Editor's Note: This post is sponsored content from AiAdvertising.
John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know what half." Wanamaker died in 1922, meaning this statement is over 100 years old, and advertisers are still plagued with the same problem today. This singular problem is the primary problem for all marketers, and it is exactly what we are laser-focused on solving at AiAdvertising.
In a recent article by marketingcharts.com, they mentioned that almost 10,000 martech solutions are available today. Marketers are challenged to embrace tech while figuring out how to engage with clients in a digital-first world effectively. But, with nearly 10,000 choices of technology to make marketing smarter, where do you start? How do you pick the right technology or software solution to add to your marketing tech stack?
First, you must get clear on your goals and objectives. Are you trying to:
- Cut costs?
- Become more profitable?
- Grow sales?
- Become the hero in your company?
Of course, the answer is all four, right?! Do you want to decrease the cost per click of your advertising? Are you wanting to become more efficient in generating ad creative and leveraging technology to scale for all channels? Are you trying to understand how to position products or services to drive sales? Are you lost in knowing what message would resonate most? Or are you simply sick of managing so many tools and want to consolidate independent systems into one?
Strategic marketing is about gaining clarity on your ideal customer profile and the buyer personas you sell to in order to create the right narrative that resonates emotionally. On top of that, you need to be able to prove what works and map marketing investments to sales revenue.
Marketers will be most successful when they can blend technology with biology by understanding how people act and how to persuade their actions. They need to marry buyer intent with the product or service that is most relevant and let technology do the matchmaking, scaling, and reporting. Marketers can now leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to amplify their strategy and efforts and truly become the ultimate opportunity creators.
So, if the primary problem is not knowing what half of advertising is working, there are many secondary problems that stem from that including, but not limited to:
- Trying to understand customers better and identify new opportunities
- Wanting to build multiple variations of ads for each channel
- Inability to track campaign performance across channels and associate it back to a known customer
To solve these problems, we engineered the Campaign Performance Platform. Our clients find the most success when they want to use their data to unlock insights so they can create compelling and emotionally motivating ads, prove every dollar of investment, and see what's working and what's not for who and why.
They are looking for a singular platform that can improve the performance of their digital campaigns through creative optimization and take advantage of the closed-loop measurement system to make predictive decisions. They want to use performance data to prove every investment dollar so they can have intelligent conversations with their executive leadership.
Problem #1: "I don't know enough about customers to segment appropriately, and I don't have access to data analysts to set up customer segments."
Marketers have a lot of disparate data but no ability to draw out patterns and insights. And, with increased privacy restrictions, they need to figure out a way to target their campaigns without cookies.
The Campaign Performance Platform starts by inventorying and onboarding zero and first-party customer engagement lifecycle data, including: CRM/CDP, eCommerce, accounting, general ledger, website analytics, social, etc. Using ML, the platform uncovers signals and insights that would normally be overlooked or unidentifiable to identify customers based on user-level interactions with the brand.
Data is enriched when the signals and insights are integrated with additional third-party data, online intent data, and psychographic models to create rich customer personas. This helps clients better understand their audience and can segment them based on their persona. Personas include typical information like demographics but offer a much deeper understanding with psychographics, behavioral insights, persuasion tactics, and motivations. The psychographic predictors are used to generate third-party lookalike audiences enabling advertisers to find net new customers based on their ideal customer profile. This process makes previously unusable data actionable and allows you to become self-reliant from depending on cookies.
Problem #2: "I don't have the creative resources to build multiple versions of my ads for every channel."
There are many tools out there that can help marketers with this problem. Tools like Celtra, Smartly.io, or Pencil enable creative automation and can create graphic production efficiencies at scale. This inevitably creates value for many advertisers, but those that understand the limitations of having a standalone tool and are looking for a more integrated solution realize that having a comprehensive platform will save them more time and money in the long run.
Sure, marketers can go to one company to get a better understanding of their customers, but that doesn't automatically feed into the next step of creating hyper-personalized ads at scale. That would need to be managed by a human. Advertisers looking for an assembly line solution where the first step automatically informs the next, so they don't have to manage each phase independently, are a perfect candidate for the Campaign Performance Platform.
Our comprehensive software solution not only uses a proprietary scoring algorithm for existing creative assets to provide recommendations but it also identifies gaps and opportunities while generating creative predictions based on persona data. The platform marries the right image with the right message for the right person at the right time and generates multiple variations of ads at scale.
Problem #3: "I can't track the performance of my creative across channels and associate it back to known users for optimization."
Now here is the crux of the marketer's problem; not being able to prove what is working and what isn't. The reality is that it can be nearly impossible to track a sale back to what influenced it, which is extremely frustrating for marketers. One of our clients said, "We know in our hearts that our advertising is creating actions and activity, we just can't prove it. Now, we're able to [prove outcomes] through this data connection opportunity with AiAdvertising..."
The ability to connect campaigns back to CRM and sales data is a game changer. It allows marketers to finally connect the dots between advertising investments and sales revenue. They gain visibility into what ad worked, for what persona, on which channel, and can see how much sales revenue their campaign generated. We close the loop so marketers can prove their value.
If you're ready to solve the problem of not knowing what half of your advertising is working, we encourage you to contact us!
