What Digital Products Are Businesses Using To Promote Their Business?
Looking at the entire landscape of digital advertising, there is a plethora of digital products out there. Here at Vici, we have a wheel that we introduce businesses to that incorporates 14 top level products, with lots of elements within each product.
In 2022, we saw two products take the lead in usage from our partners. Those two products are Mobile Conquesting and Social Mirror.
A quick read on the links above will give you some background and information on each of the two products. However, knowing the uses of each, and how to target with each product will give you insight into why they are used so much by our clients.
Starting with Mobile Conquesting, we take a look at 6 different ways to target potential customers. Usually we see clients utilize a combination of the following:
Let’s start with Behavioral Targeting.
Behavioral Targeting, when it comes to Mobile Conquesting can refer to both Online Behaviors and Offline Behaviors. Online Behaviors refers to targeting people who have shown specific behaviors online, or are within a certain demographic. Offline Behaviors refers to targeting people by where they have been tracked with their phone recently, such as a location, business, or even a specific brand name store.
Here is just a sample of some of the thousands of categories available:
Next, we take a look at 3 terms you’ve probably heard before:
- Geo-Fencing
- Geo-Retargeting
- Geo-Retargeting Lookalike
Geo-Fencing is a pretty common term in digital these days, and a lot of companies utilize it. Geo-fencing is targeting people in real time while they are at your competitors, local businesses, or even a specific location or event. Simply put, this strategy builds a virtual fence around said location(s). As people enter these locations, if they happen to be browsing on their mobile device (smart phone or tablet), we have the ability to start serving them ads through mobile apps or mobile websites.
Geo-Retargeting, used in conjunction with Geo-Fencing, is the ability to continue to serve ads to those devices when they leave the Geo-Fenced location.
Geo-Retargeting Lookalike takes it one step further. Not only do we target the people in the Geo-Fence, and continue to serve ads to those devices after they leave that location, but now we have the ability to create a lookalike audience based on geography, utilizing their home as the central location. We have the ability to start targeting their neighbors.
The next targeting strategy is Weather Trigger. Do you know of a company whose business is dependent on the weather? Hail Repair companies? Roofers? Solar? Car Washes? Ski Resorts? Landscaping Companies?
With Weather Trigger, we have the ability to serve ads only when a specific weather condition is taking place, or is forecasted! Maybe you have a restaurant that wants to promote their ice cold margaritas when it gets over 100 degrees (pretty common in the summers of Las Vegas)? Maybe you have a car wash that wants to promote a special offer when it’s raining outside? Or, maybe you have a Ski Resort that wants to let you know when there is fresh powder on the slopes?
This strategy is pretty specific, but typically layered on top of another Mobile strategy like Behavioral.
Next up is Address Targeting. This is a newer enhancement to our mobile product over the last two years. There are a lot of businesses out there with databases of client addresses. Maybe they’ve collected them over the years in their CRM. It’s possible that they bought a list through a direct mail vendor to send direct mail pieces. In one way or another, they’ve created a database of physical addresses that they want to reach.
We call this Direct Mail for the Internet. With the strategy, we take the database of addresses that you have, and map out each address and put a geo-fence around each address. We have the ability to serve ads to mobile devices that are within the home, and then we add in Address Retargeting, where we continue to serve ads to those mobile devices after they leave their homes.
With so many uses and ways to target with Mobile Conquesting, you can see why it’s so utilized by businesses to reach and promote themselves to their potential customers. They are meeting their potential customers where they are… on their phones!
The 2nd most popular product that we saw businesses gravitating to in 2022 was Social Mirror. These ads are one of the newest products to grace the “Wheel of Fun” at Vici.
What’s great about Social Mirror is it takes the content from your Social Media posts (any of the 8 major social platforms – seen above) and creates an ad to be served to your target audience outside of that platform. What’s great about this is that there is a likelihood that your potential customers don’t follow you on social media yet. Another key point of this product is that potential customers can click through to your website, but they can also click through to your social media platform, depending on where they click on the ad.
Targeting options for Social Mirror vary from what is offered with Mobile Conquesting.
Behavioral Targeting with Social Mirror works somewhat similar to Mobile. Here, we’re still targeting people based on their previous behaviors and what they’ve shown interest in online. **Side Note, Social Mirror ads are also shown across all devices, not just mobile.
As consumers online, we leave a trail of breadcrumbs on what our interests are by where we go online, what we search for, what we buy, the apps we use, etc. All of that data is collected and puts us into different behavioral buckets that businesses can then select to target.
For example, here are some (just a fraction of the 100,000+) general targeting categories available:
The next targeting strategy available is Keyword Targeting. With Keyword Targeting, we are showing your ads on webpages and apps that contain keywords related to your business.
Unlike Pay-per-Click Ads (or Google Ad Words), we aren’t just showing a text ad to potential customers, we’re actually showing an ad on a website or app that someone has clicked to that contains keywords related to your business. Here’s an example of a company targeting the keyword Nutrition.
You may have heard the phrase A.I., or Artificial Intelligence. This is a targeting strategy that Social Mirror campaigns can use to take advantage of the machine learning that’s available to them. With this strategy, as the campaign is executed, data is constantly collected (every minute) and analyzed about who is engaging with your ad: clicks, conversions, browser type, device, ad size, and more. Once the data is analyzed, the machine learning then starts to serve your ad to more people like the ones who have engaged with it. The longer the campaign, the smarter the A.I. gets, and the more targeted the ads become.
A foundation in digital marketing is Retargeting. With Retargeting, we are taking advantage of traffic that comes to your website. As traffic comes to your website and leaves, we are following them and showing them your Social Mirror Ad on other apps and websites that they go to (still across all devices). With the function of all digital ads driving traffic to your website, our goal is to stay top of mind by adding Retargeting to the majority of ad campaigns.
Lastly, we introduce Custom Audience Matching and Lookalike. One of the newest strategies employed by Social Mirror, it’s become a huge success. Think about all of the data you collect about your customers. You may collect their emails, their addresses, and/or their phone numbers. We can take that data and find those customers when they go online. Then, we show them your Social Mirror Ad when they are browsing across apps and websites. This is a perfect way to stay in front of previous customers, current customers, or even prospects whose information you’ve collected. As I mentioned, we also can create a Lookalike Audience to those on your list as well, and then serve ads to that new audience.
Between both Mobile Conquesting and Social Mirror, you can see the array of options you have for targeting with each, which is why we see a lot of businesses utilizing these products as part of their marketing mix.
If you’re looking to move the needle in your business, and you want to talk about either of these two products, or any digital products (maybe one you see on the “Wheel of Fun” above), let us know how we can support you.
