Cost Savings

Online marketing offers significant cost savings compared to traditional marketing methods. Print, radio, and television advertisements often come with high price tags, making them less accessible for businesses with limited budgets. In contrast, online marketing provides cost-effective alternatives that can reach a wide audience at a fraction of the cost.

Social media platforms, for example, offer affordable advertising options, allowing businesses to target specific demographics and track campaign performance in real time. Additionally, email marketing enables personalized and targeted communication with customers, eliminating the expenses associated with printing and postage.

By embracing online marketing, businesses can allocate their resources more efficiently, maximize their return on investment, and compete with larger companies on a level playing field.

Increased Reach

Online marketing provides businesses with the opportunity significantly to expand their reach and tap into a global audience. Unlike traditional marketing methods, which are often limited by geographic boundaries, online marketing allows businesses to connect with potential customers worldwide. Digital channels such as search engines, social media platforms, and websites can promote a business’s products or services to a diverse and vast audience.

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can help businesses improve their visibility in search engine results, making it easier for potential customers to discover their offerings. Social media advertising enables businesses to target specific demographics and interests, reaching individuals most likely to be interested in their products or services. Additionally, content marketing through blog posts, videos, or podcasts allows businesses to establish themselves as industry experts and attract a wider and more interested audience.

By leveraging the power of online marketing, businesses can enhance brand awareness, capture the attention of new customers, and generate valuable leads. The ability to reach a broader audience not only increases the chances of conversions and sales but also lays the foundation for sustained business growth.

Customer Engagement

Online marketing revolutionizes customer engagement by providing businesses with powerful tools to connect and interact with their target audience in a more personalized and meaningful way. Through online platforms, businesses can establish real-time communication channels that enable them to understand customer needs, address inquiries promptly, and offer tailored solutions.

Social media platforms serve as valuable channels for businesses to engage with their customers. By actively participating in discussions, responding to comments, and sharing relevant content, businesses can foster a sense of community and build stronger relationships with their audience.

Email marketing campaigns allow businesses to send targeted messages, special offers, or personalized recommendations directly to their customers’ inboxes, ensuring a more personalized and engaging experience.

Online marketing opens the door to interactive content formats, such as quizzes, polls, and surveys, that actively involve customers and encourage their participation. By leveraging these interactive elements, businesses can gather valuable feedback, gain insights into customer preferences, and adapt their strategies to cater more effectively to their audience’s needs.

By embracing online marketing and prioritizing customer engagement, businesses can nurture trust, foster brand loyalty, and ultimately drive increased sales and business growth. The ability to establish genuine connections and provide personalized experiences distinguishes online marketing as a powerful tool for businesses to thrive in the digital landscape.

Strategies

Online marketing offers a plethora of effective strategies that businesses can leverage to maximize their growth and achieve their goals. Social media is a powerful tool, allowing businesses to tap into vast audiences and establish direct interactive connections. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter enable businesses to share compelling content, engage with followers, and foster brand loyalty through consistent and meaningful interactions. Social media advertising also provides precise targeting options, allowing businesses to reach specific demographics and tailor their message to resonate with their target audience.

SEO plays a crucial role in enhancing online visibility and attracting potential customers. By optimizing website content, structure, and meta tags, businesses can improve their organic search rankings and ensure that their offerings are discoverable by interested individuals. Implementing keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlink-building strategies are essential elements of a robust SEO approach that can drive targeted traffic and increase conversions.

As well as organic strategies, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising offers a targeted and cost-effective way to reach specific audiences. Platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads enable businesses to create highly tailored campaigns, choosing keywords, demographics and even geographic locations to display their ads. With PPC, businesses pay only when users click on their ads, making it a measurable and results-driven marketing strategy.

By leveraging a diverse range of online marketing strategies, businesses can build a comprehensive and effective approach to reach, engage and convert their target audience, driving significant growth and success in the digital market.

Getting Started

Embarking on online marketing may seem overwhelming, but with a strategic approach, businesses can successfully navigate this digital landscape and unlock its tremendous potential. To get started, businesses must identify their target audience and the online channels they frequent. Conducting market research, analyzing customer demographics, and understanding their preferences and behavior will provide valuable insights to shape an effective online marketing strategy.

Once the target audience is defined, businesses can create a compelling content strategy that resonates with their intended customers. This entails crafting engaging and informative content, such as blog posts, social media updates, videos, and/or podcasts, that aligns with the interests and needs of the target audience. By consistently delivering valuable and relevant content, businesses can establish themselves as industry authorities and build trust with their audience.

Tracking progress and measuring the success of online marketing efforts is crucial for optimizing campaigns and achieving desired outcomes. Utilizing analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, businesses can monitor website traffic, user engagement, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators. This data-driven approach enables businesses to refine their strategies, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions to maximize the impact of their online marketing initiatives.

By following these steps and continuously refining their approach based on data and feedback, businesses can feel confident that they will harness the power of online marketing to drive significant business growth and success.

Content

Content is a critical component of online marketing. Creating high-quality, compelling content is a fundamental aspect of capturing the attention and interest of a target audience. Businesses should strive to produce content that not only informs and educates but also entertains and resonates with their customers and potential customers.

To achieve this, businesses can employ various content marketing strategies. Blogging, for example, provides an avenue to share valuable insights and industry expertise and demonstrate thought leadership. By crafting informative and engaging blog posts, businesses can establish themselves as trusted authorities in their field and attract a loyal following.

Another effective content marketing strategy is creating visually appealing and shareable content, such as infographics, videos, and/or interactive content. These formats not only grab attention but also facilitate easy consumption and social sharing, expanding the reach of the content and increasing brand exposure.

Businesses should constantly monitor the performance of their content and adjust their approach accordingly. Analyzing metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversions can provide valuable insights into what type of content resonates best with your target audience. By leveraging these insights, your business can refine its content strategy and deliver more impactful and relevant content to maximize your online marketing efforts.

By prioritizing the creation of quality content, utilizing a variety of content formats, and leveraging data-driven insights to fine-tune their approach, your business can effectively engage your target audience, foster brand loyalty, and ultimately maximize business growth through effective online marketing.

Online marketing is a powerful tool for business growth in the digital age. It offers cost savings, increased reach, and enhanced customer engagement. By leveraging digital channels such as websites, search engines, social media platforms, and email marketing, businesses can expand their global reach and establish meaningful connections with their target audience. Implementing strategies like social media marketing, SEO, and PPC advertising enables businesses effectively to reach, engage and convert their audience. To get started, businesses should identify their target audience, create compelling content, and track progress using analytics tools.

Take the leap into online marketing today and unlock its tremendous potential for your business. Embrace the digital landscape, engage your target audience, and maximize your business growth through effective online marketing strategies.

However, this advertising method does not come without pitfalls. One of the biggest is click fraud. Research from the University of Baltimore concluded that click fraud costs digital marketers as much as $35 billion [1] in lost ad dollars per year. Here’s what you need to know to defend your ad budget.

What Is Click Fraud?

You’ve likely heard of fake traffic before, but if not, this usually refers to traffic generated by bots. In some cases, these bots are utilized to crash competitor websites, but on Facebook, they are used exclusively to cut you out of the advertising market.

These bots, or even sometimes click farms of low-cost human workers, spam-click on ads to drive up your costs and run you out of business. Many small-business owners are left scratching their heads as to why their advertising is not converting into sales, and consequently abandon the advertising channel.

These shady business practices crush smaller competitors, allowing larger companies with heftier wallets to control all of the advertising space. However, all is not lost, and there are ways for small businesses to fight back.

How Can Small Businesses Combat Click Fraud

While it’s impossible to eliminate all click fraud, there are a few things you can do to make sure your ads are getting to real consumers. Here are a few strategies to implement:

Optimize for Conversions and Not for Clicks

While using software that automatically optimizes your ads for the best converting audience is very useful, it’s not perfect. This is because software is only as smart as the human that trains it. If you tell the software that you want to maximize clicks on your ad, then that’s exactly what it will do. Unfortunately, it can also hone in on fraud clicks and create a profile that targets the very traffic that you are looking to avoid.

You can alter this behavior and greatly improve your campaign’s performance by optimizing your ad campaigns for conversions instead of clicks. This means that instead of the end goal being getting someone to interact with your ad, an action that invites bots to take a bite out of your budget, you will instead be optimizing for those who make a purchase or perform another desired action such as an email sign-up.

This takes a bit more time to set up, obviously, but it’s well worth doing. Not only will this action help to eliminate click fraud from your campaigns, but it will also help you to see how profitable your ad campaigns actually are.

Use a Landing Page

In addition to optimizing for conversions and not for clicks, using a proper landing page can also reduce click fraud. This is because bots are often programmed with very simple objectives in mind. They know how to click on the ad, and that’s about it. They are not sophisticated enough, in most circumstances, to complete further actions like a human would, and even if your competitor is utilizing a human click farm, they likely won’t bother.

So, while you will still have to pay for any initial bot clicks, the software will begin showing your ad to the kinds of people who will interact with the landing page and not just click the ad. This landing page will also be useful in separating traffic you acquire through sources other than your paid traffic, such as organically or through social media. Using this information, you can make better judgments concerning your ad campaigns.

Be Wary Of Facebook’s Audience Network

The audience network is intended to push your ads to a larger number of people. While this sounds like a great idea at first, the system does not always push your ads to the right people. In fact, it often pushes them out to big pages, which are frequently populated by bots.

In most cases, having tighter targeting not only reduces bot traffic but also ends up being a lot cheaper for you. Laser-targeted ads get better conversion rates, and this reduces your cost per click on the Facebook ads platform significantly.

Target Multiple Interest Sources

It’s a popular and very effective strategy to target the audience of similar brands who are already successfully advertising on Facebook. Unfortunately, bots have taken up residence here as well, even on legitimate pages.

You can, however, help yourself to avoid becoming a victim by utilizing multi-interest targeting. This means you’ll be dialing in a very specific audience who matches several different qualifying criteria rather than just one.

For example, if you were advertising a new music festival, you might target the fans of other similar events. However, you might also cross-target fans of artists, both big and small, who have played at those shows and further qualify leads by the location of your festival. It’s far less likely that bots or click farms will meet all of these criteria, so you can get a higher quality advertising audience.

One of the great things about Facebook  is that they really allow you to narrow down your search parameters to just the right people, thanks to interest targeting. Make sure that you’re taking advantage of all the options that are available to you.

Make Liberally Use of the Block List

Did you know that in your Facebook ads account, you can block specific people, demographics, and countries from clicking on your ad? This one is a definite no-brainer if you only sell products in one country. Blocking traffic that can’t convert is easy and reduces fraud substantially.

However, even if you have a global business, you may still wish to block demographics or countries that just aren’t converting for you. For example, maybe your product is too expensive for them, or perhaps it just doesn’t resonate in that locale.

Whatever the case, there’s no reason to waste ad spending on this traffic whether they are bots or not. If you have any locations with a large number of clicks and no conversions, consider adding them to the block list to conserve your precious ad dollars.

However, just blocking countries like India or Pakistan will not eliminate click fraud altogether. Many bots are actually run in the United States by competitors themselves, or they are using user-agent spoofing, a process which masks the user’s true location. This means that rather than editing your ad campaigns using broad brush strokes, you’ll instead need to dig a bit deeper and learn how to cut where it really counts. 

Make Use of Custom Audiences

Do you already have a solid customer base on Facebook? If so, you can have Facebook specifically target more people like your existing customers. Facebook is great at using data, and this can be a fantastic way to attract more of your kind of people.

When combined with the other tips above, this method can be used quite effectively to expand your audience, and having the Facebook pixel installed on your website pulls double duty for you, as it allows you to retarget existing customers for future sales.

While retargeting won’t get you new customers directly, nurturing an existing customer and alerting them to new product offerings can be more profitable. In fact, an existing customer is 50% more likely to try a new product from you than a new customer is. [2] Retargeting is also a great way to make sure your ad dollars are contributing to your sales goals and not click farms because these ads target people who have already converted before.

Wrapping Up…

In conclusion, reducing click fraud is really about making yourself more involved in the advertising process. While being able to set it and forget it would be fantastic, a successful ad campaign needs proper management and fine-tuning to remain profitable. 

      [1] ubalt.edu/news/news-releases.cfm?id=3621

      [2] crazyegg.com/blog/customer-retention/

People who cancel their cable packages obviously do not see any traditional TV spots. Worse, many cable companies allow customers to fast-forward any aspects of their programs they do not wish to watch (like commercials) to keep them as customers. As the number of pay-TV households continues to dwindle, advertisers are looking for new ways to reach their audience.

Luckily, many of those streaming options TV viewers are turning to also offer dynamic options for marketers. Please continue reading to find out more about Connected TV advertising.

What is Connected TV?

Connected TV may be defined as any form of watching television that does not involve a traditional set-top box or satellite dish. Alternatively, this technology can be called “over-the-top (OTT).” Consumers can watch CTV content on a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, computers, gaming consoles, streaming players, and Smart TVs, so why not meet them where they are?

Experts predict that Connected TV (or CTV) advertising will become more popular in the future, making right now a great time to get in on the ground floor. While traditional ads can be skipped at an alarmingly high rate, CTV ads generally cannot be. Better yet, CTV ad breaks are usually too short for viewers to really leave their seats without missing part of their show, giving advertisers a captive audience that traditional TV ads no longer can. OTT advertising also avoids the high upfront costs associated with traditional TV ads, as there are generally no monthly minimums to meet.

Why should CTV advertising be a part of my marketing strategy?

Cable advocates will tell you that ads on Hulu and similar streaming services don’t reach the same audience that cable ads do, inadvertently revealing one of the biggest problems with the cable TV model. With traditional ads, you pick a program that your target audience is likely to watch and pay a rate based on total viewership, with no way of knowing if it’s the right audience. Cable wants you to think in terms of total viewership because it allows them to charge more per ad placement, but it doesn’t help you communicate your message to your target audience.

It’s true that OTT ads reach a smaller audience by sheer volume, but they can be targeted specifically to the customers you want. You’re getting at least as many people who might be interested in your product, and you’re not paying for any disengaged viewers. Doesn’t that sound perfect for your marketing needs?

How does that work?

Cable ads are sold by a specific DMA, or Designated Metropolitan Area. If you’re looking for a smaller or larger reach, there’s no flexibility to adjust the scope of your campaign. In contrast, digital ads can be served to a specific ZIP code, city, DMA, or entire state, ensuring that everybody who sees your ad is a potential customer.

Furthermore, online ads can be delivered to people who have already expressed interest in what you are selling. For example, it’s unlikely that any commercial could convince somebody who doesn’t want a new car to purchase one. If you sell vehicles, your ad will get the best response if it is served exclusively to consumers who have been researching automotive prices, comparing models, or otherwise indicating an interest in a new car.

Digital advertising agencies can also offer re-targeting capabilities, meaning that consumers who see one ad to completion receive follow-up advertisements online and in their favorite apps to remind them of the value you can provide. This helps to ensure that you remain at the forefront of a lead’s mind, helping to improve your campaign’s conversion rate.

Is it easy to measure the success of an OTT advertising campaign?

TV networks can tell you approximately how many people were watching their channel when your ad aired, but they can’t differentiate between engaged and disinterested viewers or help you figure out how many of those viewers were converted into customers. CTV ads offer much more transparent reporting, providing real-time data on what device leads are seeing your ad on, how many total people saw it, and what you could improve to boost conversions.

For instance, you might want to optimize your ad for mobile if your audience is typically seeing it on smartphones. If your data reveals that customers are visiting your website but not purchasing anything, you know you need to work on your sales funnel. Traditional TV cannot provide a comparable level of guidance.

Wrapping Up…

It can be tough to engage with your product or service’s target audience today, but it’s not impossible. Streaming advertising can offer superior conversion rates and improved data collection at a more affordable price point relative to cable, so why not give it a shot today?

We live in an age where information is king, and marketing data is one of your most powerful tools to increase conversion rates and ROI. Over the years, the available data for marketing campaigns has grown exponentially. In virtually every media channel, we have the ability to target prospects with a dizzying myriad of selection criteria. We can now focus in on prospects like never before to make certain that we are reaching our targeted prospects across multiple channels. One of the more recent additions to the marketing dataset is geolocation data.

Geolocation uses the GPS built in to mobile devices, to accurately determine where the device, and the user of the device, are located. This data is accessed through various “apps” that the user has installed, and grants permission to use their location data. This data is made available to data scientists and marketers to provide actionable insights for brands and companies alike helping them better understand the prospect’s complete path to purchase.

Geo location marketing, also known as location based marketing has been around for over a decade and has proven to be an effective component of any marketing plan. Geo Location Marketing is designed to reach out to the “right audience” at the “right time” with the “right offers”.  The newest form of Geo Location Marketing is known as Geo Conquesting. Geo Conquesting specifically targets consumers visiting your competitors in an attempt to lure them away. The ideas is – the prospect is visiting a competitor to purchase a product or service that you have. By promoting your product to the consumer, you are not only increasing brand awareness, but also compelling a purchase.

A marketing partner can help you develop strong geo marketing strategies with objective information about campaign success. These analytics help you to become better equipped to penetrate your local market.

Geo-Fencing

A geofence is a way to engage consumers with offers while they are in a particular area. This type of geo location marketing is one of the first strategies to emerge and is common in most mobile marketing campaigns. The geofences are setup around points of interest and “push” notifications and ads to the prospect’s device while they are in the area.

For example, a store could create a simple geofence in an area surrounding its physical location. When users pass through, receiving a location-triggered alert or deal makes them considerably more likely to stop in and shop. This type of marketing relies on the prospect’s engagement while they are in the area.

The greatest limitation of geofence campaigns is that they can only attempt to convert while the user is in that area.

Using Smart Boundaries

Creating smart boundaries around Points Of Interest allows you to market to consumers frequenting those locations after they have left the location. They can also be used to identify patterns over time, so brands can send out marketing materials with the greatest likelihood of conversion.

These smart boundaries create a structure around the movement data to develop the most effective targeting by monitoring Points Of Interest and keeping visit counts. The smart boundaries focus your marketing efforts to a very precise audience based on their behavior allowing you to go beyond mere city or zip code data to target nearby households and instead focus campaigns on the prospect’s behavior.

Prospect Boundaries

Creating a smart boundary around your competitor’s location allows you to target potential prospects that are currently in the buying cycle. These boundaries can also be created around locations that your customers would frequent to build a branding or awareness campaign and begin to target farther up the sales funnel. For example, if you were a new car dealer, you could not only create prospect boundaries around your competitors, but also include a separate campaign that monitored service centers near your location to promote your service and parts department.

Conversion Boundaries

Creating a smart boundary around your location(s) provides insight on the performance of your overall marketing efforts and can serve as a suppression audience to conserve marketing dollars. The conversion boundary also creates a new segment in your audience to present a new offer to people who have recently visited your location and make them aware of upcoming events and even loyalty programs to keep them coming back.

Implementing Multi Channel Geo Location Marketing

Knowing the precise location and habits of your prospects is powerful information. You can use this data in order to create effective marketing campaigns that have substantial impact. Using multiple channels, from social media to search engines and display networks, you can reach these pre-defined audiences with a reach and frequency that optimizes spend and increases conversions.

Multi-channel marketing includes online and offline campaigns that include the timely display of ads and posts for your customers already checking their social news feeds, listening to radio, and browsing the Internet. This is in addition to direct mail and email campaigns keeps you in front of your targeted audience to create a “recall” effect that increases organic customer acquisition by staying in front of our targeted audience.

Evolution of Marketing

In the past several years, big data has made a huge impact on the marketing landscape. Marketers are now able to speak directly to customers more effectively than ever before. They have been able to gain extraordinary insight into their interests, habits and shopping behavior from their online activities.

Geo location marketing is the latest evolution of this phenomenon. It uses information already accessible through each user’s mobile device and creates an added dimension to existing marketing data. For brick-and-mortar retailers, it’s an innovative way to get shoppers back in stores and ready to buy.

Now, with partners in the geo location marketing space, this technology is available for use by everyday retailers. In conjunction with established — and essential — online marketing techniques like local search and SEO, and SEM, this is an emerging and powerful way to drive your next marketing push.

For Your Geo Location Marketing

For retailers, marketers, and agencies unaccustomed to the use of this type of prospect data, this latest marketing tool may seem out of reach, but you do not have to develop these campaigns on your own. Partners such as PrimaryLens can help you make sense of the emerging opportunities that geolocation marketing offers.

Data partners like PrimaryLens not only deliver marketing campaigns, but a monthly overview of past initiatives, and you get to keep the data you have commissioned, in order to see what worked and what didn’t. In order to assess your campaign success, you can review this information and revise it as necessary going forward.

PrimaryLens offers essential, powerful tools for modern business. In order to get a feel for how the system works, get in touch with us. We’ll schedule a call for you to discuss how to leverage the power of geolocation marketing as a component of your next marketing campaign.

As we examine the history of SEO, it’s important to keep in mind that both search engines and the Internet have evolved over time and didn’t always exist in their current form. For example, the first search engines began to surface back in 1990 with the appearance of Gopher, the first search engine, which relied heavily on the hypertext paradigm for relevance, but Google, the current undisputed champion, which today incorporates 199 additional factors into a page’s rank did not appear until 1998. Each year there are countless theories on the future of SEO, but many of these theories declare that the entire practice of SEO will soon become extinct, yet each year these theories are proved wrong as SEO continues to evolve. As the age old saying goes, “The best predictor of the future is the past.” This rings especially true when it comes to SEO. By examining how far SEO has come since its inception, it becomes clear that the practice will always find a way to remain relevant.

The History

SEO, unlike other practices, does not have a specific date of creation. It slowly evolved over time after the first public search engines began to develop and increase in popularity in the early ’90s. By 1993, these search platforms began to utilize keywords to sort information found on websites in order to provide users with more accurate search results. It was shortly after the introduction of this method that marketers discovered that they could influence these results and increase traffic to particular websites by stuffing keywords into website content. The outcome was search engine results that were packed full of spam. These black-hat techniques, as they are now known, were prominent in the world of SEO until search engines altered their algorithms in efforts to eliminate spam and provider users with helpful results.

The Evolution

After search engine creators became wise to SEO techniques, keyword stuffing and other unethical practices no longer worked. With the risk of being banned from search engines for using these tactics, SEO evolved to work with search engines instead of attempting to outsmart them. This meant that the entire way that SEO was conducted had to be altered to fit the rules laid forth by search engines. This continues to remain a priority in the industry as search engines upgrade and make changes throughout the years. Today, SEO is a booming industry that focuses on white-hat tactics in efforts to provide users with the most informative content through the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

By examining a brief history and the evolution of SEO, it is clear that it will continue to be a valuable asset for many years to come.

Sources:

https://moz.com/ugc/the-brief-history-of-seo

http://searchengineland.com/evolution-seo-trends-25-years-223424/

http://www.thehistoryofseo.com/

TVision software, which is a combination of Xbox Kinect and its own #technology, reports more specific numbers to its clients so they can better target #advertising and create content that keeps viewers more attentive.

This is another example of what we discussed earlier this year when I brought you the “Television Retargeting“, but it is the first time that we are seeing the technology piggy back on 3rd party hardware such as Microsoft’s Xbox. Going forward expect to see the number of articles regarding the retargeting of consumers from digital to television and from television to #online advertising continue to increase, especially with the recent announcement of mobile advertising’s growth by 2018.

If you’d like to read the entire article regarding TVision Insights, you can see it here.

Fortunately, Twitter has made this possible by offering a full suite of #advertising options tailored to meet your business needs – whether you are trying to get people to buy a product on your website or are collecting email addresses for a newsletter list.

If you are interested in leveraging Twitter as part of your 2016 Social Media Campaign, this article by Jen Carpenter is a very comprehensive step by step guyide to getting started.

These figures place mobile at nearly 90% of all NEW advertising money in the global market. This accelerated growth places mobile advertising as the second largest advertising media format behind television, which is expected to generate $206 billion in revenue in 2015. This meteoric rise in digital advertising spend is also helped by a diminishing global growth for TV in developed markets. In fact, according to Vincent Letang from Magna Global, television growth in some developed markets is actually stagnate.

The prospect that digital advertising would capture more dollars than television has become an inevitably in recent years as the number of mobile devices currently used by consumers continues to increase at a mind blowing rate and advertisers slowly shifted their dollars from their print budgets to their digital ad purchases. The prediction by ZenithOptimedia is reinforced by recent data collected from Counselor’s State of the Industry study which found that over 54% of all businesses currently have a “mobile friendly” version of their site indicating that the the global economy as a whole has already created a significant platform for the proliferation of these new online ads. An important fact to consider with this trend is that the bulk of the format for these new digital ads are skewed toward online video, such as pre-rolls and social media platforms rather than conventional search and display ads. Savvy marketers will have their work cut out for them as they decide where and how this massive increase in digital ad budgets should be spent.

Odds are your home is one of the 90 million homes that has at least one DVR or set top box in a living room or bedroom recording your favorite shows, which is incredibly convenient.  What you may not have realized is that some of these same boxes also allow the cable and satellite providers to record what shows air on the TVs in your home as well.  Marketers can then combine that information with other publicly available demographic data and segment their target audiences with laser like precision.  Companies like Simulmedia aggregate the set top box data from millions of Americans to help companies target consumers watching “long tail” cable inventory, or shows that are generally cheaper than prime time hits but have an almost cult like following.  For example, a 30 second spot on a “The Today Show” or “Good Morning America” might go for around $43,000, compare that to a “long tail” like “Big Cat Diaries” which also runs mornings for around $650.  The difference is not just the price point, it’s the information about the viewer.  The “Good Morning America” buy offers mass reach, but the “Big Cat Diaries” buy has precision.  In short,  you end up paying less and you know the right person is watching.  It’s king of like choosing between a shotgun or a rifle.

Up until now, the television industry has been in the stone age when it comes to ad-targeting compared to online services.  We can place online ads and segment customers not just based on age, and gender.  We can identify age, gender, geographic location, shopping habits, websites visited, social media habits, and the list goes on.  That kind of precision is one of the reasons that digital ad spends are expected to reach $82 billion by 21018 according to eMarketer.

Companies like Simulmedia began springing up a few years ago as set top box makers began licensing out their data and the result so far has taken place in the background where an advertiser has swapped out the Cheez-It  commercial for Special K.  However, now that Pandora’s box has been opened on your television sets, the next generation of set top boxes may very well begin allowing advertisers to show specific commercials by individual box in the house.  Combine that with the recent announcement of Verizon’s “supercookie” tracking program in January of this past year and it’s not hard to imagine that Zappos display ad following you from your computer to your phone to your tv.