Should You Increase Your Programmatic Budget?

Programmatic ad buying is one of the hottest buzzwords in marketing today. With 81 percent of the sales cycle taking place online, and predictions that by 2020 consumers will manage 85 percent of their relationships without ever talking to a human, it makes sense that marketing is trending toward even more automation.

If you’re already committed to an inbound marketing strategy, this likely doesn’t surprise you. You already know that today’s consumers are more empowered, efficient and savvy than ever. But simply creating outstanding content and hoping for the best no longer is enough. Your content needs to proactively reach the right audiences—a task that can be difficult when every marketer is putting out their own vast quantities of content, saturating the market.

Making the Case for Programmatic

Programmatic ad buying provides an effective solution. By relying on sophisticated software and technology to automatically connect ads to customer behavior in real time, programmatic makes it possible to truly break down the silos and ensure you can promote your content everywhere your readers may be.

With programmatic, you can build conversations with consumers across the digital ecosphere—from online to social media, mobile and even TV advertising. This can add significant depth and longevity to your messages and campaigns.

But this raises the question: If programmatic marketing is so valuable, should you do more of it? Here are three reasons we believe the answer is a resounding YES.

1. Programmatic takes personalization to new stratospheres. Programmatic makes testing easier than ever. You can quickly evaluate the effectiveness of every element of your ads—from time of day to geography, audience segments, publisher and more. By continually measuring and tweaking your ads, you ultimately end up with only the most effective ads for the best results.
2. Your competitors are increasing their programmatic budgets. Spending on programmatic is strong and growing. By 2016, it’s projected to account for nearly two-thirds of all digital display ad spending. Don’t let this trend leave you in the dust.
   
   Credit: Forbes.com
3. The technology behind programmatic makes digital advertising effortless. Gone are the days of trying to manage dozens or more relationships with individual publishers. With programmatic, the buying and selling of digital ad space becomes streamlined and hassle-free, which in turn frees you up to focus on developing new content assets that you can publicize via your programmatic strategy.

Maximizing Your Returns

Of course, increased investment will only take you so far. To really maximize your return, we suggest you integrate your programmatic platform with your customer relationship management (CRM) database. With this integration, if an ad is served to a customer already in your database, that customer will only see ads that precisely match where that customer is in your sales cycle.

Similarly, don’t be shy in leveraging any further customer attribute data you already may have. Who is the customer you are targeting? Where does this person live … work … shop? What are this person’s goals and pain points? By inputting these attributes into your programmatic platform’s buying algorithm, you can be confident you are consistently serving up the most accurate, most targeted ads that will generate the strongest possible results.

In truth, though, digital ad buying is only one step in properly promoting your content and generating new demand for your products or services. To learn more about the newest approaches to demand generation in today’s market, download our free Demand Generation eBook today and kick your inbound strategy into high gear!