The Rise of Programmatic Marketing and What it Means for B2B

Digital marketing has evolved vastly in the 30 years since the infancy of the internet. Online marketing efforts have been in constant flux as new technologies come into play that change the game, and advertisers have more tools available now than ever before. It’s a great time to be in the online marketing world, and the perfect time to consider programmatic marketing.

So what is programmatic marketing?

Programmatic marketing is a system that allows companies to utilize big data and technology to automate and tailor messages to the right audience, in real-time, with the right message. It allows companies to utilize all screens, all channels, and all insights to create campaigns. These campaigns are targeted to push boundaries of timeliness and immediate response marketing to specialize in interested, connected, and engaged targets.

How do I get started with programmatic marketing?

The specific programmatic platforms mentioned in the original post remain current market leaders.

There are a plethora of companies running programmatic marketing platforms to help get you off the ground. Depending on your specific goals and needs there are hundreds of companies online that can help you develop and implement a strategy for your specific industry and goals.

Think with Google outlined the processes for getting started with programmatic marketing in great detail. The high-level steps they outline to developing a strategy are: Organize, Design, Execute, Reach, and Measure. Through a properly implemented strategy, you can achieve strong results.

Some action items to be aware of when setting up a programmatic strategy include:

Programmatic marketing is dependent on marketing to all devices. Ensure you’re using HTML5 and your marketing collateral works for all devices, and you have all the appropriate sized imagery for your needs.

Use data to drive smart messaging and targeting to your audiences.

Use a unified platform for all your programmatic needs to limit overlap in efforts.

As with all marketing, experiment, see what works for you.

Don’t be afraid of videos, or mobile. To succeed in the marketing of the future, you must embrace and utilize all of these platforms.

Think like the consumer, what do you want to see?

Measure your results.

What does this all mean for B2B Marketing?

The options are substantial.Andrew Fischer’s analysis from Spearmarc Marketing remains representative of current programmatic B2B practice. Here are just a few options you could be utilizing:

• retargeting via Web data
• Web-based “nurturing” via uploaded CRM records
• so-called “lookalike” audience targeting modeled on a marketer’s own customer base or top prospects
• audience creation leveraging third-party data sources
• contextual targeting

or some combination of all these angles. Today’s programmatic solutions enable B2B marketers to test and evaluate multiple digital channels at a scale and with an efficiency that’s simply never been available.

Automation is valuable for digital marketing efforts. If you’re already adopting marketing automation or social automation, you should consider programmatic ad strategies as well. Being able to automate ad strategy with data is just another tool to add to the B2B tool belt. Big data allows us to have extremely targeted marketing campaigns, and easily convert and increase our ROI.

More leads is easy. Profitable growth is the hard part.

Programmatic marketing for B2B can fill your pipeline — the engineering that makes those leads profitable is the actual work. Every paid media dollar you spend pays off only when lead handling and the marketing-to-sales handoff are fixed. Full-stack marketing run on clean revenue data — targeting built from margin and customer value, not vanity volume — is how growth becomes engineered and durable.

That’s where a diagnosis pays for itself. The Growth Assessment tells you exactly where you stand on your revenue operations and what to do first. It scopes the larger work — valuable even if you never hire us again.

Ready to find out where programmatic fits in your growth engine? Book an intro call and we’ll walk you through it.

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