You’re sold on the benefits of a marketing operating system, but you’re not sure of the level of investment needed to make this investment worthwhile.
When it comes to investing in programmatic technology, the most important thing to understand is, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.
Here’s a breakdown of things to consider:
Strategy
Success is directly proportionate to the effort you put into:
- Defining Your Goals: Defining your goals at the outset will give you something to measure against and help you to understand what the cost/benefit is of your investment.
- Using Your Data: Using the data you already have on your existing customers will help you identify whom you should be targeting with your media. Applying additional data sets will help you find new audiences to convert to customers.
- Creating More Content: Different people respond to different messages. Executing a media campaign with only one creative or minimal assets means you are limiting your audience. Creating different versions of your message and letting the technology determine what audience is right for what message will get you the biggest return.
- Budgeting for Success: When you invest in getting the above right, you will be in a much better position to reap the benefits financially. Determine your budget based on your outcomes. In addition, continually reinvest that budget to drive bigger and better outcomes. The more you spend, the more the algorithms learn what works best and the better the outcomes will be.
Spend
Regardless of how a provider has structured their pricing model, one thing is clear: You, the Advertiser, should have complete transparency into how your budget is being spent.
Execution
Planning, executing, optimizing and analyzing digital marketing campaigns is a full-time job.
There are a variety of ways in which our clients staff against their programmatic practice. Some elect to bring on staff internally to manage all aspects of programmatic marketing; others choose to work with external partners, such as those within our OPEN Partner Marketplace.
If you choose to hire, you’ll likely need one to two full-time employees to manage programmatic strategies in-house. Whether our internal experts are working directly with your staff to manage your campaigns, or you’re utilizing our NMI training, it usually takes between 1-4 months until your in-house staff are running their own campaigns. MediaMath also offers the Marketing Engineer Program, an immersive 6-month rotational program in which individuals become experts on digital media and the technology that fuels it.
Take the time to map your path to success and you will ultimately reap the benefits.
This blog post is the seventh in a series for marketers that are curious about programmatic technology and would like to educate themselves on the value it can provide.
Keep up with this series by following the Building Block Series tag on the blog.
New to programmatic? Take our quiz to find out where you stand when it comes to your programmatic prowess.