Is Programmatic Advertising A Good Fit For Small Businesses?

Programmatic advertising has been a staple in enterprise and medium and large businesses, particularly in the B2C space, for many years. In more recent years, programmatic agencies and buying platforms and strategies have become more accessible to smaller businesses. Above The Fold helps small and medium business to access premiere inventory and ad formats for lower minimums.

As marketers, we always seem to be chasing the next big tactic, competitive edge, and a way to influence customers.Programmatic advertising s evolving to be the most effective way to tick all these boxes on a marketer or businesses list. By utilizing programmatic, advertisers can easily scale, consolidate and optimize how they target, influence and convert potential customers and clients with more transparency and control.

Though there are very many ways that your business could utilize programmatic successfully, there are at times a few caveats. In this blog, we’ll be exploring how programmatic can help your smaller business and how you can utilize it to its full potential. 

Programmatic May Not Make Sense Right Now If: 

  • You have never done paid advertising for your business
  • You don’t have a lead flow or proven converting offers
  • You aren’t looking for growth and awareness strategies to drive long term growth

Programmatic May Make Sense If: 

  • You have been advertising and have consistent budget
  • You are looking to accelerate growth within current systems
  • You know your target audience and want to reach them in new ways

There is no doubt that most of the ways we buy media today will evolve to a programmatic framework. However, in the short term, there are still a multitude of options for advertisers to utilize before they may be ready to take that next step. Programmatic is a truly valuable option as a marketing strategy, so it’s important to make sure that it makes sense for you and your unique business.

Does Programmatic Advertising Make Sense for You?

Programmatic advertising is a great strategy to layer on top of Google and social media paid media campaigns, or as options instead of traditional radio or TV. It offers better and more cost effective solutions in terms of targeting specific audiences, scaling campaigns quickly and efficiently, and measuring performance across multiple channels. Additionally, programmatic advertising allows advertisers to take advantage of real-time bidding (RTB) platforms where they can bid on ad space in real time and have their ads seen by their target audience immediately.

Programmatic vs Manual Buying

The primary difference between programmatic buying and manual buying is speed and accuracy. With programmatic buying, ads are placed within milliseconds of a website visitor viewing an ad space available through an RTB platform. This enables advertisers to reach the exact audiences they’re targeting with precision accuracy—which is something that cannot be done with manual buying. Additionally, since automated bidding yields higher returns than traditional strategies due to its efficiency and scalability, it can result in more value per dollar spent on advertising campaigns overall.

However, there are also some drawbacks associated with using programmatic ads over manual buying decisions. For example, there’s less control over which websites your ads will be displayed on since this process is managed through automated algorithms instead of human intervention. Additionally, relying solely on automation can lead to misallocation of resources since ad buys may not always be optimized correctly if left in automated hands without any human oversight or feedback loops in place.

Making Data Driven Decisions

When deciding whether or not you should utilize programmatic advertising for your particular business marketing efforts, it’s important to consider the data that’s available to you in order to make more informed decisions regarding its implementation. By leveraging data from past campaigns—such as customer demographic information or website performance metrics—you can gain valuable insights into who you should be targeting with your ads (and when). Additionally, gaining access to customer behavior data across multiple channels will provide you with additional context about your customers so that you can better tailor your marketing messages accordingly.

The Risks and Rewards of Programmatic Ads

Utilizing programmatic advertising can come with certain risks that should be taken into account before implementing this type of strategy for your business marketing efforts. These risks can include taking fraud prevention measures, as hackers tend to look at these platforms as desirable targets due to their high payouts per click/conversion rates – meaning that there needs to be adequate protection against fraudulent activities taking place on the platform otherwise money could potentially be wasted if hackers were to exploit loopholes within the system itself or inject code into advertisements themselves which could potentially lead customers away from products rather than towards them (as intended). 

However, despite these potential risks – if executed correctly – there are far more significant potential rewards that come with utilizing this type of strategy. Such as increased ROI due to only targeting these granular/specific audiences that you want to get in front of (in comparison to traditional methods such as TV/Radio/Billboards etc) and improved visibility, resulting from building a reputation for your brand online by having programmatic ads appear across multiple platforms simultaneously. This ultimately results in increasing brand awareness & recognition amongst consumers on a larger scale than would normally be possible otherwise, thus leading you towards higher conversion rates & sales opportunities!

So how do you know if programmatic advertising is right for your business? Ultimately, it comes down to understanding what kind of return-on-investment (ROI) you’re looking for and whether or not investing in this kind of marketing strategy makes sense financially given current market conditions and goals within the company’s desired industry space – but ultimately, weighing out all options prior to making any definitive decisions will ensure success whenever embarking upon any new venture! Programmatic advertising wants to get you to where you want to be at the end of the day, and wants to make sure that you’re being seen by the right people at the right time. 

Overall, programmatic advertising presents an exciting opportunity for businesses to optimize their advertising efforts and achieve greater success and is a marketing strategy that is growing rapidly. By carefully considering your budget, objectives, and available data, you can determine if programmatic is the right fit for your business. Embrace the power of programmatic, but only when it makes strategic sense for you.