Popular events play a vast role in capturing the consumer's mindshare. Brands need to understand how they can leverage the topical season to drive maximum growth.
Why Must Brands Leverage Topical content?
Now that we know why it is important to leverage the season, let’s look at some of the topical events brands can leverage this year
Key Events & Topicals in 2021
(Source: Facebook & InMobi, 2020). Focusing on these events can enable brands to push their audiences into the marketing funnel that eventually leads to conversions.
Let’s explore some of the key platforms & ad formats businesses can leverage to sell online and drive sales.
Leveraging Disney+ Hotstar
In 2020, Disney+Hotstar was able to scale 86.8M total paid subscribers with 30% of them belonging to India (Brand Equity, 2020).
Leveraging Facebook:
Leveraging Instagram:
Leveraging YouTube
Leveraging Twitter
Getting creative with the formats
-Playable ads: It offers an interactive preview of the app with playable ads thereby creating an immersive experience and engaging the audience.
-3D Swirl: 3D Swirl is an immersive ad format and it runs across Google Ad Manager. Swirl Ads allow the user to have an immersive experience as the users can rotate, zoom in and expand the creativity in the ad.
-Flipbook: Flipbook ad is an outstream video format for the mobile web. It provides an interactive experience to the audience. The video played in a flipbook ad pauses & plays as per the viewer's scrolling movement.
- Branded content ads: Branded content ads are ads where the creators on Instagram can allow the business partners to promote their post or story and turn their content into an ad. The ads can be run through Ads Manager.
Case Study- boAt
Creating an integrated digital marketing strategy for boAt during the topical event -IPL:
Key objective- To drive an increase in brand and ad recall.
Our Strategy
Via Video Sequencing on YouTube, our team was able to retarget the audiences that engaged with the video in the first sequence to view the next and so on. We leveraged catchy GIFs on Google Display Network to run ads for maximum clicks that directed to the amazon product page to drive sales. With the help of leveraging YouTube Trueview for Reach, we aimed to reach maximum people over time.
Key Results
Through our strategy & execution, we were able to achieve 44.4 Million+ Impressions, a 15.5% increase in product lift, a 59% decrease in cost per click, 3.9 Lakh+ clicks, and a 158.7% increase in brand interest.
Conclusion
In the E-commerce industry, brands have immense potential at gaining visibility through topical posts. They must utilize the same for awareness, reach, recall & conversions. Leveraging relevant platforms with creative ad formats in their strategies would help the brands get a 360° understanding of their campaigns to gauge the impact on driving growth & sales.
Sources:
https://www.socialsamosa.com/2020/10/e-commerce-brands-youtube-strategy/
As we all know, this pandemic situation has pushed most brands to do online marketing in order to reach out to customers. This pandemic situation has changed the way customers reach brands since all physical stores were completely shut, leaving them with only online shopping as a feasible option.
All brands who do either large scale or small scale businesses in India want a wider reach for their brand and good sales for their products by spending money efficiently on advertising and marketing. When marketers in India looked out for an advertising technique which allows them to explore a wide range of publishers’ inventories and audience available in the market with an efficient budget investment, they arrived at a new hero of an advertising format known as Programmatic advertising.
Programmatic advertising in one line is “ Collecting all data from campaign history and using the data for the betterment of the campaign in future with the help of a system specific algorithm”. Indian Marketers have welcomed Programmatic buying with their arms wide open because programmatic ads help Indian Marketers market their brands online within a very effective budget investment. Secondly, to do any kind of online advertising you need users to be highly engaged online through any of the devices they own.
India has the highest smartphone population than any other country in the world. We Indians nearly spend 180 to 210 minutes engaging with our smartphones using the internet for watching online content and playing online games per day. This user behaviour of Indians gives an upper hand for Programmatic advertising to convince Indian Marketers to adopt it to market their brand online. Due to this, every year, programmatic ads grow at the rate of 70% in India.
That being said, there are many platforms out there to choose from so we have done a quick analysis for your benefit.
The top programmatic advertising platforms in India are
Google Marketing Platform majorly consists of DSP (DV360), Google Ads, Adserver (Campaign Manager 360), Tag manager(GTM), Analytics manager (Google Analytics), Creative manager ( Studio) and report builder (Data Studio).
Google marketing platform provides the marketer a whole new advertising experience. It helps the marketer to do end to end campaign management through all resources GMP has across digital advertising, campaign management and tracking. GMP offers integrated digital advertising comfort to marketers by giving them everything in one set to run their digital programmatic buying campaigns. GMP is an user friendly tool which gives the marketer a wide range of access in a programmatic ads environment. GMP supports programmatic buying of ad space for all three formats such as Display, Video and Audio advertising. GMP with the help of its integrated analytics and advertising platforms, helps marketers to reach their target audiences and make deeper connections with them to convert them with efficient ad spends and better ROI.
Citeo is a programmatic ads DSP that is well known for the use of in-house third party audiences for remarketing and high conversion rate ability. Criteo DSP works on the basis of CPC cost metric and it has a very high click to conversion ratio than any other programmatic platforms. In Criteo no google or first party audience can be used, Criteo DSP is built in such a way that it can run only with the Criteo in-house third party audience data.
Recently Criteo has developed an Criteo’s own API to power the marketers advertising using the Criteo’s custom report builder API, automated Criteo’s Campaign setup API and automatic Bid management API. With this help of the API systems Criteo provides an enhanced opportunity for the Marketers to do full funnel marketing for their brand.
Amazon DSP helps advertisers reach their target correct audience from amazon apps as well as Amazon’s website with the help of algorithms run by the system programmatically. It helps advertisers to reach out to the audience via Amazon publishing partners and third party exchanges. Amazon DSP supports programmatic buying of ad space for all the three formats such as Display, Video and Audio advertising. Amazon DSP provides a highly protected advertising experience to the Advertisers with the help of the brand safety advertising policies of Amazon. The Amazon DSP comes with the both self-service and managed-service option for the Advertisers who want to try Amazon DSP for their programmatic ads business.
The contextual targeting capability of the Amazon DSP has been strengthened by the sources such as Oracle Data Cloud (ODC) - custom predictions and DoubleVerify - Custom contextual. The ODC provides the marketer an upper hand in marketing by allowing them to capitalize on the inventories associated with the trending contents.
The Bidding strategy which Amazon has is totally transparent to the Advertisers. The advertisers can control their budget and spend at any level of their campaign, they can even control their spend towards the KPI goal and campaign performance on its programmatic advertising platform.
MediaMath provides the advertiser a comfortable and powerful online digital advertising experience with the help of its DSP TerminalOne programmatic advertising platform. MediaMath helps marketers manage their mobile, display, social, video, audio and native campaigns with the help of an omnichannel global ecosystem.
MediaMath delivers a complete package of campaign handling for the marketers including campaign execution, reporting, targeting and creative management. MediaMath completely focuses on delivering the best results in terms of conversion ratios and better returns on ad spends.
Due to the wide range of ability MediaMath holds on Programmatic ads, Disney+ Hotstar has recently collaborated with MediaMath to provide marketers with a highly protected brand safe environment along with premium inventories to do marketing with an extensive audience reach through OTT platform programmatically.
What is beneficial here for the marketer due to this collaboration of Disney+ Hotstar and MediaMath, is that this successive collaboration between the marketer and advertisers can reach even the narrowest regions of the country with a very high premium inventory on offer through programmatic. Also, advertisers can buy the Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) and Private Marketplace (PMP) deals to target the exact inventories and correct set of targets for their brand.
MediaMath with a huge reach and exact key targeting ability MediaMath is offering the Advertiser to do very exact marketing for their brand even in the regional areas of India through live sports or entertainment events.. With the access to audience based buying techniques in the programmatic buying environment offered by MediaMath, advertisers can have more transparency and control over their campaigns and target the exact required engaging audiences to explore better conversion results for their campaigns.
Adobe advertising cloud is a place where a programmatic advertising platform meets all media. Adobe has been a unique ad platform that gathers and automates all screens, data, media, and creativity at some measure. Introduction of programmatic buying with a Adobe Advertising Cloud brings an end to the traditional media buying process. Automated media buying with the help of a Programmatic DSP is the best duo for brands to move their digital advertising strategy one step forward. The DSP will give you the advantage that you can successfully and cost-effectively implement your strategy accurately by forecasting and predicting the outcomes.This combo will give your customer a delightful experience online advertising. Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP provides the advertiser with the access to any ad inventory for any media practically with best quality control and Measurement.
TubeMogul allows the advertiser to plan, buy, build, measure and optimize online advertising campaigns programmatically. With a TubeMogul on his/her side an advertiser or marketer can simplify the process of planning and buying ad space across multiple channels, inventories and environment all from a single programmatic buying platform. With a gift of TubeMogul’s consolidated campaign management and cross-channel advertising software helps the advertiser to run brand campaigns globally using the first and third party data across all the devices with any ad format through the premium inventories.. Along with this TubeMogul provides a platform dashboard with the real-time metrics which gives an upper hand to the advertiser to track the Ad spend, campaign performance and impact across the lifetime period of the campaign dynamically at any point.
Verizon’s media group helps the marketer and advertiser communicate and reach most of their audiences through Verizon’s own brands such as Huffpost, TechChurch and Yahoo. Verizon Media with its high technologies such as AI, Machine-learning and XR in hand provides the customer a whole packed programmatic experience for their brands. Verizon Media innovates programmatic ads to a higher level with its premium exchanges and technologies.
Verizon Media provides a streamlined suite of publishing and advertising services to many brands by integrating verizon brands like Yahoo, AOL and BrightRoll in one DSP OATH. This unified OATH DSP provides marketers an additional advantage by providing access to the inventory across MSN, Yahoo, AOL and OATH’s other pre-owned properties. With the OATH DSP offered by Verizon Media, advertisers can now target the Native and CTV inventories along with the display and video inventories.
Programmatic advertising is gaining dominance over mobile marketing in India. As a marketer you're probably excited to try it for your brand. Most advertisers wonder what is programmatic advertising and how they can set up the online advertising for their brand programmatically. But now you know how.
Most Advertisers initiate campaigns but pause them if there are no immediate results. However programmatic ads, like any other advertising platform, requires machine learning to generate results and generate ROI. Advertisers should evaluate the performance of a campaign not just by direct results but also by the impact it creates in terms of consideration, remarketing etc
Now leverage DV360 (Display Video 360) in Self Serve mode
Google offers their programmatic buying solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offer a self-serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as a Self Serve programmatic advertising platform.
Programmatic advertising or Programmatic marketing is an automated technique of Real-Time bidding on a specific inventory for a specific set of people. The ad marketplace runs the auction for the ad slot available on a specific publisher’s webpage (and apps) and selects the one with the highest bid to place their advertisement on the virtual space. Programmatic advertising has emerged as the future of online advertising due to the immense possibilities it holds.
While there are multiple programmatic platforms, Google Marketing Platform (GMP) has a powerful suite with GMP’s DV360 (Display Video 360) being the market leader. The advantages of leveraging programmatic advertising through DV360 include delivering faster and smarter marketing based on Google Marketing Platform’s machine learning algorithms, gaining control of your investments, and understanding the audience at a granular level.
Most of you might already know what fantasy cricket is and how it works. But for a better understanding, fantasy cricket is an online game of betting on the players who are playing the actual game of cricket and we will be rewarded with cash in terms of points based on the performance of the players we bet on during the actual game.
Gamezy is the latest offering from Gameskraft – India’s fastest-growing gaming platform. This app is a fantasy cricket platform designed for the user to select their choice of eleven players from both the teams in a cricket match. Based on the performance of the cricket players in the real game, the users of the app will be rewarded with cash prizes.
Gamezy allows the user to change the playing XI at the end of the 1st innings based on the actual performance of the cricket players.
- Available in 8 languages
- Players can be changed before the 2nd innings starts
- 5-a-Side (an option to play without having to choose 11 players a side)
- Daily Contests and Head to Head games.
Themed Influencer Campaign refers to an example where we have used a “couple as influencers” to talk about how to earn money on Gamezy which makes it easy for them to buy their Valentine’s day gifts.
USP-based videos where the advantages of using Gamezy over other competitors like 8 Languages, 5-a-Side, and 2 Innings were shown as short stories or a slideshow to increase the Install rate.
Within a period of 2 months, we were able to see a 226% increase in Installs with a 50% decrease in cost per Install. Since this is a real-time money based application, ‘Add Cash” is one of the most important in-app events to achieve. We have been successful in getting a 378% increase in Add Cashes with a 66% decrease in cost per Add Cash.
Programmatic advertising is not as complex as it sounds. It is a way to buy automatically & manage digital campaigns, rather than buying them from publishers directly.
Programmatic advertising is an automatic approach of RTB, which will be used on a particular inventory for a particular set of users.
Real-Time Bidding (RTB): Buying and selling of advertisement space online through real-time auction that occur in milliseconds.
Demand-Side Platform (DSP): A software which is utilized by publicists to purchase advertisements consequently. A portion of the main DSP stages are Turn, MediaMath, Invite Media, and DataXu.
Supply-Side Platform (SSP): Technology stage utilized by distributors to sell publicizing space consequently. A portion of the main SSP stages are Google, OpenX, Right Media, and PubMatic.
Data Management Platform (DMP): An information stockroom that is basically a product that has data about purchasers and clients. DMP holds data principally through cookies that are utilized for publicist focusing on.
Ad Exchange: Digital commercial center where publicists and distributors purchase and sell advertisements. A portion of the main advertisement trade stages for automatic publicizing are OpenX, The Rubicon Project, and Google.
First-Party Data: First-party data comes legitimately from the source, either the computerized distributer or the stage holder. For example, in the event that you decide to publicize on Facebook, you can get data about the crowd to tailor your campaign.
Third-Party Data: Third-Party Data is any data gathered by an element that won't have an immediate relationship with the client the information is being gathered on. More often than not, It is gathered from an assortment of sites and stages and afterward is bunched together by outsider information suppliers, for example, DMP.
Self Serve Programmatic: Google offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offers a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as Self Serve programmatic advertising.
Like Google ads calculate the bidding in real-time for all advertisers, the same applies to Programmatic RTB.
RTB is done programmatically and the highest bidder's ad is displayed. Below are the steps on how it works -
Private marketplace works as RTB in similar sectors, which is available only to advertisers that require invitation. Usually publishers block or reserve premium ad inventory for some selected advertisers. Most of the demand side platforms have their own private marketplace which is exclusively available to DSP customers.
This is a type of deal where the advertisers chooses the ad inventory even before displaying in the private marketplace by open auction at a fixed price.
This is also called spot buying as the purchase and negotiation happens on the spot and targeting, pricing etc are agreed by both the parties.
The advertiser also gets to see the publisher’s ad inventory which can help in deciding whether or not to make a purchase depending on the ad impression.
This type of deal follows the usual path of media buying, where publisher & advertiser is given a chance of negotiating on one-on-one basis. Bidding process is not followed in programmatic guaranteed. Once the negotiation is over the inventory is sold to the advertiser.
Programmatic guaranteed is also called programmatic direct or automated guaranteed.
Step 1: User clicks on a Landing page or website
Step 2: The owner of the site puts the ad up for auction
Step 3: Advertisers including competitors offer bids for the ad impression
Step 4: Highest bidder in the step 3 wins the auction
Step 5: winning ad is served on the website to the user who clicked on the ad
Last Step: Hopefully the user who clicked on the ad, converts!
The framework will assess the client examination once an advertisement is purchased on a portion of the measurements which is Behavior, Social commitment, Engagement level, Time per visit and Location.
The above information from the measurements will help the framework in arranging, estimating and choosing what setting would be applicable to a particular client. In like manner the promotion would be shown as an advertisement on the applicable situation.
For instance, when clients filter a few web journals which are identified with "Wellbeing and Fitness", The advertisement tech framework assesses and gauges the client conduct and shows a promotion that is identified with "offers on GYM Equipments" or "Sound eating routine food diagram".
Through the above measures we can focus on the correct promotion to the ideal individual at the perfect time which reflects in expanding the proficiency of an advertisement campaign. While Google only offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - there are agencies like Social Beat that offer a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns.
-Programmatic advertising works towards targeting your KPIs more closely which results in improving and increasing your overall ROI.
-With Programmatic advertising, advertisers have access to adjust metrics such as CPMs, CPCs, CPVs etc. which helps us in cost-effectiveness.
-There are a lot of things which we can explore on this platform. Gaining customer insights is one of them, and will enable you to take the learnings through programmatic technology and apply them across all types to improve overall advertising campaign performance, which results in a comprehensive marketing approach.
-Programmatic helps you to achieve your goal by reaching a larger audience which results in diversity and scalability.
Control the frequency and analyze the performance of ads across multiple channels like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Native, OTTs and Publishers with the help of campaign manager and DV360
-Avoid overexposing ads to the same user across platforms
-Acquire a wider pool of audience within the same budget. Thus, programmatic can help you get the best ROI.
-Get a single view of your audience across platforms
Create exclusive, interactive ads like Parallax, Flipbook, Cue Cards, and Audio banners
-Give your audience a better experience
-Drive engagement with your target audience
-Helps increase CTR and boost Ad Recall
-Access a more premium inventory and expand your reach across various publishers, OTT’s, audio streaming services, and third-party lists.
-Leverage 3rd Party Lists to reach niche audience segments relevant to your business
-With improved targeting, you can optimize budget allocation with efficiency and produce elevated results
-Track impressions served to a single user across platforms
-Gives a view of the entire customer journey and overlap of audience across platforms for better Media Planning decisions
-Run Sequenced Messaging campaigns even on the Display Network to drive your audience down the marketing funnel
-With comprehensive targeting options paired with audience insights and mining, you can optimize campaigns to deliver maximum results
-Improved targeting using AI & Machine Learning with advanced bid strategies and data-driven creatives to deliver personalization to a target audience
-Leverage Combined Audience - Create a combined audience using Google Audience, 1st Party Audience & 3rd Party Audience to target even niche audiences effectively.
Example - Your target audience is a CEO/CXO of a company size between 200-1000 in the US?
That can be done!
- As some of you might know, third Party Cookie tracking will be depreciated from Jan 2022 from Chrome (and soon other browsers). This is going to lead to many brands trying to build their first-party data and programmatic is best suited to manage this and build on your existing user data.
-Provides precise tracking with extensive targeting abilities
-Explore Google Audiences, 1st and 3rd Party Data, also create combined audiences to reach the right target audience
-Track post view and view through conversation for large scale trueview and bumper campaigns
-Leverage AI & ML for better-optimized campaigns
-Track Completed views and CPCV and not just views and CPV.
Transparency from your agency: Since programmatic is usually executed via the agency, it’s very important to have access to the dashboard to understand key metrics. Most programmatic platforms also allow partners to add a % of their fee to the media cost (screenshot from DV360 below). It is known as Partner Cost in DV360. For example, if the CPM is INR 200, the partner can add a 20% margin on it wherein your dashboard would show a CPM of INR 240 (20% higher than INR 200)
Privacy issues: Privacy concerns have arisen as programmatic ads are based on individual internet user's information. This applies to most forms of digital media advertising.
Ad blockers: Most internet users complain about how the ads pop up then have resorted to using ad blockers or using search engines like DuckDuckGo and this trend is likely to increase.
Firstly select your marketing campaign goal, then choose the type of programmatic ad campaign which would be suitable to your goal and strategy and lastly in the first stage would be to sign up for the right demand side platform.
First step in the execution is to set the estimated budget of your advertising campaign. Next would be selecting the basic targeting options. Last option is to select the creative type and upload the same.
-To optimize the campaign the first step is to Receive Real-Time Reports and Analyze the data.
-According to the Analyzed data optimize the campaign settings
-Customize the targeting based on the analysis and Retarget the users who didn't convert
DV360 is the extended version of DCM (DoubleClick Bid Manager), Campaign Manager, Data Studio & lastly Audience Center. This tool acts as a single tool which can be used for planning, organizing, designing, finding inventory, buying inventory, measuring & optimizing campaigns. Find out how we achieved a greater brand reach for a BFSI client using DV360.
-Collaborate across teams
-Gain transparency and control
-Get faster, smarter insights
This is where you build and execute the media plan. You can create, optimize & monitor the campaigns, Line items & Insertion orders.
This is where you manage your audiences. Audiences can be set based on frequency caps, Audience bucket can be created & Audience profile analysis also can be made in this segment.
Here, you tie your creative strategy to your data and your media plan. There are different variations of creatives, below are the following-
c: Data-driven Creatives: You can create a variation of your message which suits with different audiences
This segment allows you to discover and manage high-quality inventory from top broadcasters and publishers, which also includes exploring new opportunities in Marketplace and negotiating deals
All the campaign metrics can be found in this segment which helps in analyzing and measuring the performance across Display & Video 360 and take action on those results.
With the deadly virus and the national lockdown upon us, there has been very little to look forward to during this year. But thanks to OTT (Over the Top) platforms and the nation’s undying love for cricket, we are now anticipating the return of the fun-filled Indian Premier League (IPL) in the second half of this year. The 2020 IPL, like so many other events this year, will be held like never before. For one, the stadiums won't be packed with tens of thousands of passionate fans, as the tournament will be conducted in UAE with limited spectators. More importantly, the advertising engine that drives revenue for the IPL will be largely limited to digital platforms. OTT platforms like Hotstar are in prime position to capture even greater audiences and thus, have become the sole focus for brands. If you want to grab eyeballs during the 2020 IPL, a keen understanding of advertising on OTT platforms is crucial.
OTT platforms are one of the fastest-growing networks of today’s Indian online marketing world. With more people turning to digital platforms for all their needs due to the lockdown, these platforms have witnessed a tremendous spike in the last couple of months. With the current speed of growth, it is now roughly estimated that by the end of 2023, the Indian OTT marketing world would have a whopping 500 million viewers online.
One of the nation’s very own OTT platforms that is also the most-subscribed app in India, is Hotstar. Hotstar is owned by Novi Digital Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of Star India. As of May 2020, there are 8 million paid subscribers and 300 million active subscribers on Hotstar alone. Since IPL streaming is a service provided to paid subscribers, we think it is safe to say that we can expect another spike in the number of subscribers for the sake of the Indian Premier League.
Ultimately, video advertising is one of the most effective forms of advertising. An average person in India spends approximately 3.5 hours on video streaming on smartphones. In addition to that, 69% of internet users have one or more entertainment or video applications downloaded on their phones. With more than 95% of Indian households being single television households, the video-in-hand demand has made a huge difference to video advertising. This is probably why the 2019 IPL broke viewership records with up to 462 million viewers watching the game online and upto 300 million viewers watching it on Hotstar.
The following are some of the reasons why brands should advertise in this nation’s most awaited game on Hotstar:
After last year’s record-breaking viewership of 462 million viewers (300 million from Hotstar alone), this year we expect an outstanding increase in the viewership rate owing to the lockdown as well as the Disney+Hotstar audience pool of 250 million viewers.
With the previous IPL advertising rates being expensive and affordable only to the biggies of advertising, many small scale businesses could not advertise in the IPL. This year, however, the IPL offers a starting package of 1 lakh INR only - which means more brands will be advertising on this medium.
As per the audience interest, 66% are annual travelers, 60% are monthly online shoppers, 40% are degree/diploma holders, 70% are investors of stocks and MFs, and 90% have paid subscriptions. This opens up a vast variety of opportunities for brands to reach their audiences.
With around 56 matches, each match has around 2,300 seconds of ad inventory.
Hotstar advertisement in IPL 2020 offers remarkable engagement from viewers right through Pre, as well as Post live show updates and Highlights.
Since the public will not be able to physically attend the matches this year, the IPL experience is going to be different from the previous years. The same goes for advertising in IPL. Some of the most popular Hotstar advertisement practices in IPL are as follows:
Similar to an outdoor advertising billboard, a billboard is a big banner of your brand that can be in the form of an image, video, or a series of images as a photo carousel. A billboard may be placed on any content page such as the home page, news, sports, movies, etc.
10-30 seconds of unskippable ads that play during live match breaks/between programs. This is the most popular form of advertising used by a larger number of brands.
These ads are non-clickable ads that pop up during the crucial moments of the game. This ensures high engagement and visibility that offers a remarkable boost to your brand.
These are banners that carry the brand logo and their message and are placed right below the live streaming of the match in the social live feed.
IPL Advertising is a great opportunity for both moderate as well as high budget advertisers. It is used by a variety and a large number of brands in order to reach their target audience. Since Hotstar is the most subscribed application and IPL is the most-watched game, the two put together a remarkable number of viewers and a large audience of different likes and dislikes. With reduced rates and higher user engagement after the Disney tie-up with Hotstar, now is the best time to invest in advertising on Hotstar!
YouTube Trueview campaigns on DV360 provide more precise tracking with comprehensive targeting abilities. Advertisers can leverage Google audiences, 1st Party and 3rd Party data and create combined audiences to reach just the right target audience. It can track even view-through-conversions along with click-through-conversions at scale, completed views and the cost for a completed view while automatically optimizing for lower CPCVs and higher view rates using AI & ML.
Sundaram Mutual is an Asset Management Company that manages funds that cater to the investment needs of investors with different risk, reward and liquidity preferences. It is committed to making mutual funds accessible to everyone and is backed with a strong research team and robust processes. It is also an innovative thought leader that is the first to launch funds in new themes like Mid-caps, Capex, Leadership, Rural India, and Micro caps and Services that enhance value for stakeholders while upholding the highest degree of ethics.
Sundaram Mutual wanted to launch a new fund called Sundaram Equity Fund and wanted to maximize the awareness of the NFO. It also wanted to increase consideration for the fund and drive conversions with the audience created in the branding campaigns to push them down the marketing funnel.
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87% of the views were completed views
63% decrease in CPV which drove 0.6x incremental views
66% decrease in CPM which drove 0.7x incremental impressions
50% higher views compared to YouTube Masthead in the previous campaign
161% increase in brand search queries on Google Search
Programmatic advertising leverages the power of automated bidding for inventory in real time, which helps advertisers in delivering faster and smarter campaigns. India has seen exponential growth in programmatic advertising with 80% of the advertisers seeing efficient gains due to its effectiveness and the control it gives. The adoption of programmatic advertising in India is projected to grow by 52% till 2021. Programmatic advertising is the future of advertising in India and it is about time that advertisers start leveraging programmatic advertising to make the most of their advertising budgets. In this blog we’re going to talk about
Programmatic Advertising through DV360 offers bid strategies that leverage machine learning to improve campaign performance by serving impressions or increasing bids for users based on the likelihood of achieving the KPI set by the advertiser. DV360 gives advertisers control over setting a goal for their campaign example CPA goal - 500 and tell the system what to optimize for example - maximize clicks/conversions and also choose what to bid on example - spend the entire budget while minimizing CPA or set a target CPA.
Advertisers have various goals to choose from for Branding which include CPM, Viewability, and CTR while optimizing their campaigns for maximizing their impressions or minimizing their CPM and Performance campaigns include goals like CPA, CPE, and CPI while optimizing their campaigns for either maximizing clicks or conversions with bidding strategies focusing on a specific CPC/CPA or spending the budget while achieving the CPA/CPC the system can achieve.
Use the right bidding strategies for your campaign to show ads only to relevant users helps to make the most of our budgets and maximizing results
Programmatic advertising campaigns on DV360 lets advertisers leverage the power of personalization with data-driven campaigns and creatives paired with rich media formats for increased performance and engagement.
Advertisers can choose from various formats, upload images and copies suitable for different personas of their target audience and set the target audience for a campaign. The system automatically serves the most relevant combination of images and copies for each user based on machine learning. It involves using data to sub-segment audiences showing the right creative to the right audience at the right time instead of going the traditional route of showing one ad to an entire audience segment. This enables personalization and automation at scale, which means we don’t have to work on 10 different creatives with different copies and create different campaigns for each audience segment. Instead, we can easily do that with data-driven creatives on DV360 paired with interactiveness which helps maximize relevant engagement with the target audience and increases ROI.
An example of personalization with data-driven creatives
This helps advertisers make the most of their advertising budgets by reducing irrelevant clicks which in turn reduces wasted advertising budgets and gets more clicks from relevant users.
Leverage programmatic advertising for placing ads on different publishers like Moneycontrol or NTDV has several benefits that can lead to optimizing the efficiency of campaign budgets:
Setting clear objectives before starting the campaign helps in better optimization. The objective of the campaign shapes the entire structure of the campaign right from the goal, what we are optimizing for, the bidding strategy, the audiences that are targeted and creatives that are used. Making too many changes to these elements of the campaign can have a negative impact on the learnings.
With so many targeting options available on DV360, we can target even very niche audience segments to reach relevant audiences, paired with the relevant placement of the ads with data-driven creatives to be as relevant and interactive as possible.
A lot of times, advertisers initiate campaigns but pause it if there are no immediate results, however programmatic advertising, like any other advertising platform, requires machine learning to generate results and ROI. Advertisers should evaluate the performance of a campaign not just by the direct results but also by the impact it creates in terms of the consideration a campaign creates, how does the remarketing to this audience work in campaigns, etc.
Google offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offers a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as Self Serve programmatic advertising.
Gone are the days when marketing used to be about intuition and gut feelings. Today, in a world where people use their phones for about 60% of their day, it’s extremely important for brands to understand what a typical day would look like in the lives of their consumers. What time would they wake up? What kind of breakfast would they prefer? Would they take a cab to work, ride a bike or drive their own vehicle? Where do they work? Do they come home to a nuclear family or a joint family?
The questions are endless, and while it may seem that brands are trying too hard to sell emotions rather than products, well it is true! Maybe it’s time to stop a moment and ask yourself, do you buy a product or do you buy the emotion attached to it?
It is because of this very fact, that brands are paying a lot more attention to deriving insights into their consumers and their lifestyles. Insight-driven marketing is nothing but tapping into your consumers at the right time and place with the exact communication that they would want to receive. Insight-driven marketing can help you navigate your way closer to your consumer, and it also plays a vital role in formulating strategic business decisions based on the marketing insights you receive from your consumers.
Understanding the demographics and habits of your consumers is not just a matter of numbers but is an art in itself. With an exhaustive insight-marketing driven approach you will be able to dive deeper into the following:
And many more such questions, which then allows you to optimize your marketing strategy to deliver the best results.
Here are an astonishing few facts that we found online from a study that dives deep into consumer behaviour -
Did you know?
55% of people interested in grocery online are men
51% of women are interested in social and casual gaming
60% of men are likely to be in-market for jewellery
56% of fathers online are interested in being a chef
Tapping into your consumer at the right time, using the right channel, with the right communication, can result in higher conversions, higher engagement and higher revenues in return. Many brands in today’s era are looking at diversifying their persona and communication, making it more personal and customised for their consumers. For example, a brand that’s available in Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities may want to communicate with their consumers in each tier differently, based on the kind of content each group resonates with, and the different channels each of them would be present on.
Knowing the consumer behaviour and patterns through first-party data is crucial, helping brands cross-sell and upsell products that may add value to the lives of our consumers.
Being able to track their behaviour and journey helps us dive deeper into whether or not they would be willing to purchase more products at even a higher price.
If a brand initially thinks of venturing into a new line of services, building a new product or expanding the current business in different markets, these decisions can be made a lot stronger and effective if they are based on facts and insights taken from the marketing data and their consumer’s behaviour.
While all this may seem a tad bit overwhelming, here’s a step by step process on how you can go about analysing your data and putting it to effective use.
While you may have run umpteen campaigns for your brand over the last year, giving you access to tons of data to look into, what’s really important is how you collate it, organise it and study the data. It’s extremely crucial to look for trends between your consumer demographics, age, gender, lifestyles and professions. For many brands, their data may not just end at consumer names, which cities they reside in, their age, profession and likes and dislikes, but also depend on which part of the communication did they most resonate with, that influenced their decision of buying the product or service.
Hence, for any brand that believes in connecting with their consumers, it is fundamental to understand:
Let’s follow a simple rule: Gather data points ------> Derive marketing insights -------> Jot down a way forward and implement
More often than not, marketing professionals pause at stage 2 - Which is deriving digital marketing insights from the data points. The key here is to apply all the insights to your campaigns and communication routes, which will, in turn, help the brand see improved business results and higher conversion rates, where consumers will start to resonate with the brand on a personal level.
Once you have implemented the marketing insights, the key is to compare data, both past and present, to be able to optimise your campaigns and strategy as you keep going. This will help retrospect on whether you’ve seen a rise in the sale of products and services of your brand and how much your brand has benefited from your insight-driven marketing approach.
Here’s one such example of insight-driven marketing implemented by us for Tata Mutual Fund’s – #NoToKatauti Campaign
Brief:
To drive investments for their ELSS (Equity Linked Savings Scheme) Fund between November to March – which is the period when people resort to filing their taxes in India.
Process to gain insights:
We asked a bunch of 20-30 people over calls and video conferences, on how, when and under what circumstances they file their taxes.
Insights:
Hence from this very thought, stemmed the campaign idea of #NoToKatauti!
Consumer segmentation based on data and behaviour analysis:
We divided our audiences based on four major factors in India, namely people’s love for cricket, love for food, the housewife community, and students.
Not only did we first deliver the video to them that they resonate with most, but we also followed it up with the other three in line, creating a ripple effect and building tremendous brand recall.
Results:
38.1% increase in brand lift
216.2% increase in brand interest
13.1% increase in brand awareness
25% of leads from YouTube
Here’s another example of insight-driven marketing implemented by India’s No.1 cookware brand, Wonderchef:
Brief:
To create brand awareness, strategize and devise a campaign for a good cause.
Insight:
We pulled out sufficient data to support the fact that the majority of men in India don’t cook, they don’t help out in household chores and they don’t have sufficient knowledge of ingredients. While we try to preach ‘Gender Equality’, are we really all that ‘Gender Equal’ as a country?
This very thought led us to create the campaign idea of #DearManHoldThePan.
Campaign Execution:
We got out on the street to ask men their thoughts and gather more information on whether they knew basic ingredients, herbs and how to even break an egg without ruining its yolk! And guess what? The results were hilarious, but very satisfying in terms of numbers, reach and the appreciation we received. Not only did this make our case point stronger, but also helped us develop more content, in the form of posts, influencer videos and a whole lot more!
Results:
Reach – 14 Million
Engaging about 3 Lakh Viewers
And we turned a whole lot of eyeballs!
Various examples have shown us time and again that personalised marketing is a digital trend that adds a whole different dimension and layer to any campaign or brand. By reflecting different facets of an audience’s personality, a product or campaign is bound to be a success. Relatability makes room for connection, and thus engagement, which is why marketing insights will never fail you. And with performance marketing, the insights only ever grow, enabling you to drive growth continually for your brand.
With the advent of technology and social media, a consumer’s journey to make a purchase has become very complex. Consumers can now easily discover new brands on various social media platforms and are researching multiple brands, choosing to compare the pricing/offers before making a final decision. This new consumer decision journey has given rise to a highly evolved and aware consumer.
So, how can brands modify the marketing funnel to engage with this new digital-age consumer? The full-funnel approach is one of the most significant aspects of a marketing strategy as this helps brands convert the prospective audience into customers. This can be done on digital platforms by showcasing relevant messaging to the target audiences, moving them along the funnel from ‘Awareness’ to ‘Consideration’ and finally ‘Conversion’.
Most marketers, however, tend to focus on the bottom-of-the-funnel directly and optimise all digital campaigns to drive consumer action. However, this could lead to increased cost per acquisitions and lower conversion rates. While performance-based campaigns are key as these drive business results, it would not be an optimal strategy to focus on these alone as consumers need to be aware of the brand and build an affinity towards the same before making a purchase or enquiring.
With the shift from traditional to digital, it is also essential that a brand adapts their marketing funnel with a digital-first marketing strategy. This approach implies that it is essential for the brand to have a mobile-first approach for all digital assets in order to reach and engage with potential customers. Brands should leverage Accelerated Mobile Pages to improve the speed of landing pages and interactive ad formats to ensure the best experience for consumers.
In the first stage, the focus should be on creating awareness of the brand and its legacy. It is considered a good idea to leverage short videos in this stage to engage with potential buyers. Brands should also look at highlighting the benefits for the consumer by showcasing how the product or service can help them and resolve a pain point.
The top-of-the-funnel should be looked at as a process of casting a wider net to reach potential consumers. The users at this stage might not be familiar with the brand and only be cold prospects. Using the full-funnel marketing strategy, brands could push consumers towards the next stage of the marketing funnel.
Brands could explore various options like masthead on YouTube or Reach & Frequency campaigns on Facebook/Instagram to drive the high-impact reach for the brand’s top of the funnel strategy. One other interesting option could be to explore vernacular videos for brand awareness depending on the brand’s target audience. With the launch of Jio, smartphones and data plans have become quite affordable, leading to increased consumption of vernacular content. In the current scenario, brands should look to adopt a multi-lingual marketing strategy to tap into the next billion users.
YouTube: Bumper Ad, Masthead, TrueView For Reach are the best ad inventories to explore using YouTube.
Facebook/Instagram: Reach & Frequency Campaigns and Brand-Awareness are instrumental in ad inventories to explore using Facebook/Instagram.
The metrics to track go as Cost Per Thousand Impressions and Cost Per Video View.
Keep In Mind: As brands, avoid using product-specific/sales material in this stage of the funnel.
Users who engage with the brand’s top-of-the-funnel activity will have to familiarise themselves with the brand through more details about the product/service via relevant content. It is recommended to leverage the power of thumb-stopping content to re-engage with these users. Brands should share more context about the product/service so that consumers could consider engaging with them and finally making the purchase. The middle of the funnel should be looked at as a broad set of interested audiences who are not customers yet but are strongly considering the particular brand.
At this stage, the key focus should be on showcasing educational content in order to build trust and consideration for the brand. Case studies, Blog posts, White Papers, Ebooks, etc. are simple yet very effective tools for the brand’s middle of the funnel strategy. On Facebook, brands could explore Instant Experience ads which can help nurture intent and further drive engagement.
YouTube: Bearing Ad Inventory in mind, Trueview In-Stream Ad is typically explored on YouTube.
Facebook: In terms of Ad Inventory for Facebook, the way to go is through Traffic, Engagement, and Video Views.
To track metrics, CPC, Ad Recall and Landing Page Views are taken into account.
Keep In Mind: Alongside sharing educational content, brands should start positioning their product/service at this stage.
Once users are aware and have developed consideration for the brand, it is time to drive action with focused creatives and clear Call-To-Actions. At this stage, the consumer is already aware of the brand and is in a ready-to-buy frame of mind. With the right communication strategy, the users can easily convert into customers from a prospect lead. The focus here is to make the final pitch and keep it straight forward with the brand’s product/service details and pricing. Some potential buyers might require the extra push in the form of a time-bound offers/discounted prices to make the final decision. In the last state of the funnel, brands should highlight why consumers should opt for their product/service instead of their competitor’s as part of the content strategy. It might also be interesting to segment different audience types based on demographics/behaviour and show customers highly personalised content in this stage to drive the conversion.
By following a full-funnel, approach brands should be able to generate high-quality leads as the users have gone through the entire customer journey of awareness and consideration before purchasing or enquiring from the brand. This is especially important in industries such as Real Estate where the purchase cycle is relatively long, and consumers are continually researching options.
YouTube: TrueView For Action is often explored bearing YouTube Ad Inventory in mind.
Facebook: The best Ad Inventory to explore using Facebook is Lead Gen/Website Conversion.
CPL is typically used to track metrics.
Keep In Mind: Showcasing a time-bound offer in this stage can create an urgency and prompt consumers to take action.
For a more in-depth explanation on full-funnel marketing, take a look at this video:
Analyse those leads, work on strategies that converts them to customers, and drive revenue to the business. At the end of the day, a full-funnel strategy involves a lot of work and time, but with an efficient marketing machine, the battle is half won.
As the saying goes - The world is becoming a smaller place and digitisation is definitely contributing to it. Speaking of digitization, online advertising is considered a boon for businesses to keep their audiences interested in their brands. However, targeting the right audience is the first challenge faced by advertisers. This is where Taboola emerges as a game-changer in the sector of native advertising. With multiple options and settings, brands are able to create relevant and consistent content for ads that are published in multiple webpages and are synced with the design and behaviour of the users on the page. The best part of using Taboola is that advertisers can reach out to a large target audience to make their content visible and thereby converting potential users to customers.
On the other hand, managing ad spends is the next challenge faced by digital advertisers. This is when Google DV360 comes to your rescue. DV360 is a service platform that helps online advertisers to optimise their campaign with data-driven insights. This platform integrates various advertising tools to create ads that are impactful and efficient. With DV360, it has become easy to manage ad spends and revise the strategies for maximum ROI.
The good news for digital advertisers is that Taboola inventory is now directly integrated with Google DV360, Google's Programmatic Platform that is also available in India. This means marketers can now access Taboola using the DV360 platform and enjoy the convenience of optimising their campaigns while reaching a relevant target audience. This integration comes in as a blessing for advertisers to make constructive decisions to run campaigns that meet all the goals while managing spendings to yield the best results.
If you are already using DV360, activating Taboola is a simple process. Here is a step-by-step guide to activate the Taboola Exchange option on the DV360 platform.
Now you are all set to start your ads and bring out the best results as per the objectives of your campaigns.
Online advertisers have started leveraging both Taboola and DV360 to run successful campaigns by making the right decisions and targeting a wide range of audiences with innovative creatives, audio and video ads. If you have still not used these tools, hurry up and leverage these valuable platforms to build your brand and generate maximum ROI.