Programmatic Marketing for Events In this whitepaper we unpack programmatic marketing and why it is the latest must-use tool for event marketers. From event conception through wrap up, programmatic tools allow event marketers to reach beyond traditional brand channels to generate insights, uncover new audiences, increase event attendance and improve attendee engagement.
A Shift in Live Events A Fragmented Attendee Landscape The event space is changing rapidly, mainly due to the proliferation of new technologies and changing consumer expectations. This shift is creating unrelenting pressures for event marketers and brands alike, as attracting attendees to an event has become more expensive, time consuming, and complex. Event marketers today must not only compete with diminishing attention spans in a crowded marketplace, but they also must convince people to attend their event in-person (in an age of virtual consumption). To stand out, event marketers need to adopt new dynamic approaches to audience acquisition and engagement. This white paper uncovers ways in which event marketers can tackle audience acquisition and engagement challenges in a competitive marketplace. Our Focus: Programmatic marketing as a must-use event marketing tool. 02
Introduction to Programmatic Marketing What is programmatic marketing? Programmatic is a form of marketing automation that utilizes exchanges enabled by software to purchase digital advertising (essentially letting machines buy ads rather than people). Industry experts predict that 4-5 years from now all paid media advertising efforts will be bought programmatically. HOW IT WORKS DEMAND A Look at Programmatic Marketing This disruption in the event landscape should motivate event marketers to focus on growing and evolving their audience acquisition tool kit. A powerful tool (that often doesn t get much attention in the event world) is programmatic marketing. Programmatic marketing can help event marketers boost event attendance and in return keep event budgets growing. Programmatic Overview The advent of ad networks has changed how we target, interact with, and analyze audience engagements. Capitalizing on what the internet does best (matching buyers with sellers), ad networks have enabled publishers with inventory to sell (supply side) to brands and marketers with messages to convey (demand side). Programmatic platforms have emerged as a way to help marketers take advantage of these ad networks through user-friendly interfaces providing real-time performance optimization and omni-channel analytics. These platforms, which include Digilant, AdRoll, DataXu (and many others) are continuously evolving to help marketers understand and reach today s consumer. Even social platforms like Facebook. Twitter, and Instagram support programmatic efforts. SUPPLY Marketer Programmatic Platform Ad Exchange Publisher Bidder Bidder Bidder Bidder Insights Data capture 03
Why Now? Programmatic marketing reflects a drastic departure from conventional media buying strategies. With traditional media buying, marketers had to employ hordes of media planners to identify where and how to reach audiences. This often resulted in differentiated buying strategies and budgets scattered across siloed media buying teams. Today s online media landscape is enormously fragmented, creating both challenges and opportunities for today s event marketers. Traditional media buying often creates an isolated view of a customer, forcing marketers to piece together bits of data from different channels to understand the buyer s journey. As the buyer s journey becomes more complex and less linear, traditional media buying strategies aren t be able to keep up. In contrast, programmatic can seamlessly string together a series of actions across channels to help marketers see the buyer s complete journey. Therefore, reducing assumptions marketers have to make, and decreasing the probability of error, ultimately resulting in better utilized marketing budgets. Advantages of Programmatic Programmatic marketing can save time and money for today s busy marketers. Through automation and algorithms, programmatic tools manage ad spend, determine ad placements, and optimize ads in real time freeing up resources for marketing teams. With more free time, marketers can focus more on optimization and ROI, rather than getting into the weeds of manual media buying. 04
Programmatic: Growing the Event Marketer s Toolkit Benefits of Programmatic for Event Marketers For event marketers there is enormous benefit in utilizing programmatic marketing for audience acquisition efforts. The greatest benefits: providing more control over targeting, messaging, and engagement efforts. 1. Targeting the most hard-to-reach audiences A successful audience acquisition strategy requires that the right message is shared with the right audience at the right time. CRM is still one of the most effective and least expensive ways to reach your existing customers or those who have opted into hearing from your brand, but not all of those are looking at your messages. Others need to see messages multiple times to become engaged. Reaching beyond the CRM database to capture net-new audiences can be extremely beneficial to audience acquisition efforts. With programmatic marketing tools you can create hyper-targeted audience segments. Through programmatic tactics, event marketers can define, pinpoint, and reach audiences that look and act like their most valuable attendee where they are natively engaging. Programmatic marketing tools incorporate several audience targeting tactics that work to uncover hidden markets made up of potential attendees that are most likely to engage and attend. Look-a-like Targeting: Finding audiences that look like your attendees (based on behavior and demographic data) to help uncover net-new audiences that are most likely to convert and attend. Behavior-Based Targeting: Tracking browsing activity with a cookie or mobile device ID to reach audiences based on interest or behaviors across channels. Demographic Targeting: Segmenting your audience by the standard segments such as age, gender, household income as well as attributes including industry, job title, and company. 05 Location-based Targeting: Location based opportunities that are enhanced by mobile device GPS tracking or beacons targeting more precise locations (such as location within a specific building).
Retargeting: Capturing intent through cookies and pixels to harness interest from those that are most likely to attend based on their browsing history. Contextual Targeting: Publisher content is crawled, analyzed, and categorized allowing event marketers to display their ads on sites and pages that are highly relevant to their audience and where their audiences are already engaging. 2. Delivering hyper-personalized messaging Finding the right audience to speak to is the first step in audience acquisition planning, but if you don t have the right message to share, then generating a desired action will be nearly impossible. Insights gathered from audience targeting efforts are an event marketer s secret weapon. Before diving into messaging efforts, it is important to understand who your key audiences are, their attitudes and how they behave. Understanding these will help uncover moments of intent; moments when your target audience is most likely to convert. Aligning your messages to these moments of intent will help better encourage conversion (despite an often complex path to purchase). With programmatic tools and techniques, event marketers are better equipped to send hyper relevant messages to targeted audiences, increasing the likelihood of conversion. 3. An omni-channel, real-time approach to audience engagement As the buyer s journey becomes more complex, pressure mounts on marketers to reach audiences where they are engaging natively. For event marketers, that means adopting audience acquisition efforts that are omnichannel. The growth and popularity of omnichannel marketing parallels that of programmatic marketing. As programmatic becomes smarter and more intuitive, it has become easier to initiate and manage omni-channel marketing campaigns. With programmatic, event marketers can better syndicate information about the customer s journey across channels, with the ability to react and adjust content and spend in real time. Without programmatic, omnichannel media buying and campaign management can be complex, difficult to manage, and require a specialized focus. Marketers are forced to focus on media buying, optimization and ad placement one channel at a time, which frequently results in a disconnected media strategy. 06 Successful audience acquisition efforts efforts today require a robust multichannel approach; creating synergies across all platforms and channels. Programmatic makes it all possible and achievable.
How to Get Started with Programmatic There is no one size fits all approach to programmatic. What works for one marketer may not work for the next. Because the programmatic landscape can be challenging to navigate, these basic steps can help you evaluate the marketplace, pick a partner and kick-start a successful programmatic initiative. 1. Setting Goals Although it may seem like marketing 101 it is important to take a step back and evaluate your goals before diving into the world of programmatic. By answering the following questions you will be well prepared to kick off your programmatic marketing process. What will make for a successful event (event ROI, attendance numbers, the right attendees)? Framing up the overall idea of success can help to direct your programmatic efforts ensuring that goals and objectives ladder back to the overall event success metrics. How are your current marketing efforts helping to drive event objectives? What are you doing now that is working and how can you improve your event marketing efforts? These questions will help ensure that your programmatic efforts align with your overall event marketing strategies. Are there audiences or objectives that you are not reaching with your current initiatives? Programmatic marketing may be able to fill in those gaps in your event marketing efforts. From insights to conversion/ticket sales, there are ways to craft programmatic efforts to support your overall goals. What are your marketing constraints (budget/time)? There are always realities that come into play such as small budgets or lack of bandwidth. Being transparent up front with your constraints can be critical in choosing the right vendor for your needs. 07
Turnkey vs. Customizable Solutions Turnkey solution: A turnkey solution is more hands off for the event marketer. It offers less control over placement and impressions and is often easier to scale. If you think you have sufficient audience data and you are looking to layer on some additional insights, then a turnkey platform can work for you. Customizable solution: If strong third party insights is a priority, then a more customizable platform may be necessary. These types of solutions allow event marketers to get in the deep details of the campaign, offering controls for fine-tuning and the ability to tailor the output of data. 2. Picking a Partner There are many different types of programmatic partners in the marketplace. With you goals in mind, here are some things to consider when picking your programmatic partner. Customization In picking a partner assess your bandwidth and goals. Although programmatic is an automated marketing solution, it is not a tool that you set and forget. Programmatic solutions can range from off the shelf (turnkey) to extremely customizable. The more customizable the platform the more detailed your view will be. If optimization and data analytics is something you want leave to the experts, then a more turnkey solution may be right for you. Budget The amount of money you want to spend on programmatic can dictate which partner you choose. Despite your budget constraints, you want to make sure you are looking for a partner that clearly outlines fees/markups in initial conversations (so there are no surprises). If you have large budgets to spend, you may want to consider a specific vendor that can handle large buys at a time. Our Pick in the Marketplace A programmatic tool that is versatile, responsive, and caters to a range of budgets is Digilant. What we love: Budget Friendly: Digilant works well with budgets of all sizes (unlike many big players in the programmatic space) Programmatic Education: Digilant has a robust programmatic curriculum to support growing needs. Account and Support Team: The team is responsible and flexible. They are able to plan and execute on campaigns with transparency and reliable support. 08
3. Performance Quality & Reporting It is helpful to keep in mind that customization and budget restrictions may affect your campaign performance quality. Decide what your non-negotiables are and choose a vendor that can meet your needs. Performance Quality Lack of customization may be better for your budget but it also could mean a lack of transparency. Be aware of vendors that withhold placement and performance data. They could be covering up for potentially fraudulent clicks or low quality placements. Reporting Your programmatic partner should be able to provide customized reporting to suit your needs. It is normal to receive weekly reports that outline your campaign s performance, allowing for actionable optimizations. As part of your reporting ask, inquire about, audience insights that can provide information about your ideal customer. Also ask about publisher sites where your content is being shown to ensure that your ads are maximizing their potential and reach. 09
Expanding the Message with Programmatic Did you know that video can be programmatic? A programmatic live stream platform we love: AmpLive See how we were able to generate 10k new viewers during one of our recent events using AmpLive. By now it is clear that programmatic marketing can provide measurable value to event marketers acquisition strategies to help boost audience attendance. Because today s attendee has an always-on mindset, event marketers need to stay relevant and engaging from the time of event conception to the months following the event. With a finite beginning and end, programmatic can offer seamless opportunities keep the event messaging relevant both during and beyond your event. Amplify Event Content Event marketers have found that an easy cost effective way to increase the reach of any event is to live stream content to people who couldn t attend in person. Traditionally webcasts, webinars and live stream platforms are promoted to those who already know a brand, and in many cases content is gated gated by form fills or registration forms. Programmatic can be used to help stream your event content in a cost effective way through the form of display ads. Platforms like AmpLive allow event marketers to pair compelling live event video with their programmatic marketing efforts. Event Follow up that Matters For many event marketers, one of the biggest challenges post-event is determining which prospects and leads to follow up with first. Programmatic strategies can help event marketers proactively reach attendees who are no longer reading event emails or engaging with the event app. Through audience targeting techniques event marketers can better deliver follow up messages based on behavioral, geo-location, or demographic data improving the chances of re-peat attendance. Testing & Measurement Event measurement is not always systematic and can be hard to define. Programmatic marketing data can back up an event marketer s audience acquisition efforts with hard (non-negotiable metrics). These metrics can be used to define future audience personas, create new buyer s journeys and most importantly, attribute specific attendee actions to conversions. 10
Conclusion As new technologies, innovations and trends continue to direct today s event landscape, marketers have more creative ways to reach their audiences. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, programmatic marketing is a mustuse tool when it comes to audience acquisition and event marketing efforts. From audience targeting techniques to follow up tactics there is a place for programmatic pre, during and post event. Reaching an driving meaningful action from your audience certainly isn t getting any easier, but programmatic marketing sure can help. About Cramer As a brand experience agency, Cramer is thriving in today s new experiential era of marketing. The company s fast growth has come as it expands its relationships with long-standing clients, while also landing a new roster of global brands. Cramer s portfolio of work spans a variety of brands including Caterpillar, Mimecast, GE, IBM, Jordan s Furniture, Puma, Siemens, W.B Mason, and UPS. These clients trust Cramer to invent, craft, and fuel content driven experiences, including meetings and events, activations, community and advocacy programs, mixed reality, and marketing campaigns. Visit cramer.com to see how we achieve more for our clients. Join the 100,000 marketers that receive our newsletters to stay on top of experiential marketing trends, original thinking, and curated industry news. Subscribe today. Jessica Peterson Strategic Planner Joe Lovett Director, Strategic Planning We invent, craft, and fuel content-driven experiences that achieve more for global brands. If you re ready to achieve more, so are we. Let s go. 781.278.2300 cramer.com