Introduction

Customer behavior is always changing and evolving. It is a given that all your competitors in business are actively strategizing to catch consumer attention (whether an individual or a business) for similar products and services. In such a competitive scenario, to thrive, your business needs to come up with creative ways to serve advertisements to clients. It is here that programmatic advertising gives you the edge you need.

Marketing and ad-serving personalization are also big of late, and with third-party cookies rapidly on the decline, programmatic has immense potential to double up as a source of first-party data; all the professional programmatic advertising companies would agree.

According to this eMarketer report, the USA has already invested a quantum of $123.22 billion in programmatic digital display ads; it isn’t a new concept. Additionally, this report says that programmatic advertising makes up 72% of the digital displays, establishing just how popular and useful this method of marketing is. Let’s learn a few more interesting things about how programmatic can help your business capture client attention in an engaging, retentive way.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the process of utilizing the power of automation and machine learning software to judge the purchase of digital real estate to place your ads in real-time, informed, and powered by cohort data and related client insight to make the advertisements more targeted and goal-focused.

The best part about programmatic is that its scope extends beyond static advertising – it gives you the power to place dynamic advertisements in real-time on platforms such as ad screens in malls, streaming websites, mobile applications, online publications, and much more.

It is a highly data-driven, automation-oriented way of serving ads to your clients and consumers, garnering higher attention and response from whomever the ad is shown to.

How Does Programmatic Work?

Programmatic advertising is quintessentially an automated process. Whatever process happens behind the scenes of the software is completed quickly, within a matter of seconds. The entire shebang employs the use of intelligent software to purchase ad space, push an ad through the ad exchange interface and place an impression on the purchased space – and it all takes just a couple of seconds.

This may be a seemingly short process; however, there are quite a few steps involved to identify an ad space and place an ad there. It all begins with the advertiser using a Demand Side Platform, and the publisher (website owner) using a Server-Side Platform. These platforms communicate with each other automatically based on the parameters and protocol specified by the deployer.

When a visitor comes to a website, the website owner releases an ad space for sale. This attracts bidders (advertisers) who have been targeting that space to place an impression. Bidding begins, and the highest bidder wins that piece of digital estate – and eventually serves an ad to the visitor, hoping they would click on it and convert. This long-winded process is fully automated and only takes an instant to execute.

Programmatic advertising is popular because it helps advertisers economize their bids while automating them, informed by the insights generated from the data of their consumers.

Why to Use Programmatic for B2B

There are multiple benefits of leveraging the power of programmatic B2B advertising. The five most prominent benefits are listed below.

• Automation. Use of intelligent software equipped with machine learning allows for automating the creation, placement and bidding of ad campaigns, saving a lot of time
• Real-time measurement. Effective campaign tracking is possible when real-time results are instantly viewable, helping you dynamically streamline your funnels
• Huge ad inventory. Programmatic display ad investment is projected to reach $141.9 in 2023. One major reason is the advertisers’ exposure to an untapped ad space that isn’t available through standard PPC
• Sophisticated targeting. Programmatic helps you place microtargeting parameters to focus ad serving with high precision to a business that is most likely to convert
• Scalable. Programmatic functions according to requirement, allowing you to be aggressive with bidding when needed or letting you adjust the campaigns to suit strategies
• Ad management and tracking. By measuring results in real-time, you get instant insights into which strategies are working and which aren’t

How to Apply Programmatic for B2B

There are five effective ways of applying programmatic ads to a variety of digital real estate. Here are 5 best applications of programmatic advertising you can leverage for B2B marketing.

Connected TV Advertising

There is great potential in leveraging the ad space available with Smart TVs these days, in combination with the emerging OTT streaming. You can now analyze and cohort your audience to bid for the top time slots they are viewing on the TV and place your ads there.

Native Advertising

Native ads emulate the look and feel of other items in the application feed or webpage, garnering more impressions than banner or pop-up ads. Programmatic has helped reduce the cost of native advertising in real-time by automating the bid process, which you can economically utilize for higher CTRs.

YouTube Advertising

According to the Search Engine Journal, YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world. If you aren’t leveraging the ad space it provides, your business may be missing out on a lot of revenue. Programmatic offers you the power to place your ads in video, out-stream ad spaces and in-stream video ads.

Digital Out of Home

Ad spaces like screens in malls, dynamic billboards and the like offer great viewing potential by large masses. Programmatic advertising helps you secure ads in these high-viewership areas for no printing costs, automatically economizing the entire operation.

Social Advertising

Social media is where all the action happens today. Placing advertisements on this real estate helps capture the attention of the businesses you are targeting. Programmatic gives you a competitive edge in securing the good ad spaces on various social media platforms that support programmatic, like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and more.

Conclusion

Programmatic advertising isn’t a mere option any longer – it has become a necessity to stay in the race of securing consumer attention. The same applies to B2B as well; in order to ensure that your services are presented to the best audience in their best light, programmatic advertising aids greatly.