Tag: Marketing Strategy

3 Ways to Improve Marketing Campaigns Using AI

Posted on by Jacob Amann

Are you using artificial intelligence for your marketing? 

If not, you’re likely spending unnecessary time and effort launching and optimizing advertising campaigns.

Which creative assets are best for this audience? How much should I bid for a particular ad placement? Who is my target audience? 

AI can help you answer all of these questions, minimizing guesswork and assumptions. 

How does AI boost marketing campaign performance?

To distill it down, AI uses algorithms to sort through data using a set of rules to complete automated tasks. To function optimally, the algorithm needs a goal to optimize towards. So it’s up to humans to tell the machine what that goal is and if the campaign is succeeding or not. These guardrails are necessary to ensure actions aren’t taken that create cost reductions, but are actually detrimental to marketing goals. 

With this strategic foundation in place, artificial intelligence can significantly improve campaign performance, save time, and increase efficiency.

Here are the top three ways you can use AI to improve marketing campaigns:

1) Campaign Optimization

The most prolific use for AI in marketing campaigns is for media buying automation and optimization. 

Automatic bidding allows media buyers to place appropriate bids for each ad placement in the open market. This ensures you are reaching your target spend levels and pacing evenly across campaign durations. 

Artificial intelligence tools can also optimize pre and post bid to improve campaign performance and learnings: 

  • Pre-Bid Optimization: Analyze site visitation patterns and social media following before a campaign launches for faster learnings and more accurate targeting.
  • Post-Bid Optimization: Pull insights from millions of data points to understand what worked and what didn’t. These learnings provide a roadmap for improving future campaigns and identify tweaks throughout the campaign. 

These automations allow you to focus on meaningful data and strategic thinking. Use them to repurpose your time to more strategic tasks while platforms manage the day to day operations. Look for anomalies and trends in the data, but let the AI do the heavy lifting. Then you can take a more inquisitive approach to determining the “why” behind the data points.

2) Audience Targeting 

The second way you can use AI to improve marketing campaigns is by expanding and refining audience targeting. Using AI, you are able to expand your first party and/or pixel data to find more people who look like your existing customers. Whether it be similar media consumption behaviors, demographics, or other behavioral attributes, this technology can find people most likely to convert. 

In a post-cookie world, AI-assisted targeting will be particularly important. Many brands will have less complete customer profiles due to less availability of consumer data. There will be an increasing need for AI to rapidly test various targeting tactics to find your best audiences in a way that’s both measurable and efficient. 

3) Creative Optimization

Finally, creative optimization is another impactful way to leverage artificial intelligence. Consumers are demanding more personalized, exciting moments from brands. To drive action, ads need to be hyper relevant to your niche audiences’ motivations, but also break through the clutter of other “personalized” ads. 

Dynamic creative optimization is an AI feature that delivers the optimal combinations of creative imagery and headlines to individuals in real-time. This takes the guesswork out of the creative process while improving ad personalization. By letting computers sit on top of the data, you can gain valuable insights into what creatives drive the most impact among core audiences. 

Here are a few tips to make the process of exploring AI go a little smoother:

Bonus AI Marketing Tips

  • Build a strategic foundation: AI saves time and resources, but there’s no point in capturing data if you don’t know your key business objectives.
  • Test and learn: The digital world changes fast. Use data in real-time to make decisions and see if things are working – and if they’re not, to make smart pivots.  
  • Remember the human element: We can’t forget feelings, relationships and human interaction. Make sure human insights from your team and your audience are still part of planning and optimization processes. 

If you’re a marketer, start getting more familiar with AI. Don’t expect to get it all right at first. Ask questions and talk with experts in this space. Start learning and move forward from there.

To work with Coegi and leverage our Data & Technology experts for your brand, contact us today. 

How to Nail Your International Marketing Launch

Posted on by Coegi

In today’s world, we have access to the global marketplace with much less friction than in decades past. Previously, it was very difficult to initiate an international marketing launch without local people on the ground. You had to know who to call to get your ads placed. 

The growth of digital was the biggest catalyst for globalization at the turn of the century. We gained the ability to conduct business, advertise and communicate from one location to another with ease. Access to the international marketplace means boundless opportunity, but can also be overwhelming for brands and marketers. 

Thankfully, digital advertising and content promotion provides the flexibility to test, adjust, and be nimble with your marketing campaigns as you learn the nuances of a new landscape.

Here’s four reasons why digital marketing is an ideal starting point for your international marketing launch:

It allows you to: 

  1. Launch campaigns quickly
  2. Test before you invest
  3. Flexibly adjust media placements 
  4. Track real-time results 

Launch Campaigns Quickly

Taking a digital-first approach lowers many logistical barriers to entry for a new market launch. Oftentimes, traditional advertising mediums involve lengthy contract processes, upfronts and lead times. 

For example, in Japan, one media conglomerate owns the majority of all traditional media in the country. If you want to activate traditional ads in Japan, you must partner with them in order to penetrate the marketplace. On the contrary, digital offers a much quicker way to market, with much less red tape and upfront cost. Once you have digital campaigns up and running and understand what is working, you can begin to supplement with traditional media placements. This allows you to have a well-rounded, data-driven strategy. 

Test Before You Invest

With digital advertising, you can understand your ability to scale with your target audience in a new market before making a major investment in buys that offer little flexibility. To do so, lean into a test and learn approach to allow your marketing initiatives to fail forward. 

However, don’t be too timid. If you only dip your toe in the water, you will not have enough information to know if your campaign is making an impact. Do the upfront research to create a strategic plan and then put mechanisms in place to test and track media success and pivot quickly as needed. 

How to Run a Test Campaign in a New Market

Look at the population of the country and the specific audience you are targeting. The goal is to reach a percentage of the audience at a high enough frequency so they know your brand. Typically this is around 6-12 exposures, depending on creative strength. Once you’ve reached this threshold, use a measurement framework or consumer study to understand the effectiveness of your campaign. Did it create strong brand recall? Was there a lift in brand affinity? 

Some brands will also need to consider non-paid media ways your brand has been exposed to audiences in a given country. Have you had any positive or negative press? Are there any Google trends to inform changes in interest level? 

Flexibly Adjust Media Placements

Another benefit of digital marketing for international brands is the ability to quickly pull media out of market. In today’s climate, certain contexts can quickly become problematic due to changes in current events or world news. Even if there aren’t major world events impacting your marketing ecosystem, be sure you’re staying nimble in your approach to culturally relevant messaging, swapping out creatives based on what is and is not resonating. 

Track Real-Time Results

Comparing marketing metrics across various countries will never be apples to apples. However, digital ads will give you quicker results and show clearer signals of success. Real-time platform data can give you a baseline understanding of what’s working, rather than waiting for post-campaign result readouts. This is especially critical during the testing phase.

To see a more holistic view of your advertising results, aim to have a unified measurement strategy in place to benchmark long-term success. Start by understanding what you can and can’t track in various countries. Then, consider filling in any gaps with these methods for gathering meaningful insights: 

  • Do your own commissioned survey research (ie. brand lift study)
  • Use global market research providers (ie. Harris Poll)
  • Create a cross-country scoring model to normalize data across different geographies

As you plan your international market launch, start with a digital approach to be more nimble, timely and informed.  But, achieving maximum scale across a full country profile will require you to eventually incorporate traditional channels into the marketing mix. 

Ready to Launch?

For help preparing your international marketing launch, contact Coegi today to get started. 

To read more, view Ryan’s second article on The Drum: The Key to Breaking Into International Markets

 

Cookieless Targeting and Identity Solutions

Posted on by Savannah Westbrock

An audience-first approach or 1:1 marketing is something brands often strive for. As a digital marketing partner, it’s at the core of our mission. 

However, the ‘cookieless world’, the meanest curveball Google has thrown at the industry yet, is approaching – even if its arrival has been further delayed. With cookieless targeting, being ‘audience-first’ takes on a new definition. 

Targeting will no longer be as simple as building an audience persona and pressing “go” on pre-made data sets. Instead, it’s about really diving into the ethos of who your core consumer is and using that intel to guide your audience strategy.

We sat down with Coegi’s Account Strategy Director, Savannah Westbrock, to get her perspective and tips on how she’s helping clients prepare for cookieless targeting. The following article is an edited transcript of that interview.

It’s Time to Improve Your Audience Research

How should audience research change in light of the cookieless future?

There are three changes in audience research most marketers need to make to ensure the data tells an accurate story: 

  1. Understand the methodology: We rely on research every day to inform our media plans and marketing decision making. However, we often don’t peel back the curtain to understand how that data was collected and consider potential biases. In the cookieless future, it will be even more important to think critically and be selective with our data sourcing. 
  2. Exit the platform: Don’t rely solely on demand side platform information and forecasting for your planning. This data will be most affected by cookie deprecation. Instead, combine platform insights with external research that never relied on cookies. 
  3. Diversify your data sources: It’s time to get creative. Platform data and syndicated research will still hold value. But, you’ll need to layer it with non-syndicated data and first party data. Combine these tools to see a full picture. Even consider non-media data, such as macro-environmental trends, which may impact your audience’s behaviors and the industry at large. 

What types of cookieless data should brands be gathering to understand their audiences?

Pixel-based retargeting is essentially out of the picture. The best pivot brands can make is mining their own first-party data. But you don’t have to rely solely on your own data. Combine ‘hard’ data such as your website and platform analytics with ‘soft’ data such as social listening. Taking a more journalistic approach with these softer data sources can actually provide more meaningful insights and make your brand more authentic and trustworthy. 

Tip: Balance quantitative and qualitative data. Trust your instincts and use research to back up or refute as needed. 

How can marketers collect and expand their first-party data? 

First, you need to have systems in place to generate leads. Then, it’s all about what you do with that customer data to maximize results and become more strategic. 

Lead generation campaigns: Keep first-party data and zero-party data collection top of mind when planning campaigns. For example, promoting a useful downloadable with a lead form. This will help drive consideration and give you an opportunity to learn about your audience in exchange for shared value. 

Data enrichment: Once you collect and understand your first-party data, you can upload it to enrichment tools, such as consumer survey platforms. This helps you learn more about your audience’s interests, media consumption and day-to-day behaviors. 

Cookieless Audience Targeting Alternatives

Is contextual targeting an effective cookieless targeting strategy? 

If your audience research is thorough, you will know the channels your audience frequents, their preferred devices, favorite shows, and where they are most engaged. Pair this insight with contextual placements that make sense for your ads. 

Contextual strategies fell by the wayside in the late 2010s. Many brands focused on only reaching the “perfect” deterministic, addressable audience with cookie-based data. So some marketers may fear for impression waste by comparison. However, there are now many sophisticated contextual solutions that allow for hyper-customization and reach niche interest groups. 

For instance, Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms are beginning to better understand the actual context of ad placements using artificial intelligence. This allows marketers to implement positive sentiment targeting and smarter keyword targeting. Smart contextual offerings can optimize to real-time content trends, going beyond standard display. 

Are new user identity solutions direct replacements for cookies? 

Cookieless identity solutions such as Unified ID 2.0 and Liveramp’s IdentityLink will help reach high-value segments without wasting media dollars on the wrong audiences. But, there will still be gaps. Pre-made audiences and 1:1 third party targeting will not be the same. As cookie-based information is no longer shared across the web, we’ll need to tap a few different buying strategies. I also expect walled gardens will center in on themselves more, protecting their high value audience data. 

To overcome these challenges, marketers use all the data at your disposal to understand customers better, from channel-based information, survey data, CRM analysis, Google Analytics, and more. 

Cookieless Targeting Tips

What’s your best advice to brands preparing for a cookieless future?

There’s a lot to consider, but the two simple things brands should prioritize are: 

  1. Invest in first-party data collection
  2. Start testing now 

The most important thing you can do now is establish a baseline. Then you can conduct a true study comparing your performance with and without cookies. Cover these two bases and you will be ahead of many brands. From there, you can continue to refine and adjust your research, targeting and measurement strategies as the industry evolves. 

Our team at Coegi is actively testing cookieless solutions and brainstorming innovative cookieless media plans for our clients. For more strategic insights and tips on how to prepare your digital advertising for this change, listen to our full podcast episode on cookieless targeting here. 

Boost Customer Lifetime Value with Awareness Marketing

Posted on by Maggie Gotszling

Brands, especially those in the ecommerce space, often feel tempted to skip over building awareness and consideration with their marketing efforts and jump straight to conversion-based advertising campaigns. However, brand awareness is a key marketing component to fill the sales funnel that should not be ignored. Keep reading to learn how to optimize awareness campaigns to establish customer lifetime value.  

Start At The Beginning

If your core business goal is to drive sales, you still have to do the work to introduce your brand to new customers and convince them why your offering is worth their money. 

Even on commerce channels like Amazon, Instacart or Shopify storefronts, you must establish baseline awareness before a consumer will be receptive to your product. 

Forrester’s 2021 CPG Digital Go-To Market Review found, “35% of surveyed global CPG marketing decision-makers cite brand awareness as an important metric…brand metrics rank high because CPG/FMCG products are typically low consideration, making it critical for the brand to be top of mind in a category.” So before you begin investing all of your marketing dollars into ROAS focused tactics, put yourself in the consumers’ shoes and consider the information you would want from a brand to take the next steps.

Understand The Customer Journey

To understand how much of your efforts should be allocated across awareness vs consideration vs conversion tactics, look to the purchase journey for guidance. 

  • What is the average timespan from initial awareness to purchase? 
  • How many touchpoints are needed to reach the point of consideration? 
  • How much time does the average consumer spend in the consideration phase? 

If your consumers move from consideration to conversion very quickly while in store or on digital retail platforms, the greatest chance to reach them is within the awareness phase. The media objective in this case is to ensure a consumer recognizes your brand when searching for products in your category.

If they spend longer in the consideration phase, you can nurture leads longer with educational content and community building.  But it all comes down to understanding how your product or service fits in with their behaviors and routines. 

Establish Awareness With An Omni-Channel Media Strategy

Ensure your awareness campaign has broad reach by strategically combining various digital and physical channels. If done right, this will also create a seamless user experience across channels, even with the fragmented media landscape.

How do you know which channel mix will reach your ideal audience? 

  • Leverage syndicated research to understand their media consumption habits
  • Use channels whose userbases broadly match your target demographic
  • Select channels where the typical user behavior aligns with the desired action

Use Branding Campaigns To Create Lifetime Value

Once you’ve established awareness, the value of brand campaigns does not end. Awareness marketing aids in fostering an ongoing relationship that we fondly refer to as the loyalty loop. It initially introduces your product to new users, but then continues to establish lifetime customer value after a purchase is made.  

To establish this loyalty loop, develop a clear path for your customer. Put yourself in their shoes and understand the timing they need before making a repeat or complementary purchase. 

  • Is your product a one-time purchase that typically lasts a lifetime? 
  • Is your product a weekly or monthly staple that is consumed and repurchased? 
  • What products make sense to recommend based on previous purchases? 

Don’t waste money promoting the same product a user has already purchased and is unlikely to purchase again for several years. Instead, remarket them with ads and experiences that reinforce their positive experience with the brand and keep them interested in future purchases. For example: 

  • Personalized ads and email marketing with recommended products 
  • Branding campaigns to reinforce brand loyalty and affinity
  • Special discount codes and alerts about new product drops or sales

Set Clear Expectations With Measurement

We know advertising works, but success doesn’t typically happen over night. Instead, there is a gradual impact on business results that can be tied to marketing initiatives.. It can be especially difficult to see clear and instantaneous results from awareness campaigns. However, there are strategic ways to understand your progress and ensure you’re moving the needle.  

Tracking Short Term Brand Awareness

The primary goal for short-term awareness campaigns is to reach the highest volume of unique users at an effective frequency. Our general understanding is that 2-12 exposures are needed to drive action, which varies depending on effectiveness of creative and the relevancy of the brand. Balance this exposure while being mindful of over saturation. 

Metrics to track that indicate brand awareness results: 

  • Reach: The number of unique users reached, reported by channel and by campaign. 
  • Frequency: The amount of times a user is exposed to an ad, commonly reported as impressions/reach. 
  • CPM: The cost of serving ads.

Measuring Long Term Brand Awareness

When media metrics do not answer your business questions, the next step is to incorporate third party studies that show media impact on business results and consumers’ perceptions. These studies show the true incremental impact of awareness campaigns on business goals – whether in driving brand affinity, site traffic or sales. 

These are not attribution tools, but rather studies that show correlation. The two most impactful studies for e-commerce based brands are: 

  • Brand Lift: Difference between control vs exposed survey responses
  • Sales Lift: Post campaign analysis comparing media activity to sales data sets

Use both short and long term measurement tactics to craft a story using a mix of KPIs that show media efficiency and channel effectiveness in combination with monitoring sales overtime.

Key Takeaways

  • Awareness must come first 
  • Let the consumer inform your strategy 
  • Build your brand to increase customer loyalty
  • Establish a clear measurement plan to create accountability with branding campaigns

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.

Marketing to Gen Z: Authenticity Over Perfection

Posted on by Samantha Schmidt

Born into the digital era, Gen Z is the first generation to be fully immersed in a world of smartphones, social media, and constant internet access. Because of this, they have higher expectations from brands when it comes to digital advertising. This cohort makes up 27% of the U.S. population, and will soon become the largest group of consumers with significant buying power (Insider Intelligence). 

Brands marketing to Gen Z should prioritize meeting their media preferences, directly communicating to them without abandoning key channels for existing customers. In this article, we will discuss the values of Gen Z and how to best align your marketing strategy with those values. 

Authenticity Matters, Not Perfection

In a crowded media landscape, brands often compete for consumer attention with flashy creatives and mass media placements. With a “best foot forward” mentality, brands can get caught up in trying to show consumers the perfected image of their offerings. However, Gen Z consumers often ignore this type of content because it’s not relatable or different. They care heavily about a genuine showcasing of a brand’s values and offerings. They want to understand why the product matters, not just why they should buy it.

How can you achieve this?

Be Realistic

When using paid, over-glamoured models, Gen Z does not feel a connection with the brand. Gen Z wants to see a representation of themselves in the people showcased in advertisements, choosing brands that feel personable. Make sure your creative feels authentic to get the best attraction from the Gen Z audience. This is especially important considering this generation is the most ethnically diverse in the U.S., and they are passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Make A Stand

Gen Z consumers hold companies to a high standard for corporate social responsibility. These socially responsible individuals go out of their way to support companies that stand for social issues they value. Use marketing to showcase how your brand makes a positive impact on society. Position your brand so that when Gen Z consumers purchase they not only get a useful product but also support the causes or social views they find most meaningful. 

Show Transparency

Gen Z wants to feel involved with its chosen brands and understand how they operate. Be honest with consumers about your practices, and tell a story about why you do what you do. This will inform your audience about your ethical standards and build trust. A lack of transparency can damage a brand’s reputation. In fact, 22% of Gen Zs reported that a lack of transparency reduces their opinion of brands and products, which is more than any other generation. 

Being genuine with Gen Z audiences should be a primary concern when it comes to delivering a marketing message. This authentic approach can be executed by being realistic with your audience, making a stand for a social cause, and showing transparency in brand practices.

How to Reach Gen Z on Social Media

If you want to effectively reach Gen Z consumers, social media is the place to be. Social platforms are a key part of their daily routines. 

On average, Gen Z spends about 8 hours a day online. And 90% of Gen Z are spending a minimum of one hour per day on social media – primarily on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. These platforms are all dominated by user-generated short-form videos, which speaks to the need for brands to focus on creativity and authenticity in their content.

Sourced from E-Marketer

And they’re not just looking for entertainment on social media anymore. 50% of Gen Z make social commerce purchases (along with 51% of Millennials). Social media is a place to authentically reach Gen Z where they are spending time, but it’s also a tool to drive sales conversions.

Here are three tactics to win over Gen-Z consumers on social media:

#1 Short-Form Video

Gen Z spends less time watching TV than any other generation. They’re consuming digital video content on social media platforms instead. In particular, short-form videos have taken off in popularity over the past few years, especially among the Gen Z audiences. 

These 6-30 second videos are great for quick recognition. They require less attention span and quickly convey a message. One can argue that TikTok is the reason for the explosion of short-form video, as the platform continues to rise to the top of popularity rankings. As such, social media apps are redesigning their algorithms to prioritize this content. 

Short-form videos also tend to gain more Gen Z audience engagement, with the average engagement rate at 50%. This level is considerably higher than other generations. With storytelling potential, attention-grabbing power, and virality, short-form video is a must-have tool to drive full-funnel results in nearly all Gen Z marketing campaigns. 

#2 Influencer Marketing

What do Gen Zs want from brands? Honest, relatable, and compelling content. 

Where do Gen Zs spend their time? On social media. 

Influencers offer the best of both worlds – authentic content across various social media platforms. This makes influencer marketing a no-brainer tactic to reach Gen-Z consumers. 

Successful creators have spent time building trust and confidence with consumers, which brings meaning to their name as they hold a high “influence.” According to a GWI Report, “Gen Z puts more stock in the opinions and recommendations of influencers than past generations, and that’s heavily shaping how they approach media in general.” Micro-influencers, with smaller but more dedicated followers, are a great way to gain trust and narrow in on niche Gen-Z segments that best match your brand.

Read more of our best influencer marketing tips here.

#3 High Impact, Interactive Content

Interactive content is growing in popularity among younger audiences, which can boost awareness and engagement with your brand. Users want to engage with content, whether that’s a swipe, tap, click, vote, or like. 

Instagram is known to have highly interactive content such as polls, carousels, quizzes, questions, prompts, and more. TikTok also recently introduced interactive add-ons that allow paid media content to further engage audiences with ad posts. Immersive content such as 3D, AR/VR, and the development of the metaverse introduce innovative ways to reach audiences in a “phygital” way. Interactive content allows your brand to be present with Gen Z as they shift deeper into digital connections and worlds. 

How Coegi Can Help

As a digital marketing agency, Coegi is well equipped to assist you in marketing needs to reach your Gen Z consumers. We ensure each campaign is carefully researched based on data-driven tools to strategically activate across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and many other platforms. Reach out if you are looking for a partner to effectively execute and optimize your campaigns to grow your brand.

How to Build an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Madeline Martodam

What do the metaverse, Web 3.0 and the cookieless future have in common? They demonstrate the need for agility to build an effective digital marketing strategy. Three years ago, these topics wouldn’t have even crossed our minds. Now they’re in our inboxes on a daily basis.

Now we’re learning the implications they’ll have and adapting our routines to ensure our marketing strategies seamlessly integrate into the changing landscape. By clearly defining the business goals aligned to our strategy, digital marketers can make informed decisions faster than ever before, allowing for real-time adjustments. 

Let’s dive deeper into how you can build an effective marketing strategy with these four key steps. 

Define

Start by outlining your high level business objective. Is it to increase sales by 2X this year? Expand into four new markets? Or increase brand awareness among a new audience group? 

Whatever it may be, clearly establish that overarching goal with all key stakeholders. Then, define marketing’s specific role in supporting that goal. 

  • What are the marketing objectives that level up to the desired business result?
    • All departments in the organization should have a shared vision. Define marketing’s specific role in reaching success. 
  • How will you optimize your marketing efforts towards this goal?
    • If it’s brand awareness, set that expectation from the beginning and maintain focus. This will prevent you from getting sidetracked and optimizing towards tactics that do not ladder up to your primary goal.  
  • What are the key signals you will track to define short-term and long-term success?
    • Decide which KPIs will most accurately indicate your progress. We often choose a cost-based metric paired with an effectiveness metric for each key channel, to make sure we are prioritizing quality for our clients. 

Align

Before you proceed with any advertising campaign, it’s important to check for alignment within your marketing and across the organization. 

  • Does your creative messaging and channel selection align with your target audience?
    • Conduct audience research to understand the places where your audience is most active and receptive to advertising. One of the tools we use at Coegi is Resonate, an AI-powered consumer insights platform which allows us to identify and target audiences on the channels, platforms and sites they over index for. 
  • Do your marketing/media KPIs align with your overall business goals?
    • Ensure all campaign tactics and KPIs support your previously defined marketing objectives and business goals. Be strategic when selecting your target metrics and make sure you are measuring what matters for your brand. 
  • Is your advertising consistent with your brand values and aesthetics?
    • Regularly audit your content for consistency and alignment. Live out your brand values and maintain a cohesive identity across the board. This will establish a positive user experience and strong brand message. 

Activate

Now you understand where to reach your audience. You have impactful creative assets, and are armed with a strong understanding of how you will measure success. It’s time to put your plan into motion. 

  • Define what brand safety means to your organization.
    • Outline the content and topics you are and are not comfortable with your brand being near. Use these to set targeting parameters that ensure your ads are only shown in brand-safe environments.
  • Set guardrails for quality assurance.
    • Maintain updated blacklists and use bid exclusions for brand safety and suspicious activity filtering.
  • Use AI for efficient media buying.
    • Algorithms and machine learning can help personalize ads with dynamic creative optimizations, expand your targeting pool with lookalike audiences, and automate the media buying process. 

Assess & Optimize

Once a campaign is live, your job is not done. You must continuously assess the media mix and channel tactics to see where you can improve. 

  • Understand that what worked last year may not necessarily work this year. 
    • The digital landscape is constantly changing, whether it be due to data privacy laws, emerging platforms, or changing consumer preferences. Be agile and avoid complacency. 
  • Stay curious and open minded.
    • Don’t be afraid to be an early adopter of a new trend – if it makes sense for your brand. 
  • Continuously improve through experimentation.
    • Inform future strategy by testing and learning which messaging and creative imagery resonates with your audience. Place trust in your media experts, and the process, allowing time to try new things and test hypotheses. 

My final words of advice for fellow digital marketers are – be patient. Data trends don’t happen overnight, and neither do results. But by being intentional and strategic at every stage of your marketing process, your brand will be ready to weather whatever trends the industry has coming its way. 

For more insights on how to build an effective digital marketing strategy, contact Coegi today.

5 Ways to Refresh Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Jennifer Burleson

Looking to breathe new life into your marketing strategy? It’s easy to feel stuck using the same messaging or the same tactics over and over. But, there are subtle ways to reinvigorate your advertising without reinventing the wheel. 

Here are five easy ways you can refresh your digital marketing strategy and approach to better reach your audience and optimize campaign performance. 

Step 1: Adjust Your Audience Targeting

Digital media strategists need to place audiences at the cornerstone of their planning. As campaigns perform, evaluate if you are reaching your target audience in the most efficient ways. 

Continually review your target audiences through a combination of research, performance analysis, and product/service feedback to understand who your best customers are. Once this is established, your digital media agency or in-house operations team can build on these learnings by activating relevant first, second, and third party data sets available across platforms to reach their audiences on channels where they are known to engage and are available to target.

Note: Be vigilant about staying ahead of shifting policies and privacy laws that impact platform targeting capabilities. This will become more prevalent as cookies diminish. 

Step 2: Keep Your Creative Fresh

Everyday, consumers are bombarded with ads across every digital platform. To help break through the clutter, update creatives every three to six months and carefully monitor frequency. If your audience is constantly seeing the same creative, ad fatigue is likely to set in and even negatively impact your reach. By rotating in new creatives, you can keep engaging content in front of your target audience.

If you’re not using video ads, incorporating this medium is a perfect way to invigorate your advertising. 

Why? Because videos are: 

  • Attention-grabbing – the motion and sound of videos captures attention driving higher engagement 
  • Engaging – videos convey more information and drive higher engagement than static images
  • Versatile – video creative can be adapted for use across various channels such as YouTube, Connected TV, and social media 
  • Shareable – users are more likely to share entertaining or interesting videos on social media giving your brand greater exposure 

Step 3: Authenticate And Test Your Messaging

Make sure the message you are sharing is relatable to your audience. This doesn’t mean you have to constantly be coming up with new ad copy and creatives. Instead, use a test and learn strategy. You can use AI optimizations  to find the best combinations of existing creative and messaging for your core audience groups. 

A/B testing various creatives and headlines also allows you to utilize your top best performing ads to guide future collateral, bringing informed ideas to each marketing touchpoint. 

Step 4: Audit And Optimize Your Website User Experience

If you are sharing a different message in your advertising than on your website, you will quickly lose user interest or, at minimum, confuse your customers. Analyze your messaging as well as your customer’s journey. Make sure ads have cohesive messaging that aligns with the corresponding website landing pages. This not only allows for a positive user experience, it also helps with relevancy score to help martech platforms prioritize your ads. 

Additionally, with the ever-increasing number of users on mobile, prioritize design, targeting and optimizations for a mobile-first environment. Creating this seamless user experience will help guide your audience down the funnel towards conversion. You can use Google Analytics or other web analytics platforms to understand website behaviors and make adjustments based on where consumers are abandoning their journey with your brand

Step 5: Be Bold And Adopt Relevant, Emerging Channels Early

Set aside a portion of your budget for testing new channels and platforms. Run test campaigns to see your audience activity and engagement on new platforms. Once you find the top performing channels and tactics, you can meet your audience where they are most active. You can also keep an edge on your competitors by being a first-mover with new trends. 

Some emerging advertising channels to consider testing include:

  • Influencer marketing
  • Emerging social platforms: TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, Clubhouse, etc..
  • Podcast advertising
  • Digital-out-of-home
  • Connected TV/OTT advertising

This can also be as simple as testing a new ad format in a platform already included in your media mix. 

In the fast paced world of digital advertising, marketers cannot afford to be complacent. Always keep an eye on your marketing strategy and how it aligns with your company goals. Not all strategies need a full overhaul to stay competitive. Making a few small adjustments can make a big difference in staying relevant in the advertising space. Use these five steps to analyze, update and refresh your digital marketing strategy on an ongoing basis. 

To stay up to date with the latest marketing strategies and trends, subscribe to our bimonthly newsletter, The Loop.

Recommended Reading

How to Build an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

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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Make Smarter Marketing Decisions with Media Mix Modeling

Posted on by Lindsey King

Every brand wants to pre-optimize their campaigns for success right out of the gate, with parameters in place to quickly attribute success to specific channels, audiences, and creatives. However, as we look toward a future without the simple attribution offered by cookies, we need to get back to our statistical roots of traditional media strategies, those without the easy button involved. That’s why marketers should lean further into the value that’s offered with media mix modeling.

What Is Media Mix Modeling?

At a high level, media mix modeling is a way to define optimal budget allocation for media channels by looking at previous campaign performance. It requires analyzing sales-related data and media metrics (Coegi’s data and technology team recommends 2-3 years worth) to make predictions and strategy optimizations that will, in theory, improve future campaign performance. 

Is Media Mix Modeling Superior to Attribution Models?

In short, these models should be considered and analyzed alongside each other, as they both offer valuable insights from unique perspectives.

  • Attribution gives you quick, real-time information about how specific media parameters are impacting your business goals. This information is useful when making mid-flight optimizations and short-term reporting.
  • Media mix modeling zooms out to give a bird’s-eye view of how all the pieces are working together to affect long-term strategy and performance. Each model informs the other, but tells different stories. 

How Can Marketers Build Strategies from Modeling Learnings?

It is crucial to fully understand the data you’re analyzing, not just the standard media metrics from campaign reports. What are all of the factors that may have contributed to performance fluctuations?

  • Creative?
  • Messaging?
  • Audience strategy?
  • Seasonality?

Knowing the context surrounding the numbers will give you a strong foundation to build future strategies upon. Using that context as the framework, determine what story the data points are telling you. The numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always tell the whole story. By asking the right questions, and maintaining a test and learn mentality, you will ensure strategic decisions are based on multiple factors rather than just one KPI.

How Do You Know Your Media Mix Model Is Working?

A media mix model makes predictions, but it’s not a crystal ball. Just because Facebook historically performed well does not mean it will continue to do so forever. That said, it is important to develop a continuous learning agenda to design your models.

Test your assumptions based on historical performance. For example, what will happen if you increase the budget for programmatic channels? Do overall business results change? The only way to know is to strategically make the budget adjustment and measure incremental results. From there, you can make more informed decisions about your channel strategy and budget allocation. 

Priming Your Media Mix Model For Success:

  • Keep business goals at the center of your strategy 
  • Gather quality, historical data to measure actionable results 
  • Understand the contextual factors impacting your data results 
  • Consider the sales cycle when designing tests – a longer cycle needs more time between strategic adjustments
  • Share strategic details and learnings across teams. Seemingly trivial aspects to you may impact how a model is built. 
  • Data can be easily manipulated to tell an inaccurate story. Think critically and apply business acumen to make sure you have sound methodology. 

Further Reading:

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