Bob Dillon says, “Pro athletes hire trainers, nonprofits hire grant writers and you probably hire a tax accountant. As a business owner, bringing in a digital expert can also help you grow online. In 2016, 92 percent of small and medium sized businesses said they expect to spend as much, or more, on their online advertising as they did in 2015. To make the most of your investment, consider bringing an agency on board. Here are some of the top reasons small and medium sized businesses have chosen to hire a digital expert: 1. I don’t have enough time. Even with all the time-saving tools available,... [...]

Mike Sands says, “Brands continue to invest more in digital advertising: This year, spending on digital display ads in the US is anticipated to hit $32.17 billion, eclipsing search ad spending for the first time. However, a rise in spending doesn’t necessarily translate into better customer relationships or more ROI (return on investment). Click-through rates remain paltry, and consumers are indifferent to or annoyed with advertising — tuning out the vast majority of display ads that they see. Marketers are still struggling to engage people across devices and channels, and consumers have... [...]

Carly Stec says, “This year, 73% of content creators plan to prioritize creating more engaging content, while 55% plan to prioritize creating visual content, according to a report from Content Marketing Institute. This means more infographics, more social media images, more video content, and more visually appealing advertisements. What constitutes as visually appealing advertisement?In short: A lot of things. It needs to be simple, on-brand, targeted, actionable, understandable … the list goes on. To help you and your team better understand the underlying mechanisms that go into... [...]

Brienna Pinnow says, “Achieve maximum impact with addressable advertising This is an exciting time for digital marketers, with the growth of new devices and channels bringing more opportunities to intelligently and creatively engage. However, this rapid channel growth also means there is more potential to overspend on marketing and advertising programs that do not achieve maximum impact. For this reason, it’s more important than ever to leverage for both traditional and emerging channels. Through addressable advertising, you can use first, second and third party data to provide a better... [...]

Jami Oetting says, “Ads that make people share and buy can usually be summed up in one word: emotional. That should be no surprise. Studies show that people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make brand decisions — and that emotional responses to ads are more influential on a person’s intent to buy than the content of an ad. As Douglas Van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing, wrote in Fast Company, “The most startling truth is we don’t even think our way to logical solutions. We feel our way to reason. Emotions... [...]

Sean Philip says, “Contrary to what we in the industry might like to think, most people have total antipathy towards advertising. At best it’s a necessary evil. But advertising really could be so much more, providing it’s useful. And the way to make something useful is to make it relevant, through contextualisation and personalisation. Every brand worth its salt uses some form of contextual targeting to entice users in – be it through display targeting, RLSAs, or promoting certain pieces of content or products on their website based on previous visits. Google’s announcement of its... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Getting to grips with PPC measurement? Search campaign tracking can often be unsophisticated, working on a last click model, measuring revenue, transactions, ROI etc. However, some more advanced marketers measure a bigger variety of variables, including profit margin, lifetime value and phone contacts. Let’s look at the different levels of PPC campaign tracking. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive – a combination can be used for performance objectives. 1. Reach Reach, or awareness, is defined as the number of ad impressions generated by the campaign... [...]

Staphanie Carr says, “Online budgets are getting bigger to more accurately reflect consumer behaviour, but so are ROI expectations. And some new technologies which promise to bring us closer to our customer, arguably push us further away. How is the ad tech landscape changing in 2016? And what tactics can we expect to boom? Marketer priorities in a challenging ad tech landscape 2015 brought us programmatic retargeting, which results in great engagement but requires viewability to be closely monitored. Coupled with the rise of ad-blockers, it’s arguably getting harder to get in front of... [...]

Ben Davis says, “Recently, I wrote an article about the scale of ad fraud. In it, I mentioned a press release I had received from engage:BDR about their new VP of Inventory Quality. I decided to catch up with their CEO, Ted Dhanik, to discuss the state of the industry. Tell us what your new appointment will be doing day-to-day. Our new appointment, the VP, Inventory Quality, will focus 100% of her time towards overseeing our acquisition and filtration of high-value ad inventory. She will be working with our internal tech team as well as third-party partners to ensure we are comprehensive... [...]

Jack Simpson says, “We often discuss the state of display ads on this blog, sadly it is not always in the most positive light, and it seems the majority of marketers agree with us. But there is hope for a better approach. Sixty-six percent of brand marketers and media buyers in Australia surveyed in our recent People-Based Advertising report either agree or strongly agree that the current model for display advertising is broken, and only 12% disagree that it is. Not only that, but almost three-quarters (72%) of respondents fear ad blocking could make the current model obsolete”. Two-thirds... [...]