More and more marketers that I talk to are focused on building a solid relationship with their customers. It seems we are moving away from simply transactional experiences with customers. In my last blog, titled “Reinventing Our Marketing Behavior”, I briefly discussed that consumer capitalism, the effort by brands to maximize consumer satisfaction, was in full force. We recently launched a campaign with a major eCommerce brand that encompassed this philosophy regarding customer appreciation. The campaign’s mission was to “delight and surprise” customers. Their marketing team worked with Klick Push to create a display ad campaign designed to deliver 1) an AMAZING customer experience and 2) revenue in the form of online sales.

How it worked

First, we gathered insight around their target demographic which was established by their DMP (data management platform) data. A marketer from the team then boiled the data down to three specific target audience segments (High Level):

• Segment 1: 18-25 year olds
• Segment 2: 26-40 year olds
• Segment 3: 45-65 year olds

Next, Klick Push segmented digital music, that would meet each audience segment. We created playlists of digital music that would appear within the display ad.

Finally, we launched the display ad campaign to consumers across the media of choice by the marketer. The experience for a consumer was similar to the music streaming application,  Pandora, where users would be able to preview the song from within the ad or skip the track to play the next best song that was curated and selected for them.

User experience:

• User browsed the Internet and was deemed a target for a Klick Push-powered display ad
• User previewed and engaged with music from within the ad (preview, skip, stream)
• Once user liked the song they previewed, they could click on the call to action
• After they clicked, users could download the song and learn more about the brand

Results

Results showcased how personalized and curated music truly created a “best customer” experience by emotionally connecting with consumers.

As a result we saw amazing brand lift and performance from ROI to engagement:

• .4% Engagement of ad (Industry standard – .08%)
• .3% CTR (Industry standard – .05%)
• 6:1 revenue to dollar spent ratio ($6 in revenue for every $1 spent – Double Click)
• $145 was the average purchase order (30% increase from standard)

Furthermore, appealing to a consumer’s auditory senses not only has an overwhelming effect on a consumer’s desire to engage but it has a commanding effect on their purchasing decision. We see time and time again that customers, we, are more likely to interact with something that speaks to us and who we are as individuals. Music plays a key role in our lives, and when marketers use music to speak to us, we respond by taking action.

Please click here contact us for a full overview and case study

-Ben Jorgensen, CEO and Co-Founder

The post Driving ROI from Display Advertising: E-Tailer Case Study appeared first on Klick Push.

Being an ad tech startup these days comes with a ton of hurdles. Over the past 10 years, startups in the ad tech space approached brands with delusions of grandeur, over promising and under delivering.

If you’re a new ad tech startup, this decade of often missed expectations, has created an environment where it is almost impossible to survive, especially if you’re company is bootstrapped. It’s not just that today’s ad tech companies are being held more accountable for marketing ROI, proof of concept to even get a meeting, and the requirement to exhibit an extremely unique and innovative idea. It’s that VP and directors at agencies and brands have become so overwhelmed and immune to these startups that getting meetings sometimes feels like winning Olympic gold.

To some degree, I cannot blame the agency or CMO. The barrier to entry to be in online advertising was, at one point, so low that almost anyone could serve an ad by turning on their computer and dedicate a server to push a lightweight image. People could then claim technological expertise and targeting efficiency because it is nearly impossible to discover your ad across the web. There was too much faith given by the marketer or agency to networks and digital technology startups because agencies and marketers are not traditionally technologists. This trust was often abused when advertising performance didn’t live up to the hype of the pitch.

The result is that marketers are becoming much more creative at finding potential partners.

Brands and agencies are forming partnerships through tech accelerator programs (boot camps for startups), creating innovation labs where they can mold technology at early stages, and launching pitch competitions where startups get a chance to present in front of marketers. For example, I observed a pitch competition that a brand held, where the startups had a month to put together a custom pitch to stand out. It was awesome… unique… different… solved a problem… everything you could want for a marketer. The next steps were to potentially work with that brand. Not a contract. Not a deal. All that heart soul, time, expectations, anticipation, long nights, pizza, working of the network, and well… “Great Job… you were in front of 15 C-Level Execs”.

In addition, marketers are putting these innovative technologies and businesses (startups) through much more rigorous sales cycles (some that last years just to get on a sales cycle), complete with custom presentations without follow ups (remember the expression “buying on yahoo won’t get you fired.”?), and requests for free labor and work to build a proof of concept specific to that company.

While this is all great and helpful for vetting, the result for marketers is that they are not striking while the iron is hot. These methods simply are not scalable. This is also unfortunate because it could impede the next Google or Facebook from happening (I am pretty sure that Facebook and Google didn’t go through pitch competitions), and also because the role of a marketer is to experiment, test things out, and find unique ways to capture an audience’s attention. Testing these new businesses and technologies does not mean that you have to have a hunch that it will work out. Startups these days are tied to strict expectations on ROI and proof through analytics… more than ever before.

Here are some ways that marketers can better work with today’s start-ups:

Help direct and mature startups as they have a lot to learn and well… you won’t have to deal with bad best practices that drive you nuts today.
Invest in these startups: use your marketing dollars to invest and create the future. Asking for gratis work only hurts the company and will potentially put them out of business (which doesn’t do anyone justice when the solution works).
Please stop saying “we are all planned out for the year, but thanks for the time.” If things don’t work as planned (pun intended), have a partners in place to complete your goals.
Today’s crop of ad tech companies are different and better than those of the past. For one, data has had a large impact on the advertising industry. We have the ability to measure ad campaigns in so many different ways that it requires us to be accountable and transparent. The startup community is bigger than ever and marketers have the ability to use this to their advantage in a positive way that can build their future as well. This isn’t the time to exploit the labor, the findings, and the innovation of companies; it is the time to reinforce change and ride the wave so that everyone wins.

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