The Internet of things (IoT) will play a major role in the way we conduct business and assimilate information in a more interconnected world. But do we have the right infrastructure to let IoT reach its full potential? And are we fully disposed to explore its immense benefits to digital marketing? Go through this incisive infographic to learn more about it.
The search engine network Bing from Microsoft is bringing in a host of updates in order to help digital marketers to better target their customers with location based targeting. It is also giving you more options in terms of ad scheduling. All this will help marketers to customize their ad campaigns based on their exacting business needs.
You can advertise to your prospective customers based on their specific geographical location. This kind of hyper-local targeting is most common on mobile devices. Today more and more people are surfing the Internet via mobile devices and this helps to make geo-targeting that much more efficient because of GPS enabling. But there is more to geo-targeting from Bing than meets the eye. Bing allows you to serve a user depending on the location intent of the user as well. If you are selling realty in Los Angeles and a person from New York City is interested in your LA properties then that person will also see your ads even though he is physically in NYC.
You can even exclude users in a certain geographical area depending on your needs. If you are running a retail chain and you don’t have a store in a certain location then you can exclude that area or if a certain region offers very low conversion rates then you can disable your ads for that location. You can choose the days of the week and the time of the day (in increments of fifteen minutes) during which you want your ads to be served.
All this is good news to digital marketers who can now better control their ad spends and deliver very narrow targeted campaigns. You can get a detailed report about the location of your users and the impressions that you receive. This can then be mapped back to the device from where it originated for better understanding of user requirements. You can choose the devices on which your ads need to be served like mobile, tablet or PC and even chose the specific OS. You can target an ad group within an ad campaign separately thus overriding the inherited targeting from the ad campaign. All this goes to add that much more punch to your online advertising. Updates like these from Bing will be immensely beneficial to digital marketers going forward.
So how do you think these new features from Bing will help your ad targeting?
LinkedIn has acquired B2B ad tech company Bizo in a deal costing approximately $175 million. 
This acquisition comes after Facebook bought LiveRail and Twitter purchased TapCommerce recently. These moves by social networks are aimed at bolstering their ad reach beyond the boundaries of their websites.
Bizo enables B2B marketers to post ads to professional target audiences across the web. Bizo is integrated with marketing automation platforms and also has a database that will help marketers target by company, industry and functional area parameters. Bizo helps marketers nurture prospects at every stage of the buying funnel through targeted content and supports precise and measurable multi-channel marketing programs.
Bizo’s targeting capabilities coupled with LinkedIn’s large professional network can help B2B marketers improve performance of multi-channel campaigns.
LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo was closely followed by the launch of a new feature, Direct Sponsored Content (DSC), which will help marketers reach out to specific audiences with more personalized content.
DSC is an extension of LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates. DSC enables marketers to publish sponsored content to their LinkedIn homepage feed without posting it on the Company Page. DSC can be viewed by page administrators on the Company Page but it will show only for those users who fit the target criteria specified for the campaign. The launch of DSC will allow marketers to target and engage with the right members of the target audience using more personalized content.
Earlier, with Sponsored Updates, marketers had to post content to their Company Page. If they wanted to test an ad, they had to repeatedly post ads on the Company Page to measure the audience’s reaction. It was very likely that users would get irked by this. Marketers collected a mix of organic and paid results and could not measure the performance of posts accurately.
DSC now allows marketers to optimize content according to the preferences of specific consumers and conduct A/B tests across audience segments.
Will LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo achieve the desired results? Can Direct Sponsored Content (DSC) contribute to LinkedIn targeting and personalization capabilities?
Image Source: Bizo
AOL’s Adap.tv’s new patent allows it to tie consumer sales to specific television advertisements. This helps marketers to connect conversions with television advertising better.
The new patent involves a system which can recognize conversions stemming from television and based on the study of those patterns, can predict the possibility of future conversions. For companies, activating this online conversion attribution capability is as simple as adding conversion tracking script on their websites.
Sales will be measured against audiences who have been exposed to your ads and those who haven’t been. This system measures the total change among those groups and provides capabilities for real-time analytics. Being able to access real-time analytics is a huge plus compared to the earlier scenario where this data was available once in a quarter or a year.
Using this technology, marketers can understand the capability of their TV or digital advertising in driving sales. It also helps marketers to have a more complete view of the performance of their marketing campaigns across channels. Marketers can track conversions to a specific ad and also to a particular airing time. This will be a lot of help for marketers during budget allocation for television and optimizing effective ads.
Inability to trace conversions to their TV ad campaigns has long been a pain point for marketers. Such capabilities are steps towards addressing this concern as well as bringing together TV and online advertising.
What do you think about this analytical capability? Let us know in your comments…
Image source
