing strategy.
Podcast advertising becomes increasingly relevant for brands aiming to reach Gen Z. A 2023 report found that Gen Z listens to podcasts nearly as much as they watch streaming TV. Yet, audio advertising is still a largely untapped white space in the market for many brands.
No matter your industry, marketing goals, or budget, explore how your brand can leverage the influencer status of podcasters to gain brand awareness and build authentic audience connections. Even if you are opting for programmatic audio, aligning your branded content with contextually relevant and interactive audio advertising content will increase authority and brand affinity.
How has the world of audio advertising changed over the last 5 years? Did the pandemic impact audiences’ listening behaviors?
Despite expectations that audio would decline with the rise of hybrid office work and fewer commutes, time spent with audio during the lockdown stage of the pandemic seems to have grown at-home streaming audio listenership to levels not seen previously.
In 2021, at-home audio streaming grew to surpass 90 minutes per day, with expectations to continue rising. Podcasts have been a major factor driving this growth, which could be related to the increase in individuals creating new podcasts from home.
Podcasts are a unique audio advertising opportunity. How can brands do podcast advertising “right?”
This advice is going to be true of all media, but especially with podcasts: know your audience. Heavy podcast listeners usually have tight bonds with their favorites, especially those who subscribe to support their favorite creators. Ensure your audience matches the show, and then ensure the inventory itself is a strong fit for your strategy.
What is the value of doing host-read audio advertising versus dynamic ad insertions (DAI)? Are there noticeable differences in use-case or performance expectations?
Host-read podcast ads have been the mainstay for many years due to historically limited programmatic audio ad formats as well as the benefits of a more organic ad experience. Programmatically inserting audio ads may turn listeners off of your brand if they feel irrelevant and disruptive.
Collaborating with creators may be a better choice if your product or service has a very specific audience. In this case, the process will work much like influencer marketing. (For a full step-by-step process, view our Influencer Marketing Guide.)
However, if your product has broad enough audience appeal that the content of the show itself is less of a strategic concern, dynamic ad insertion remains a doable tactic. With programmatic audio and DAI, you also gain greater flexibility. You can swap out outdated ads with new ones, versus host-read ads which live in the podcast archives forever. Take timeliness into consideration as you weigh the pros and cons of these options.
In what ways are host-read podcast ads similar to or different from influencer marketing?
The relationship between podcast marketing and influencer marketing is quickly becoming a squares-and-rectangles situation. Generally speaking, you can expect a strong recommendation from a podcaster to carry a perception of greater authenticity for your brand.
The core difference is the content itself. With influencers, influencing purchases is the content, whereas podcasts cover every topic under the sun. A relevant recommendation from a trusted host is more akin to a testimonial than an influencer’s #sponsored post.
How do you measure the impact of audio advertising?
Depending on your strategy, measurement will look very different. Programmatically-bought audio spots allow for most standard digital metrics like clicks (via companion banners) and inferred view-through conversions.
But increasingly, strategists are viewing podcasts as a similar opportunity to influencer marketing. With this approach, pairing awareness KPIs, such as reach and lift, with referral codes or unique landing pages can be a stronger play.
For more benefits and tips, check out our 3 Reasons to Use Podcast Advertising blog.
If you’re interested in running audio advertising campaigns with Coegi, contact us for a discovery call.
