Traditionally, marketing and advertising have staked claims to different turf. Advertising agents have focused on paid content placement, such as radio commercials, banner ads or pre-roll video spots; while direct-to-consumer marketers have directed their attention to owned channels, such as email, website content or direct mail, as well as the broader function of managing overall promotional strategies.
But as businesses become increasingly data-driven, that dichotomy is less and less relevant.
After all, marketers aren’t the only ones who are realizing the benefits of a data-driven approach. New technologies have emerged in the advertising space, too, and I’d venture to say that the most transformative of them all is the advent and adoption of programmatic buying and selling of ad space, also known as real-time bidding. Instead of buying blocks of ad space as in traditional media, advertisers can now make impression-by-impression decisions on content placement at an individual customer level. In fact, this type of media transaction now represents roughly one-quarter of non-search online spend and shows no sign of letting up anytime soon.
As a result, the boundaries between advertising and marketing are beginning to blend. More and more marketers are finding that real-time bidding:
- Enables individual-level customer targeting of paid content placement
- Generates volumes of behavioral data — browsing, ad impressions, clicks, etc.
- Drives better results through big data and analytics
- Automates the advertising process — moving spend from manual agency media buying to software and associated services
Let me drill down even further. When your marketing team starts collaborating more closely with the folks in advertising, you’ll know more, so you can do more. You’ll see benefits in multiple areas, including:
- Message control. The customer experience has moved to the top of the corporate agenda, and by integrating outbound and inbound campaigns with digital ad campaigns, you’ll be able to deliver a consistently relevant experience to your customers, regardless of the channel. The key here is using actual customer data, like purchases, to reach individuals, whether the purchase was made in-store, on the web or on a mobile device.
- Relevancy. Traditional web personalization initiatives connect web visitors with content relating to their known buying behaviors (past purchases, declared preferences, etc.). For most brands, however, the majority of website traffic at any point in time isn’t known customers (with logins); it’s anonymous browsers. Sure, relationship-driven data ultimately enables the most relevant customer experience, but leading brands also realize they need to fall back on anonymized third-party and advertising-related data to tailor the on-site experience prior to a login event. For instance, this data can help an insurance company decide whether to surface auto or home insurance offers, depending on an anonymous visitor’s browsing behavior at either auto review or real estate research sites.
- Discovery and advanced insights. An increasingly important type of behavioral analysis involves evaluating customer journeys across the various touchpoints leading to a target event such as a purchase, account cancellation or enrollment. Path analyses can identify early indicators of attrition or opportunities to improve conversion rates, but unfortunately, many of these calculations omit ad impressions that occur before the “first-click” — that is, before the visitor actually arrives at the website. When advertising, marketing and technical professionals partner on these analytics, modeling and understanding of customer paths improves – because the analyses include both pre-click ad impressions across the web and direct interactions with the brand.
- Attribution and spend management. Many firms now invest in attribution to better understand the performance of their marketing campaigns. But too often, these implementations are limited to digital or confined to evaluating a direct response. Without evaluating the long-term effect of advertising impressions, how can a marketer understand the result of brand advertising? And without calculating attribution metrics across all online and offline channels, how can executives accurately account for their marketing spend and revenue generation? Integrating all marketing and sales data – and then connecting results back into advertising systems – enables marketers to fully close the loop and optimize spend.
To learn more about these technologies and the broader value that marketing and advertising integration is delivering to the enterprise, take a look at our new whitepaper, When Our Powers Combine: The Impending Convergence Of Marketing And Advertising And What To Do About It.