What Programmatic Marketing Is & Why It’s Important

For many small businesses, reaching their target audience can be a major challenge. Most advertising approaches require significant time and resources to make a substantial impact. In some cases, advertisements can even backfire. 

Programmatic marketing is one way to reach your ideal customers at scale without doing all that heavy lifting yourself. Additionally, it’s flexible enough to use for various campaigns, like search engine advertising or email marketing.

This article will explain programmatic marketing​, why marketers use it so frequently now, and how you can get started.

What Is Programmatic Marketing?

Programmatic marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses automation and data to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. It’s an automated way to purchase media, and real-time bidding (RTB) technology fuels it.

Programmatic marketing uses AI and data to personalize ads, identify new customers and ensure they’re happy with their experience. This marketing method tends to be more affordable and targeted than traditional marketing methods — meaning you can get the most out of every dollar you spend on ads.

How Programmatic Marketing Works

Programmatic marketing works when you enter a page set up, particularly for programmatic advertising. This marketplace helps connect publishers with ad space to sell and advertisers ready to buy ad space to promote their company.

Advertisers will contact their programmatic ad agency when they need to launch a campaign. The agency then uses the demand-side platform (DSP) to automate the purchasing of ad impressions.

DSPs allow advertisers and agencies to buy media inventory from more than one publisher. It ensures the ads target the right audience with the help of a data management platform (DMP).

A DMP contains the data of an audience, including various factors such as demographics, location, user behavior and more.

When the advertiser visits a publisher’s website with the right target audience, the website sends an ad request to the supply-side platform (SSP). The SSP will run an auction, and the advertisers must compete for the ad position. Yet, only one company can win by bidding the most money.

By using the data from the DSP, advertisers can evaluate the ad and align it with their target data — crucial information that determines the bidding price. This process is known as real-time bidding.

While it sounds tedious, it only takes a second to complete the bidding. Once an impression sells, it immediately displays on the publisher’s website.

What Are The Benefits Of Programmatic Marketing?

Programmatic marketing offers plenty of benefits for small businesses. Below is a list of some benefits your business can expect to reap.

1. Frequency Control

When you create a bid, you control the frequency and time. For instance, you know the audience you want to reach is mostly online during the day. You can customize your campaign to only bid for ad spots tailored to your audience’s behaviors.

This is especially useful because you can increase your focus on your target market. You can also reach them during a precise time of the day you know they’re online.

By controlling your campaign, you get the benefit that saves you from wasting money and putting it to better use.

2. Price Control

In addition to controlling the frequency, you also benefit from establishing the amount to pay. Like pay-per-click advertising, you can choose how much you want to pay in bidding. 

This ability allows small businesses to establish the maximum bidding amount and overall advertising budget.

3. Relevancy

Programmatic marketing also allows you to pay for the most relevant impressions. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, this method will enable you to reach the target audience that aligns with your advertising campaign.

In your campaign, you can create the minimum number of impressions that you want to receive. Implementing this ensures you achieve your goals and reach people more likely to buy.

By investing your money into relevant impressions, you increase your return on investment for your business.

4. Precise Targeting

With programmatic marketing, you can advertise your brand to a specific target audience. This makes your campaign more effective since you’re choosing an audience that resonates most with the content you’re promoting.

You can also determine which content works best for your campaign by monitoring which gets the most clicks and makes a positive impression on your audience.

You can also enhance the user experience of these ads, which increases the chances of customers clicking on them.

5. Use for Different Channels

One of the most beneficial aspects of programmatic marketing is its versatility. You can advertise on the channel that you prefer. Whether you want to promote through email, apps or e-commerce, you can choose which medium fits best.

For instance, you know your audience prefers to use email. You can tailor your ads in a way that best reaches them. In turn, you acquire more people through a channel your audience uses most.

How Do I Get Started With Programmatic Marketing?

If you wish to get started with programmatic marketing, consider implementing these tips to drive the best results.

1. Set Your Performance Goals

As with any digital advertising campaign, you should set your goals before creating one. To achieve this, you must use your current data to determine the type of advertising and strategy needed to reach your short and long-term goals.

2. Choose Your Programmatic Marketing Platform

Many different vendors offer programmatic solutions. Therefore, it’s important to choose the one that’s right for your business. A couple of ways you can determine the right fit is if it matches certain factors like price and features.

3. Use Data to Influence Your Strategy

Programmatic marketing performs exceptionally well when you use data. When collecting your insights from your data, you can use that information to target your customers and drive sales.

One thing to be aware of is that third-party data will disappear soon, and advertisers will have to use other ways to learn about their target audience — such as first-party data.

4. Define Your Target Audience

Your ad aims to ensure you’re reaching the right audience so you have a better chance of converting. As soon as you define your campaign objectives and strategy, you’ll need to do the same for your target audience. 

Consider creating a customer persona to help you determine the type of audience you need to target. Use your data to analyze whether you should set a geo-target campaign. There are also many other ways to reach your audience if you change your settings to target browsers, operating systems and devices.

5. Stay Authentic

Because programmatic marketing heavily relies on algorithms and machines, it can be easy to remain far away from authenticity. Once you choose a platform to run your campaign, you’ll need to allocate skilled marketers to plan and optimize your buying activities. That way, there is some intervention to provide a human touch.

The Future of Programmatic Marketing

As you can see, programmatic marketing is all about data. It’s a form of digital marketing that uses algorithms to automate the placement of ads on websites and other online platforms.

While this technology has been around for over a decade, it has only recently become mainstream — thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence advances.

This technology is constantly learning and updating itself, which will help advertisers target audiences better over time. As such, this form of digital marketing will become fundamental to most marketing strategies and enable hyper-segmentation. 

Yet, it’s important to note that programmatic marketing isn’t something to set and forget. For now, it requires ongoing maintenance to ensure your ads are still relevant.

Make the Most of Your Marketing Campaigns

Programmatic marketing is a great way for small businesses to reach their target audience. It can help you save money and be more efficient with your marketing dollars. When getting started, implement the tips above and use your data to make the most of your campaigns.