Global ad spending is set to fall by 8.1 percent — or $50 billion — this year, according to a late May analysis by marketing research firm WARC.
Those are scary numbers, but they don’t necessarily portend total doom and gloom for the ad industry. If history is any guide, industry watchers predict a coming era of innovation driven by the need to do more with less. For efficiency’s sake, marketing teams are focusing on healthtech, remote work enablement, e-commerce and other industries that are thriving in the current economic climate, while simultaneously using technology to monitor customer intent and bypass expensive customer acquisition.
For years, advertising and sales teams have aligned on strategies like account-based marketing, but that trend may accelerate as marketers target accounts with the most potential for success. Meanwhile, SaaS companies are building platforms to monetize and modernize all channels, from apps to local TV broadcasts.
The success of those techniques will continue to be tested over the coming months, and a survey of local marketing tech companies offers a glimpse of an industry doubling down on personalization and hyper-targeted campaigns.
Do More With Less
In times of economic hardship, “senior leaders often cut costs in part by reducing marketing budgets,” Brian Maschler, executive creative director of Hero Digital, wrote in a recent blog post. That means marketing professionals must be prepared to do more with less. Maschler points to account-based marketing as a way to focus resources where they’re needed most. By prioritizing target companies — those in industries least affected by the coronavirus pandemic, for example — at the start of the process, marketers can find opportunities within their sales teams’ “unruly, sprawling list of target accounts” with the most potential.
However, a successful account-based marketing strategy requires an alliance across departments. But that collaboration “isn’t as easy as setting up a few meetings at the beginning of a program,” according to Maschler. Shared ownership and responsibilities are necessary to the foundation of that relationship, he pointed out, while passive approval is not.
Monetize Other People’s Marketing
When it comes to in-app marketing, few things turn users off more than a large, pixelated and off-topic banner ad seemingly pasted in at random. And when you consider that ad conversions often contribute to an app’s all-important ARPDAU metric — that’s “Average Revenue Per Daily User” — it becomes even more important. As a result, building an online experience that can intuitively host a variety of ads is critical.
Companies have sprung up to help app developers make money from ads, working as liaisons between advertisers and app designers. One example is Liftoff+Vungle, a publisher platform where developers set up ad placements that fit with established formats. Once an ad placement is up and running, developers can monitor performance and adjust the types of ads shown within their app.
Context is key here — Liftoff+Vungle recently partnered with hiphop mixtape community Audiomack to find ad placements that would lead to conversions without interfering in the user’s experience, leading to a series of video placements that stay muted during audio files.
Find New Channels For Reaching And Engaging Your Audience
According to research published on data site Statista, the average user acquisition cost was $1.75 per app installation in 2019. For an in-app purchase, that figure jumps to more than $86. In other words: Brands need to invest in alternative user acquisition channels. Two professionals at multi-channel customer engagement platform Leanplum — Strategic Account Executive David Woods and Customer Success Manager Brook Serguson — recently wrote in a blog post that “having a multi-channel engagement strategy across email, in-app messages, push, etc. really pays off.”
Delivering the right message at the right time, they said, is important to maintaining user trust. The pair pointed to a recent project with TED, which was looking to boost usage metrics amid its large user base. Leanplum leveraged user data to understand what drove an individual to watch TED Talks on its mobile app and doubled down on translation services for its large international audience, growing engagement in the app by 72 percent.
A New Approach to Old Media
In the broadcast television industry, the idea of “convergence” — putting digital strategies behind the strengths of traditional TV advertising — has been gaining currency for some years now. While television is increasingly seen as part of the old guard in the advertising world, it still fetches considerable reach and engagement, and businesses like San Francisco-based WideOrbit are building tools to help TV advertisers use their broadcast reach alongside digital services like OTT.
One major turning point in this convergence trend came last September, when NBC’s local TV group said it would no longer sell ads based on ratings. Instead, they would switch to a traditionally digital metric: impressions. In an interview at 2019’s TVB Forward conference in New York, WideOrbit Chief Product Officer Will Offeman said impression-based selling allows broadcasters to charge for ad performance, rather than the number of households in a broadcaster’s local region. Broadcasters can then reconfigure inventory to ensure they are meeting the number of promised impressions.
“Moving towards impressions sets a better playing field for local broadcasters,” Offeman said. “Reach is one of the core criteria for media spend. Everyone is looking for targeted, customized audiences. It’s very hard to do that at scale, but local broadcasters have that capability. They are the perfect geofenced distribution.”
Get Proactive About Customer Intent
For B2B sales and marketing teams working in tandem to engage multiple stakeholders in target accounts, it can be hard to make personalized campaigns work at scale. However, technology developed by companies like San Francisco’s 6sense looks for otherwise invisible signals like anonymous web visits, false form fills and third party research. Data on those interactions can indicate interest that falls under the radar of traditional marketing automation platforms, and help marketers and SDRs target their efforts with more efficiency.
In a recent blog post, 6sense quoted their central region’s RVP of Sales, Maura Brady on how her team is using intent data to find the most impactful accounts to target in a time of limited economic activity.
“Intent is important because companies are having to be more efficient and there aren’t as many at-bats,” she said. “It’s more important than ever to leverage intent insights to find companies that are in a place to buy.”
In other words: Fewer companies are in the market for software, so marketers and sales reps must watch carefully for any signal that an account is looking to buy.
