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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Set objectives

The objectives for a display campaign, because of the type of activity it drives and encourages, which is awareness and consideration, is different generally than the KPIs you will set around search. A search campaign will be more around conversion and driving sales or leads or revenue or whatever it is.

Objectives are usually:

  • Build awareness
  • Influence consideration
  • Drive action

In the planning stage for display, we want to look at whether we are trying to build awareness or influence consideration, which would be more in that top-of-funnel area.

There is also the option to drive action. So the driving action piece tends to come in with your remarketing or any kind of very precise audience targeting, with a clear CTA. The results will be quite different now between paid search for example, and to drive action piece, and displaying the drive action piece.

Both will do it. Search will be more on the effective side, while the drive action piece with display will be more around recovering, maybe people who didn’t buy in your site, so you’re remarketing to them or whatever. So it is an option; it’s just it’s the less effective option within the three.

Define your audience

Begin with audience most likely to be interested

We need to find out who our audience is and who are most likely to be interested in our product. We can discover this through brainstorming, through internal research, through just what we know about the market itself, and common sense and best practice. There are also predefined audience targeting within platforms like the Google Display Network and within social media, and then there’s advanced audience targeting using display, programmatic, or other methods of retargeting like that.

Conduct internal business intelligence

Business intelligence relates to those KPIs that we set out for our initial campaign, and the lines to our audience is a core facet. It can’t rely purely on your media house or the predefined options within the platforms. If it is, we’re lacking the bespoke needs of our own business.

Define by location, interest groups, and demographics

We need to understand where they actually are. So we will find that different markets and certainly different areas within market cities and suburbs will behave differently. Define then the audience groups within those regions. And then on the next level and final level should be demographics. We’d always recommend not starting with demographics, because demographics doesn’t represent the motivation of the person. Two 25-year-olds could have the exact same demographic, but very different motivations in terms of fitness, for example. So, targeting just 25-year-olds with your ad for a certain fitness product might not suit the other 25-year-old.

So, as you see, demographics is not the starting point for any audience targeting. It is an extra level on the motivational or psychographic targeting that we like to begin our targeting with.

Use programmatic targeting

If we have the ability, budget, and data, we can start using things like programmatic. Programmatic looks at your website, it looks at your conversions, and it feeds this data into an algorithm of maybe 11 million different variables. It then picks the right audience, creates a profile, and serves your ad to those people at the right time based on the historical data of your site, data within the market and data about that audience.

The targeting and the bidding is all done automatically through machine learning and artificial intelligence on the programmatic scene.

Look at what websites people have visited

If you can understand where they go, we can just have an arrangement with that website. So, if it’s a certain newspaper – the Guardian or the New York Times - we can have an arrangement, a display arrangement, with those newspapers, for example to serve display ads to their audiences, because this is where our audiences go.

Indeed, we can serve it on different sections too, so it’s not just the entire run of site.

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Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a digital strategist, lecturer, and trainer. He has over 15 years’ experience in eCommerce, social media, affiliate marketing, data analytics, and all things digital. He worked at Yahoo! Search in 2005 as a Senior Search Strategist for the UK Financial Services vertical. He moved to the world of agency in 2010 as Head of Search and Online Media. Cathal’s previous clients include Apple, Vodafone, Expedia, Virgin, Universal Music Group, Amazon, Compare the Market, and HSBC.

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    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Display Advertising
    Cathal Melinn
    Skills Expert

    This module introduces the key concepts involved in display advertising. It covers the advantages of different types of display platforms and demonstrates how to set up a display advertising campaign. It also explores the key considerations for targeting and bidding in a display advertising campaign, and how to report on and optimize campaign performance.

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