Advertising is an essential factor when it comes to creating a marketing plan to successfully promote your brand. In today’s technology-driven world, there are always new methods of garnering more brand recognition and exposure. Some of the heavy hitters include word of mouth, native advertising, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), display advertising, retargeting, and more. In recent years one type of advertising has been getting a lot of buzz, and for good reason—programmatic advertising. Without going too deep into the technical nitty-gritty, we wanted to give you an overview of this type of advertising so you can understand why it’s so popular, and start implementing it in your own marketing strategy.
Programmatic Advertising for Hotels – What It Is and Why You Need It
What is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising is a method of using a computer-automated system to buy advertising space instead of bidding manually.
With programmatic advertising, you get to choose your target segment and budget and let computer software take care of the rest. Using algorithm-based-technology, programmatic ads fine-tune the best location for your ad in real-time and bid on that placement against others. The result is your ad placed on a website that is ideal, based on your target audience and their point of purchase. This means you no longer have to take an advanced computer technology class on how to hack the internet to get peak results. Programmatic advertising takes care of all the heavy lifting, letting you sit back and relax with a click of a button.
How is Programmatic Advertising Different from Display Advertising?
You may be thinking this sounds a lot like display advertising. However, the biggest difference is that programmatic advertising’s reach extends way beyond your typical ad network. While display advertising cashes in on a group of websites under one umbrella, like Google’s Display Network (GDN) or those offered by Yahoo and Bing, programmatic advertising dips into a variety of display networks, giving a much wider range of ad real estate options. In turn, programmatic advertising offers richer options when it comes to segmentation since the sheer volume of website offerings and user information available is higher.
Why Is Programmatic Advertising Important?
Apart from range, one of the main pulls to programmatic advertising is efficiency. You no longer have to spend hours painstakingly setting bids and wondering if one ad network is better than the other. While we still recommend you do some spring cleaning to optimize every now and then, for the most part, once you start running programmatic ads, it’s smooth sailing.
Digiday reports, “Some agencies now say they’re eager to buy as much media as possible through programmatic channels, and some major brands have even built out in-house teams to handle their programmatic ad buying as they spend more of their marketing budgets that way.”
Programmatic advertising is highly targeted, allowing you to define your ideal customer down to the T. Apart from typical demographics like age, salary, sex, and geography, you’re able to identify your customers by unique interests and behaviors. With such a massive user bank to pick from, data is easily sparsed to match the customer you’re looking for with the content they’re looking for.
Throwin’ it Back Old School
If you thought TV and radio advertising as cheesy infomercials selling gym equipment at 3 am and a 10-second audio clip of someone repeating a phone number as many times as they can, you’re not wrong, but you’re also only touching the tip of the media iceberg. The challenge of advertising on these platforms is that you spend a lot of money for a mediocre spot, only to have your ad feel like a flash in the pan. However, with programmatic advertising, these methods are making a comeback, and you’re able to get more skin in the game.
Wideorbit explains that with traditional methods, “it can take months to plan and buy a campaign that runs spots across dozens of markets and perhaps hundreds of stations. On the other hand, programmatic TV platforms help agencies make short-term buys across any number of media markets quickly and even move spots overnight.”
Gone are the days of trying to compete to get ad space surrounding everyone’s favorite hit tv show. Instead, programmatic tv advertising targets the viewer—making sure their eyes fall on your ad no matter what they are watching.
On the audio side, with streaming services like Spotify, XM radio, and the rising popularity of podcasts, companies can leverage programmatic advertising and target customers like never before. “It allows the advertiser to identify and buy the audience profiles rather than doing a flat audio spot, which reaches the masses with no clear definition of audience segment clusters.” This means the message you’ve spent time meticulously crafting will no longer fall upon deaf ears.
Now that you’ve dipped your toes into the realm of programmatic advertising, are you ready to take a deeper dive? Contact us, and we can help you understand the ins and outs of this rapidly changing technology and how you can leverage it to reach your business goals.