Buying ads and producing content are both easy at face value. But if you don’t know your audience, chances are your marketing efforts will fall on deaf ears.
According to a new report from AudienceScience, advertisers are realizing that digital marketing success rests on better knowing and targeting their audience. More than half of “mega advertisers,” or those who spend more than $64 million annually on digital advertising (see graph at right), plan to spend more in 2015 on programmatic buying and real-time bidding (RTB). Programmatic buying, while definitions differ, generally refers to the use of algorithms to automate data-driven and targeted experiences to consumers across paid, owned, or earned channels.
In a nutshell, advertisers are increasingly looking to audience data to better target consumers. About 60 percent of advertisers say audience data has the best potential to create a positive marketing impact. And 82 percent of advertisers say they plan to shift a larger share of their budget to audience-targeted buys.
Skyword previously reported on how digital marketing budgets are set to increase in 2015. According to AudienceScience, some of those funds may be used to bring more digital marketing expertise in-house. Forty-seven percent said they think having in-depth technology knowledge in-house will be most helpful in yielding digital marketing success.
Capturing the Audience
The big challenge for digital marketers is catching their audience’s attention. Ads are easy for consumer to ignore, which is where content comes in. As Mitch Stoller writes in Advertising Age:
“…the current generation of consumers has developed an innate ability to detect salesmanship and tune it out, especially in the digital and social sphere. Content solves for this sensibility, beginning a conversation by sharing knowledge—not marketing messages—then builds the brand relationship with the most engaged.”
Like audience-targeting ads, great content is created with the audience top-of-mind. Content mapping can help brands identify consumer profiles and create content that provides the information these consumers are looking for in the buying cycle. But the most effective content is more than just a product pitch. Top content shares information or tells a story so compelling that the audience wants to learn more and continue engaging with the brand.