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Are you ready to make your move to a self-service buying model? Find out with our handy guide.
Mobile advertising is no longer just beneficial—it's imperative!
Advertisers know that mobile ads are one of the most effective ways to reach consumers. Ranging from text, video, and banner ads, to interstitial and gamified ads, there are a variety of formats available for grabbing people’s attention.
One of the main benefits of mobile advertising is that it gives advertisers the ability to target audience segments. Advertisers can reach consumers in a place that travels with them to many different environments, using mobile capabilities like GPS that create a variety of options for targeting.
However, the mobile advertising space can be tricky—marketers need to progress beyond mobile clicks, conversions, and app installs data, in favor of more complex behaviors and KPIs in order to engage more effectively with customers.
Audience Targeting Tactics for Mobile Advertising
While there are a variety of ways to target mobile consumers, the tried-and-true tactics include:
The Future of Mobile Advertising
As the first 5G networks ramp up, and privacy regulations become the new standard, mobile advertisers will need to remain agile in order to make the most of mobile advertising.
Check out our Centro Institute Webinar, The Future of Targeting: Contextual, Semantic, and Cookies for more information.
Learn more about Mobile Advertising with Centro.
The first thing to know about choosing a new DSP—is that you need more than just a DSP. We know the idea of transitioning to a new digital media platform can be very intimidating. There’s an incredibly daunting process of direct and programmatic integration, media convergence, and many other moving pieces. Where and how do you start? Below, review the evaluation process to ensure a solid and confident investment that will meet the expanding needs of your organization, now and into the future.
Know your “why.” Why? Setting business goals and looking at the big picture will allow you to see where there is room for improvement down the road.
Ensure buy-in from the executive team and stakeholders. Break it all down—education may be needed to help company executives, shareholders, and members of your tactical team understand the reason(s) for this large transition, as direct and programmatic integration is no small feat. Educate yourself about the entire process first, so you’re able to answer their questions to the best of your ability. Also, identify the questions you aren’t sure of to come back to at a later date.
As mentioned, you need more than just a programmatic buying platform. Determine the components that are critical to your business, by identifying the specific initiatives and goals the platform will need to support. Assign a project manager to track progress, tasks, and deadlines.
Arm your team and stakeholders with the necessary considerations and questions needed to craft a well-thought-out Request for Information (RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP). Our Digital Marketer’s Guide to Choosing a DSP takes you through the entire evaluation process and is chock-full of questions to ask potential vendors.
What are you waiting for? Get started today!
Whether it’s enhancing Basis’ capabilities, creating educational resources, or providing Raving Fan Service, Centro is always working to help your organization grow and succeed.
New updates. Every week.
Did you know that we update Basis every week? From an enhanced dashboard to smaller design improvements, our technology team is constantly finding creative ways to improve your experience with Basis.
They also connect you with partners to increase the options you have for building tactics. This year we:
All our 2020 features and integrations can be reviewed at BasisUpdates.net (there’s a lot!)
When the world changed, so did we.
Our award-winning training program Centro Certified went fully virtual this year. The best part? 652 participants across North America, South America and Europe have been able to join us to learn as a group. You can boost your knowledge of the media space by registering in one of our courses:
The Centro Institute also offers on-demand education. Our monthly webinars feature industry experts that give us their perspective on topics such as:
These, and many others, can be viewed anytime on our website.
Providing Raving Fan Service is in our DNA.
If you aren’t raving about our people and our products, we have not achieved the level of customer happiness for which we strive. There are over 400 Centrons dedicated to helping you maximize your experience with Basis and navigate the complexities of digital media.
Acting as your digital advocate, your CSM and Account Lead work to understand your requirements and priorities, make sure both are being met, and provide seamless communication and connection between you and Centro. Many of the enhancements and programs we create result from conversations with our clients: your needs and ideas are our priority!
We aren't done yet.
2020 isn’t over, and in the next months you can expect to see visual changes implemented to make Basis more interactive, new partners added for campaign targeting, and more stimulating conversations published for you to tune in.
Always evolving. Always innovating. For you.
Digital marketing activities don’t just play out on one channel. From advertising publishers and social management tools to mobile analytics portals and call tracking solutions, the modern marketing organization is tasked with juggling a matrix of disparate systems to map and refine their customers’ increasingly complex paths to purchase. With the number of marketing avenues open to businesses continuing to grow exponentially, the predominant challenge facing marketers is managing the sheer volume of data they are collecting via these siloed platforms. The success of any marketing strategy today has thereby become hinged on being able to effectively track and report on all this data to uncover how every channel is working in harmony to drive revenue.
That is where marketing dashboards come in, replete with all the mechanisms needed to empower marketing teams to turn a pile of fragmented statistics into dynamic visualizations that offer an interconnected overview of how marketing investments pay off. Dashboards have the power to tell countless different stories, and consequently how they are modeled and displayed will depend entirely on the role of the user. Digital analysts and those more closely involved with the day-to-day management of data should place a focus on visual aids that drill down into recent performance over short time periods. A marketing executive, by contrast, will be primarily concerned with big picture trends and analyses, as opposed to the intricacies of how campaign X performed on channel Y. “How much have we been investing? Where have we been investing? How does that compare to our budget planning?” These are the questions a Chief Marketing Officer will want answered in a dashboard.
This blog post highlights five dashboard components essential specifically to marketing leaders. Collectively, the snapshots depicted here provide the high-level data a decision-maker needs to measure campaign efficacy quickly and ultimately determine strategic objectives moving forward.
Overview:
Dashboards need to tell a story. This component does that both immediately and effectively. By headlining the dashboard with this succinct executive summary against high-level goals, CMOs can identify within the first 10 seconds of viewing whether something is amiss. These metrics quantify the overall impact that an organization’s marketing approach is having on their market and illustrate if there is a need to scrutinize particular areas of their program more acutely. These numbers inherently only demonstrate value if the data is recognizable to the user and they know what to expect. “By now, I anticipated having spent 2.48 million and therefore this makes sense. However, I was forecasting a ROAS of 650% and we’re noticeably short of that. Why?” Quick, penetrating insights are what this visual aid is designed to induce.
Overview:
Pictures equal a thousand words, and that should certainly be true for CMO dashboards. While the headlining component above details the hard-core marketing metrics in aggregate, these eight simple visualizations handily break down those numbers to showcase how each channel is performing independently. For businesses and CMOs to continually outpace their competition, marketing teams need to be driving replicable growth month-in and month-out. Boosting revenues and profits relies on a constant process of identifying areas for optimization across marketing channels and swiftly responding to market movements. This component empowers marketing executives with the information they need to do just that.
Looking at the charts, one can observe that spending is at similar levels on both Facebook and Microsoft ads, yet revenue and conversions are both higher on the social channel. Seeing this, a CMO can then instruct their team to assign more budget to Facebook and monitor how the change in approach works out. That’s ultimately the nature of the information an executive can extract here: big picture trends for the year to date. Utilizing stacked charts - with the total value at the top and the breakdown in between - is particularly valuable in this context as they fluently expose swings and smooth progression from one month to the next as opposed to displaying each channel’s performance individually as distinct entities.
Overview:
Data by itself can be incredibly dry, and it is the job of a dashboard to bring numbers to life. This dynamic line graph unpinned from zero is a great example of that. It’s a visual aid built without a y-axis to highlight that the most important piece of insight here is the correlation between efficiency metrics rather than the actual value themselves. This chart is not modeled to reveal whether you’re hitting your CPA goal, for example - that data is in the headline component - but instead what the overall trends are in terms of relationship to one another over the course of the year.
Driving efficiency is shaping up to become the top priority for CMOs over the next few years. In a recent study titled The Modern CMO conducted by Forbes Insights, it was found that 46% of CMOs named efficiency as being top of mind. The study - which surveyed more than 200 CMOs in global companies - revealed that efficiency was more significant than other areas of marketing including customer experience, brand awareness, investing in technology, reaching younger generations, and global expansion. With CEOs progressively looking to marketing chiefs to connect investment to revenue and enterprise value, showcasing consistent improvement across these efficiency metrics is going to become table stakes for marketing teams. It is vital, therefore, that CMOs have a pulse on how they are swinging and shifting.
Overview:
CMOs are directly accountable for marketing performance and so they must be able to demonstrate clearly where budgets are being spent. With marketing campaigns today more multifaceted than ever before, these pie charts and stacked bar charts provide a birds-eye view of how a strategy is evolving and how an investment portfolio breaks down. If one publisher begins trending against expectations, or if certain investment criteria are not being met, these visualizations will expose that and afford marketing teams the opportunity to rectify the problems before they escalate.
Overview:
The goals of digital marketing teams vary significantly from company to company, but what unites them all is a desire to make the most of every single dollar they invest. To understand how strategies are unfolding, CMOs are principally looking at their Cost per Acquisition and Return on Ad Spend; two metrics that are critical in determining campaign health and authority. These two line graphs together offer a baseline of how CPA and ROAS measure up on each channel and essentially communicate what’s working and what isn’t in terms of advertising spend. Marketing leaders armed with this information are then empowered to design a more robust investment blueprint that doubles down on the most lucrative advertising outlets and iterates on the others accordingly to drive improved outcomes.
The most effective CMO dashboards simultaneously answer executive-level questions about performance, tell a logical story, convey a hierarchy of priority, simplify comparisons, and avoid reporting overload. Their fundamental objective is to provide a CMO with the data required to make smart decisions, course correct, and improve planning and forecasting for the months and quarters ahead.
Recent numbers by Statista show that the average person consumes upwards of 5 hours and 57 minutes of video content per day. There’s no doubt about it, we are watching more videos and spending more time screens—and there are no signs of slowing down. In fact, by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic – 15x higher than it was in 2017 (Cisco, 2020). So why not tap into this growing advertising opportunity? In order to hit your key consumers, it's crucial to understand the basics of the digital video advertising landscape, as well as four essential video ad formats.
Review a quick list of basic terms every marketer must know in order to master digital video advertising in 2020:
In-Stream: The ad format most commonly connected to digital video and similar to a TV commercial viewing experience. It is often used synonymously with pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll.
Interstitial: Particularly popular in the mobile space, these units most frequently appear in-app and are served between app activities or gameplay. On desktop environments, they appear between page loads. These units will typically have a countdown or the ability to skip the video ad after a few seconds.
In-Banner: Served in IAB standard display sizes on a website, most commonly 300x250. The pricing for these units is more in line with static banners or rich media formats.
In-Feed: typically, the video ad will begin once a user scrolls to the placement within a web content feed online or within a mobile device. This format can also go by the name out-stream, in-page, or in-article, depending on the publisher partner.
Pre-roll: A video ad unit that runs in-stream before video content or as an interstitial ad.
Mid-roll: A video ad unit that runs during video content within a video player environment.
Post-roll: A video ad unit that runs after video content within a video player environment.
Reach your desired audience at the right time and the right place with video advertising. Video ad campaigns powered by Basis by Centro can scale and streamline content creation and distribution, and ad campaign analytics. Centro's experts are here to help!
Retargeting need not be merely a tactic for B2C companies to reach consumers. Done right, it can be an incredibly effective way to reach future clients, as long as you combine the right retargeting tactics with strong and tailored messaging.
To illustrate the effectiveness of B2B retargeting, I want to call attention to a case study on an insurance client of Centro’s. What this example illustrates is that if you know your audience, pay close attention to the right benchmarks, and are willing to test a number of approaches, retargeting can work very well in a B2B context.
Overview
For this insurance company, Centro ran a two-month campaign whose initial objective was to target small business owners and decision-makers interested in purchasing small business insurance. The primary objective was to increase applications and, in turn, boost its lead generation effort, while recognizing a positive ROI.
We had a few challenges to address out of the gate. First, the client historically had seen a fairly long pathway to conversion, including a large number of site visitors who would start, but not complete, the application for insurance. They held us to a relatively challenging CPA benchmark. Since this was the very first Centro campaign for the client, we had no historical data to use in for campaign optimization.
Strategy
Setting up the insurance company’s first campaign with Centro meant we were to build a user pool to increase the scale we’d get with retargeting small business owners. We also tested multiple data and content partners right out of the gate to improve efficiency, gain insights and increase scale. Specific campaign approaches included:
Results
Due to Centro DSP’s multiple integrations with data and content providers, and its ability to create tiered retargeting through advanced pixeling strategies, we were able to target application starters more aggressively to come in at about one-half the client's cost-per-action goal, with strong overall numbers.
As a result, the insurance company expanded its retargeting efforts considerably, extending into multiple, specific small business industry campaigns and testing a variety of messages against each audience.
Learn more about retargeting with Centro.
From the revolutionary Tasty videos to the recent roll-out of Instagram TV (IGTV), video as a social media marketing tactic has become, “the new black.” The mad rush of businesses incorporating video advertising into their digital marketing and advertising strategies may have you in a panic, but before you dump a ton of dollars into video advertising production, take a step back. It’s best to approach social video marketing with a cool and collected mentality. Dive into these tips to determine how you can incorporate video advertising into your digital strategy.
1. Know your audience
Knowing your audience is a key piece in any marketing plan. Establishing your target audience early on will help you determine what type of content to plan and post later. Whether you’re implementing video ads or still imagery, make sure it’s relevant to your target audience and true to your brand. Stick to useful, engaging content, that doesn’t stray from your brand’s look and feel. Consistency is key.
Make sure your visuals compliment post copy. For example, if you are promoting a blog post about technology trends, a cat picture for the header image probably isn’t the best idea. When the post copy and visual element are related, it ensures success and avoids confusion in the long-run.
If you decide to use video advertising to promote a blog post, or explain a product, try to not give everything away at first glance. The point of creating a video ad or using a captivating image is to encourage people to click through to your website or landing page. If you tell the viewer everything they need to know in one sitting, the chances of holding their attention after the video ends are slim-to-none. Images and videos can be the first point of contact with your potential new customer. Keep them coming back for more!
2. Images should still have a place in your heart—and on your feed
The heavy focus on video these days almost makes still images seem like the MySpace of content—outdated and obsolete. Know that not everything on your feed needs to be video. Still images also play an important role when it comes to visual communication. In order to create a balanced strategy, it is important to recognize that some content lends itself to video advertising, while other content is more enticing with the use of an enhanced image. Informational videos are a great way to promote new products, features, or services by highlighting value points in a concise and entertaining way. However, using an image to promote an upcoming event or program can also be successful.
Post subject matter and topics that create audience engagement, but avoid overwhelming them with too much of one type of content, or worse—boring them by not posting enough. As you dive into the world of digital video advertising, keep a well-rounded approach to your strategy. Too many videos may cause your audience to lose interest. Keep them on their feet by adding in variation, and don’t be afraid to mix it up!
3. Test, test again, and keep testing
The rise of digital video advertising has encouraged many businesses to incorporate videos into their social strategy, but how do you know if it’s right for you?
The answer? Tracking and testing.
A/B testing content on social platforms is an ongoing process in any marketing initiative. Remember to take it slow, before putting a big budget towards video production.
Here are a few A/B testing suggestions to get you started:
Track all of your efforts. A/B testing will provide you with more data and knowledge on what your social media audience likes and dislikes. Knowledge is power! Use your findings to give your audience what they’re looking for, on whichever platform you’re testing. Remember, you can never be too thorough when it comes to testing different types of content. Something that worked for another business, may not work for yours—and that’s OK. Try new things! Yes, some ideas will flop, but others will fly! Make sure you learn from all of your results and apply new knowledge to future initiatives.
4. Utilize platform insights and reporting
Monitor and report the success of each video ad. Notice how your audience reacts, and whether or not the video created conversations or engagement online. Did more people engage with your post than normal? Were engagement rates higher on certain platforms and lower on others? Did you gain any new followers?
Asking these questions will help as you build out your content calendar, and ultimately, create a robust social media marketing strategy. Defining and monitoring a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) will determine what types of content to continue making and posting to your social channels. There are many KPIs to monitor but start with tracking follower growth, link clicks, and engagement metrics.
Digital video advertising is a powerful tool in the world of social media marketing. However, take precautions when adding social video marketing into your holistic digital marketing strategy. Be smart and strategic; get your feet wet with A/B testing and take the time needed to learn the likes/dislikes of your target audience. Last but not least, remember that images are still important to sprinkle into your overall strategy. Have fun with it, and take risks! Now, lights - camera - action!
People with Latinx identities make up one of the fastest-growing audience segments in the United States. As the growth in this segment shifts from immigration-based to U.S.-born-based, advertisers must look at the impact of language to market to Latinx populations in the US.
In this webinar, Sofía Escamilla shares Acento's insights on how to better reach bilingual Latinx people in the U.S. We review the U.S. Latinx bilingual population size, psychographic characteristics, and media insights as it relates to language and their user experience.