Welcome to Just Global’s new thought-leadership series, “The Advanced B2B Marketer’s Guide to Omnichannel Platforms.” This six-part feature will highlight how the world’s most cutting-edge B2B marketers are applying programmatic advertising to achieve game-changing performance results.
Programmatic is media
Gone are the days of programmatic being a line-item on a media plan. Today, brands are applying the most advanced programmatic tactics as a core piece of their marketing strategy. As an agency, Just Global believes programmatic is foundational to an omnichannel brand-to-demand strategy.
The future state of media is connected omnichannel (not including walled gardens) where media comes together as a holistic ecosystem and user experience. It’s not about direct buys versus programmatic buys but about planning a unified holistic user experience.
We’ve helped clients form stronger relationships with their customers through this unified approach time and time again. Our clients have reaped benefits like higher recall, greater actions and optimized results (not to mention a more efficient execution for our own teams).
The omnichannel playbook
The proof is in the data
According to 83% of B2B leaders, omnichannel selling is a more successful way to prospect and secure new business than traditional, ‘face-to-face only’ sales approaches. What’s more, marketers using three or more channels in any one campaign earned a 287% higher purchase rate than those using a single-channel campaign.
The value of omnichannel programmatic planning lays in its’ ability to surround and sequence relevant and consistent brand messaging within each stage of the customer journey. In other words: the right message, the right audience, the right time.
One of Just Global’s most recent successes in omnichannel programmatic comes from our work with the enterprise software company, Databricks, and the campaign, “The Data Team Effect.”
Databricks has always prided itself on the world-changing work their clients achieve. From literally saving lives to enabling hyper-travel, these stories were meant to be told.
Behind every great company is a great data team, that’s The Data Team Effect. This would be the key narrative across the entire campaign. An omnichannel approach was taken to generate top-of-mind awareness through a series of programmatic display and native, programmatic video, social, connected TV and premium partnerships.
Decreased programmatic costs
Target accounts to landing page
Above-average CTV view through rate
Below-average CPC for programmatic video
By promoting “The Data Team Effect” through consistent, frequent and highly-targeted media messaging, Databricks was able to increase their competitive share of voice, drive new business and even experience a ‘halo’ effect of existing customers volunteering to participate in the campaign.
B2B audience strategies
Our agency is born and bred business-to-business marketing. We understand the relationship nuances between brands and B2B buying committees – plus the pains and joys of both along the customer journey. B2B brands have to reach these very specific audiences by using great attention to detail.
Industry-leading platforms like The Trade Desk are constantly advancing their audience targeting capabilities. Products like Solimar allow marketers to enhance audience-building techniques in several ways:
1st party data, retargeting, unified ID 2.0
1st Party Data
- CRM viaLiveRamp
Retargeting
- Koa retargeting
UID 2.0
- Activate cookieless targeting with universal identifiers across the Open Internet
- Activation occurs viaLiveRampor TTD’s UID CRM (free) onboarding tool with Box portal
Lookalike modeling
Koa Audience Predictor
- Lookalike modeling off home page visitors or conversion-based visitors
Koa Audience Excluder
- Excluding key audiences that won’t convert
3rd party data
- B2B audiences via providers like Bombora, D&B, Oracle,LiveRamp, etc.
- ABM targeting via Bombora, D&B orLiveRamp
Contextual
- Advanced matching capabilities at the keyword level via TTD custom contextual targeting
- Keyword targeting from partners like Grapeshot, Peer39
- Conviva CTV category targeting (in-dev / alpha stage)
Custom Audiences
- Leverage a mix of various data points like keywords, sites / apps, geos, etc.
These are typically four methods of data ingestion that go along with audience building. Pixel Based uses original pixels generated in the DMP and range from homepage retargeting to converters. The Dynamic Pass Back approach allows for pixels to report additional granularity and ROI tracking like unique IDs in Lead Forms. One of the most progressive approaches is Offline to Online wherein CRM and other offline sales and revenue data help optimize online media (see how we used Google’s Offline Conversion Tracking in Search Marketing). Lastly, as marketers continue to decrease their reliance on third-party cookies, modern advancements like Unified ID 2.0 retain relevant advertising data but with more consumer control.
Set up and activation
The in-house media and programmatic specialists at Just Global strategize, implement, deploy, monitor and optimize omnichannel campaigns for over sixty of the world’s leading B2B brands. Although some brands are bringing marketing services in-house, we’d caution that this is a highly-nuance process and requires expertise to deliver the best possible outcomes.
That said, here’s a broad overview:
1.
Determine the goals of your campaign between Awareness, Consideration and Conversion
2.
Specify your key performance indictors and rank them
3.
Choose your audience targeting strategy and the platform will populate available inventory
4.
Add advertiser rails like brand safety, exclusion lists, etc.
5.
Review the recommended omnichannel mix and suggested budgets
6.
Publish the campaigns via the serving platform
7.
Monitor performance in-real time and report opportunities for optimization and future campaigns
Programmatic and Search synergies
It’s vital for advanced B2B marketers to understand the impact of omnichannel programmatic strategies on last-click channels. We know it’s not always a straight line from programmatic ad serving to conversions. Let’s double-click into a common user journey:
First, a programmatic platform will serve a brand’s ad to a targeted user. That person may not click the ad immediately but will later search one of the brand’s Google Ads keywords. Then the user might click on the brand’s Google search ad, ultimately landing on a webpage and making a conversion. Brands must measure the programmatic media impact on search activity to accurately understand its’ role.
Just Global saw this first-hand for our campaign with Tenable.
Just Global laid the groundwork for a foundational marketing strategy designed to grow over time leveraging data-driven insights to maximize performance and guide future optimizations. Working with The Trade Desk, users who saw a programmatic ad prior to clicking on a search ad were 4x more likely to convert than those who didn’t.
More than half (61%) of users who saw a programmatic ad for Tenable then searched “Tenable” within 24 hours. Ultimately, 75% of users who saw a programmatic ad and clicked a paid search ad went on to convert. This is measured through campaign UTM parameters that allow brands to further segment engaged users.
Another pro tip: Compliment current SEM strategies by leveraging non-branded search terms with programmatic retargeting. You can get ahead of your competition and increase interaction with your customers by retargeting site visitors who engaged with non-branded search terms.
Third-party measurement
Platforms such as The Trade Desk host their own reporting and in-flight optimization options. They offer objective measurement solutions for every goal. Metrics are always verified across viewability, brand safety and fraud and on-target percentages. In-platform reporting is often supplemented by a wider ecosystem of measurement partnerships.
The Unified ID also helps provide performance insights across awareness, consideration and purchase metrics. The measurement space continues to advance with new practices to measure impact across the customer journey such as Brand Lift Studies, Inferred Brand Intent and Conversion Lift Experiments.
Because Just Global has such deep partnerships with media platforms, we are often the first to market with many of these new inventions. By working with Just Global, brands have access to the latest technologies, integrations and opportunities to improve performance. Across the last twelve months alone, the agency has pioneered nine betas across social platforms, six betas with data providers, five alphas and betas with programmatic platforms and 30+ betas with Google.
We are not at liberty to discuss the currently closed beta opportunities being tested by Just Global and our client base, however, we can assure B2B marketers that many new advancements are on the horizon. Stay tuned to our channel and this series to learn about the latest omnichannel programmatic capabilities from A/B testing and multi-cell testing to causal impact.
Omnichannel planning consultation
Just Global partnered with The Trade Desk, the world’s leading independent DSP, to produce this entire series. Together, we can provide a wealth of additional information. If your brand would like an in-depth consultation with Just Global please contact us.
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