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Advertising during COVID-19

Advertising during COVID-19

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog, Social Media

The past few weeks have been a time of unprecedented disruption to almost every part of our daily lives. The current pandemic has upended our routines and changed the way businesses do business.

Many businesses have been required to close their physical doors and covert to fully online sales. Other “essential” businesses have been navigating how to keep their employees safe and healthy while still trying to meet their customers needs and heightened expectations. Still other businesses are facing the harsh reality of not being allowed to do business at all.

No matter the situation, Adventure Ad Agency is working with each and every one of our clients to help them succeed even under these strange and challenging circumstances. Regardless of what your current situation is as a business owner or employee, we are hear to remind you that life and business can still go on, and as we all adjust to new ways of communicating and doing business, we are here for you.

While it may be challenging to worry about advertising during a pandemic, there are numerous opportunities for businesses to continue to reach out to their customers, build brand awareness, and attract business.

Here are some of the ways adverting is more important than ever during COVID-19 and how you can do your best to help your business succeed:

Embrace Social Media

Social media was critical to any business before the current pandemic. However, with people stuck at home spending countless hours on their phone unable to interact normally with their peers in social settings, social media has become even more important.

Your customers are stuck at home on their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube account, and more. If you weren’t active on your social media before, get active! If you are, think of new ways to promote your business or simply stay in touch with your customers.

1. Post an update on how your business is effected by COVID-19.

If you are open for business, how are you protecting both your employees are customers? Have your hours of operation changed? How can customers get in touch with you? Let your social media family know what is going on. Keeping your customer base and potential new customers informed is important.

2. Share resources.

In times like these, communication is key. Along with posting updates about how your business is adapting to COVID-19, share resources to help your clients stay in touch. If you have a new online order system, share the link. Provide answers to FAQs and local government announcements pertaining to your business.

3. Try something new.

Do not be afraid to try something new. Many businesses are trying Facebook Live for the first time. Clothing stores have put on Facebook live fashion shows. Law offices have done live Q&As with customers. Restaurants have started contests asking customers to share images of the enjoying their food to win a gift card.

What do all of these business have in common? They are trying something new. Even if these ideas aren’t new to you, keep up the good work. Look at what other business are doing for inspiration. Just keep trying!

4. Stay in touch. Build community.

At the end of the day, just stay active on social media. It will build brand awareness and ensure your customers don’t forget about you in the meantime. Now is a great time to build community and support one another. Use your social media account to build community.

Focus on What Matters & Adapt

With the current pandemic, your advertising plan is going to have to change. What you thought would work a few months ago won’t work in the current landscape and that is okay. You may have to lower your advertising spend or switch from one medium to another. The key is knowing how to adapt and planning ahead.

1. Know your business.

At Adventure Ad Agency, we work with our clients to fully understand the business of each and every one of our clients .This is critical to creating and implementing a successful advertising strategy and campaign.

As a business owner or employee, you are likely hyper-focused on ensuring your company can brave the storm of COVID-19. You know best what you need and your advertising plan should be specifically designed to do just that.

2. Be adaptable.

Sometimes it feels like the current rules and regulations change everyday. As you are looking to adjust your advertising strategy during this pandemic, be sure to remain adaptable.

3. Try new ways of advertising.

Just like with social media you should try new things, now is the time to try new advertising strategies. These are new times with new needs. You may find that something you haven’t tried before because it didn’t make sense for your business needs at the time is now the perfect fit. Many businesses are still just starting to explore online advertising. However, with many people stuck at home, online is where your customers are.

Hopefully these tips have helped inspire new ideas and served as important reminders to help your business during COVID-19. Advertising is a powerful tool that can help businesses survive in challenging times and thrive in even better ones. No matter your current situation, the team at Adventure Ad Agency is here to help and hopes you are staying safe and healthy!

If you have questions about how Adventure Ad Agency can help , contact us today! For more advertising insights, explore our blog or call us at 1-864-400-9920.

Adventure Ad Agency Team

Visit Our New Office Location!

by advwpman, posted in Blog

Adventure Ad Agency is excited to announce that we have moved offices. Come visit us at our new Greenville office location conveniently located close to the Bon Secours Wellness Arena and I-385!

We are growing. Thus, we needed more space in order to continue bringing our clients and partners the highest quality advertising services.

Come visit us today at 1010 East North Street, Suite B2, Greenville, SC 29601!

  • Adventure Ad Agency In House Photography
  • Adventure Ad Agency
  • Adventure Ad Agency
  • Adventure Ad Agency Team
  • Adventure Ad Agency
Brand Personas

Building Brand Personas to Enhance Advertising Efforts

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog

Never heard of a brand persona before? No worries. That is why we are here to help. Every billboard advertisement, social media post, and marketing flyer is an opportunity for you to tell your customers who you are and what you are all about. Each of different items are influenced by brand personas. Thus, understanding what brand personas are and how they can be used will allow you to take full advantage of those advertising opportunities and help you convert your audience to customers.

What is a Brand Persona?

It’s not that complicated. Your brand persona is the personality or “voice” of your business that shines through your advertising. In simple terms, it is your brand’s personality.

“A well-crafted buyer persona (or customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona) allows you to personalize your marketing on a large scale by humanizing core target groups of your customer base.”

Hootsuite

If you sell children’s clothing, your brand persona will likely need to be fun, light-hearted, and compassionate. However, if you sell motorcycles, you will need an entirely different brand persona. Your brand persona will be fierce, fiery, and fun. There will be more room for adult humor or content that would be completely unacceptable from a children’s store.

Why Does it Matter?

You may be wondering how this is different from your brand. Your brand persona and your brand should be closely aligned. However, brand personas focus specifically on the personality you are using to communicating your brand across different mediums and platforms.

While you should have one brand, you can have one or multiple brand personas. In fact, we encourage multiple personas.

The Importance of Multiple Brand Personas

When you are selling a product or service, you always want to be sure to consider your audience. The way you may sell a pencil, for example, to a 5 year old boy and a 30 year old woman would be very different. In advertising, this is the same. The way you communicate or reach your audience should depend on who your audience is and what they care about.

The various platforms you use to market your product are different and have different audiences. The way you speak to your followers on Facebook should be very different from how you communicate with your followers on LinkedIn.

Understanding your audience will allow you to build better brand personas. Your LinkedIn brand persona will be different from your Facebook. Taking the time and effort to carefully craft these identities can pay off in the long run.

The Challenges of Multiple Brand Personas

However, one of the biggest challenges is balancing multiple brand personas while still managing to maintain one cohesive brand.

Here is the way I like to think about it. We as individuals have one brand or identity. However, we have multiple different personas or aspects of our personalities. We show different aspects of ourselves at work, with friends, and around our families. We don’t speak to our grandmother the way we speak to our boss or our friend.

Brand personas are the same. You should keep your brand or business identity consistent across platforms, but you should also craft a specific brand persona for each platform or medium.

Whether or not your realize it, these small things are big things for businesses. Your brand persona can draw customers in or turn them away.

One of the biggest challenges of brand personas is balancing multiple brand personas while still maintaining one cohesive brand. Make sure to constant ask yourself – does this still align with my primary brand.

Building your Brand Persona

There are tons of great resources providing tips on how to create a brand persona such as Weebly or Buffer. Here are a few of our favorite tips from Forbes:

  • “Develop your personas around the 20% of your customers who account for 80% of your income.”  – Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
  • “By understanding their problem or challenge, you can determine how your product or service can best help them, where they may be typically seeking information on how to solve that problem, and even brainstorm content ideas that will engage with this persona.” – Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
  • “Consumers today expect that a brand persona be honest, human and true, but all that can be bolstered when the brand shows it really cares about higher-order ideals like community, humanity or citizenship.” – Daryl McCullough, Citizen Relations
  • “Considering the platforms, channels, times of day and overall communication method that is best for each persona will help ensure your ads are optimized for that audience.” – Ben LeDonni, CreativeMMS

If you have questions about how Adventure Ad Agency can help you build your brand personas or rejuvenate your advertising strategy, contact us today! For more ad insights, explore our blog or call us at 1-864-400-9920.

Social Media Planning

Getting the Most from your Social Media Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

by advwpman, posted in Blog, Marketing, Social Media

If you are a business owner or marketing manager, social media can often find itself becoming a low priority item on your busy day to day agenda. There is a misconception that it can be an ad-hock exercise when you have a few minutes of time to spare.

Unfortunately though, if this is your social media approach, you are likely not getting the most out of your marketing as you should be. More importantly, you are also missing out on the opportunity to build brand awareness and engage with customers.

While it can be tricky to know where to start to improve your social media, it is most important that you start some where. Just by being proactive in your planning and strategy, you will see improvement.

If you’re interested in taking your social media marketing to the next level and getting the most out of your efforts, follow our five easy steps to social media success.

1. Integrate your Social Media into your Marketing Plans

Stop thinking about social media as a separate effort from your main marketing mix. No matter how you advertise and market yourself, you need to be cohesive across all channels.

While your twitter brand persona may fun and quirky and your LinkedIn brand persona may be professional, the messages and organization values should be consistent across platform and across digital, social, and traditional advertising channels.

Your social media strategy should not be separate from your advertising or marketing strategy. Instead, your business marketing strategy should guide your social media planning. When you plan an advertising campaign, it should be a focus in traditional advertising as well as social.

2. Perform a Social Media Audit.

Once you’ve begun thinking about social media as a part of your larger business strategy, it is important to take a hard, honest look at your platforms. Ask yourself …

  1. How does reality compare to my expectations?
  2. Am I communicating the values of my business consistently, accurately, and to the best of my ability?
  3. Am I engaging with my audience in an informative and helpful manner (not just trying to sell products/services)?
  4. Are my brand messages consistent across platforms?
  5. Have I developed different personas for each platform? If yes, are these the correct personas?

While this is not an entire list of questions, it is a good starting point. The best way to get a thorough and accurate assessment of your social media platforms is to perform a social media audit.

Quite simply, this is a formal process where you document the status of each of your platforms. After the analysis, you can step back, see what is missing or doesn’t align, and then adjust from there. Hootsuite has a fantastic free guide and template you can use for your social media audit.

3. Understand your Audience

Your marketing messages should be directly informed by the audience on the platform you are using. For example, radio ads and television ads are extremely different. This is for obvious reasons as on television you can see the advertisement and on the radio you can only hear voices.

While the difference between social media platforms is not as extreme, it would still be wrong to assume your messaging should be the same on each platform. The platforms are different and so are the audiences.

Understanding your audience on each platform is key to success. The best way to do this – spend the time researching.

Check out these amazing resources from Hootsuite:

From this demographic information, you can make informed and educated decisions about content, timing, and more. This brings me to the question – does what I post actually matter?

4. Build an Editorial Calendar

Yes! What you post absolutely matters. Often, this is how you can tell an ad-hock social media plan from an informed planned one. While it is important to be timely and post relevant interesting content, it is also important to be prepared.

One of the best ways to stay on top of your social media planning is to build an editorial calendar. This is a tool to organize your content and plan out what, when, and how you will post to the various platforms you choose.

When we handle a client’s social media, we start with an editorial calendar. This allows us to plan out how often we want to post and ideal times to post, but it also ensures we take the time to think through what we are posting.

Not only does this allow for collaboration with the client, it also allows us to stay on top of sticking to consistent brand messaging. Because we aren’t rushed to post, we have time to think through different brand personas and communicate differently on different platforms to different audiences.

There are many different ways to build an editorial calendar, but yours should be design in a way that is best for your business. Here is one source that provides a free template as a starting point.

5. Measure it. Strive for Excellence.

Social media is both an art and a science. Because of the digital world we live in, marketing managers and business owners have access to lots and lots of data. We can see massive amounts of information. However, this can be a blessing or a curse.

It is easy to get overwhelmed with all of the information and not do anything with it. However, you are then missing out on useful information that can take your social media planning to the next level.

There is no one size fits all way to view your data and analytics, but finding what is best for you and your business is critical. Hootsuite provides tons of resources on how to look at your analytics, including this free guide.

Last but not least, if you make it through all five of these steps, keep going. Never stop evaluating through audits, staying up on the latest audience trends, utilizing an editorial calendar or planning system, and measuring your success. However, if you do only one think, start thinking about your social media as a part of your whole marketing strategy. You will start building more value from your efforts immediately.

For more information on how to drive value for your business through marketing and advertising, explore our blog, contact us here or call us at 1-864-400-9920.

Google Ads Digital Advertising

Is Digital Advertising Right for your Business?

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog

Digital Advertising can seem daunting and intimidating for many business owners. Unlike traditional advertising where you can see your ad in the local newspaper or on the billboard beside the highway, digital advertising is not as tangible for business owners.

However, lack of understanding shouldn’t keep your business from utilizing digital advertising in your marketing and advertising strategy. Digital advertising is quickly becoming an important part of all business’s advertising strategies and can drive real results for companies.

According to Wordstream, “for every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses make an average of $2 in revenue,” and according to eMarketer, digital ad spending is only continuing to grow.

Digital advertising is a powerful tool that can help reach the right audience (your customers), at the right place (websites they visit), and at the right time (when they are looking for your products or services.

Right Place.

One of the benefits of digital advertising is it reaches consumers where they spend their time – online.

The average American spends 24 hours a week online, as reported by the MIT Technology Review. This number is only rising. This is especially true among target demographics for advertisers such as millennials.

Right Time.

Another benefit of digital advertising is it reaches consumers when they are looking for your products or services.

Digital advertising platforms, such as Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords), works through keywords. As an advertiser, we set keywords that align with your products and services. When a user searches Google using those keywords, a search advertisements is shown promoting your business in the top few results. Plus, with Google Ads, you only pay if they click.

Additionally, retargeting through digital ads is another form of digital advertising that reaches your potential customer more strategically than traditional advertising can. Retargeted ads appear to visitors who have visited your business website. When these visitors leave the website, they are continued to be shown ads reminding them of your products and services or showing them difference promotional offers.

Right Audience.

Finally, digital advertising can help you reach your specific target audience. When you set up an advertising campaign, you have control of user targeting.

This means you can set up specific user demographics such as age and gender. Some platforms allow users to be targeted based upon household income and more personal details. Plus, you can limit your advertising to certain zip codes or more narrow geographic areas.

If you’d like to learn more about if Adventure Ad Agency, contact us here or call us at 1-864-400-9920. To learn more about the latest advertising trends and strategies, check out more of our blog.

LinkedIn Strategy

Boosting your Brand with LinkedIn: Debunking Common Myths

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog, Marketing, Social Media

LinkedIn is an incredible tool for individuals to connect with other professionals, to hunt for a new job, or to stay tuned to the latest news in the industry. However, often people forget that LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for advertising and building your business’s brand. 

If LinkedIn isn’t at least a part of your marketing and social media strategy, you are likely missing a bid opportunity to reach potential clients in a brand safe social media channel.

You may have avoided focusing your social media strategy on LinkedIn for a number of valid reasons. It may make sense for your business to spend your resources and time on something else. You may flat out think LinkedIn isn’t important. 

On the other hand though, there are a number of times where businesses ignore LinkedIn for reasons that are wrong. As a result, we are taking a deeper look at some of the common myths we hear from clients about LinkedIn.

Myth 1: My customers aren’t on the platform.

For business-to-business sales, the benefits may seem obvious. LinkedIn is known as the number one social network for lead generation. According to Forbes, an “estimated 40 million business decision makers (i.e. the people who seal the deals and sign the contracts) spend their time on LinkedIn.” 

Additionally, Omnicore reports that … 

  • It is the #1 channel B2B marketers use to distribute content at 94%.
  • It makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites & blogs.
  • 91% of marketing executives list LinkedIn as the top place to find quality content.
  • 92% of B2B marketers include the platform in their digital marketing mix.

However, if you aren’t a business-to-business focused company, you may be rolling your eyes at the idea of LinkedIn helping you reach your target audience. However, professionals are people too, and LinkedIn has a massive general consumer audience with money to spend.

In fact, more than half of LinkedIn’s audience has a college degree and forty-nine percent make more than $75,000 per year. To learn more about this platforms unique demographics, check out Omnicore’s full report or see the list below:

Myth 2: LinkedIn is just for career milestones and announcements.

LinkedIn has become a thriving community for professionals and businesses to share content including industry perspectives, blogs and more. This content is not just about celebrating a year at company ABC or announcing a new hire. 

In fact, “more than 100,000 organic articles are published weekly on LinkedIn, many of which are written by top-level executives at brands around the world,” according to Buffer. AdWeek even wrote a feature on how LinkedIn has become a hot social network.

If your business writes blogs posts, it is worth the extra effort to post these to your profile. Even that small thing is better than nothing and can bring users back to your website.

Myth 3: LinkedIn may build my brand, but it won’t lead to actual sales or profit.

Did you know that LinkedIn has three times better conversion rates than Facebook or Twitter? From that perspective, it is important to balance your social media strategy and not just stick to one platform.

One of the key benefits of the platform is that there is arguably less bombarding a user or potential customer or client when using the platform. The platform has been established as a brand safe and professional environment. This means that content viewed here will more likely be consumed by an attentive and engaged audience.

Start building your brand!

LinkedIn is a free, powerful tool you can start using right now to advertising and build your brand. You can explore the paid advertising options. However, simply building an active online presence for your business will have a big impact. There is a large audience of engaged consumers and business decision makers ready to spend money on your products and services. You just have to take the time to show them who you are.

If you’d like to learn more about Adventure Ad Agency social media strategies, contact us here or call us at 1-864-400-9920. To learn more about the latest advertising trends and strategies, check out more of our blog.

Advertising Agency

Small Agency Versus Large Agency: Is AAA is right for you?

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog, Marketing

You may have heard the phrase bigger is better, but in fact, bigger is NOT always better. Depending on your business, a personalized experience with a smaller advertising agency may better fit your businesses needs than a large agency.

As a business owner or as a decision-maker for your company, it can be challenging to determine whether a small agency or a big agency is right for you. You are faced with making so many complex decisions in the day-to-day of your business that worrying about your advertising may be the last thing on your mind. It can be particularly challenging is marketing and advertising is very different from your core business. 

To help you make the decision about whether or not to choose a small agency like Adventure Ad Agency to manage your advertising or to take the leap to a bigger agency, we have compiled a list of a few of the biggest differences between small and large agencies.

Small Agency Versus Large Agency

Personalization. Flexibility. Innovation.

First, one of the biggest and most obvious benefits of a small agency is the personal touch and customization that naturally emerges. At AAA, we are able to give a high quality, hands-on experience for our clients. 

Because the people meeting and working with the clients are the same people working on the advertising materials and campaigns, the results of our work tend to both be more inline with client expectations and to perform more successfully than they otherwise may have. 

Additionally, this close relationship with our clients allows us to better understand their business. This enables us to better market their specific brand identity and value proposition, as well as allows us to better anticipate their needs. 

Small agencies, like Adventure Ad Agency, are constantly thinking of new ways to help their clients. Since small agencies are not as constrained as big agencies, they have more flexibility to innovate and think outside the box for their clients.

Resources. Connections. Diversity.

At the same time, large agencies have many benefits as well. Most notably, large agencies have more resources than small agencies. However, that is not to say that small agencies do not have a fair amount of resources. The main difference is small agencies will rely more on partnerships with freelancers whereas large agencies have most everything they need in-house from photographers to graphic designers.

In general, large agencies simply have more people, more money, and more connections. For example, if you are looking for endorsements from professional athletes or partnerships with the hottest celebrity, large agencies are the best fit for your business. Expensive and high profile strategies like this do not tend to be the focus of small to medium sized agencies.

Finally, with more people and more resources can come more creativity and diversity. Small agencies can provide consistent, dynamic and both diverse and creative advertising for your business. However, it is not as easy to find a small agency that can provide that year after year. We are constantly working to stay on top of the latest trends and to innovate for clients. Bigger agencies though, with their greater resources, larger talent pool, and bigger staff, often can easily bring more diversity and more options to the table.

Is AAA right for your business?

We would love to help every client who walks through our door, but we also understand that a small agency may not be the best fit for every business. It’s not about size. Adventure Ad Agency works with small businesses to large corporate organizations.

It’s about your business needs, your culture, and your style of doing business. 

Adventure Ad Agency is right for your business if you …

  1. Want a hands-on relationship with your agency
  2. Are a small business or a large organization
  3. Require flexibility and value customization of your advertising strategy
  4. Are looking for out-of-the-box ideas that deliver high ROI
  5. Want no worry, full service management for all advertising OR want help with a particular project or campaign

If you’d like to learn more about if Adventure Ad Agency is right for your business, contact us here or call us at 1-864-400-9920. To learn more about the latest advertising trends and strategies, check out more of our blog.

Still unsure about whether a big or small agency is right for you? Keep investigating and don’t settle for a “lukewarm” advertising strategy. Don’t just take our advice. Ask your peers and business partners how they feel about their agency situation. Check out this great Forbes article on choosing an agency! And if you choose an agency and discover it’s not the best fit, do not be afraid to make a change.

Waze Advertising

Everything You Need To Know About Waze Ads

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog

One of the golden rules of advertising is to go where the “eyeballs” are, and the eyeballs are on Waze. For 110 million drivers worldwide, the Waze app has become an integral part of daily life. An average user spends 10.5 hours per month on Waze, which is more than Snapchat, Pinterest, and even Twitter. Not only are users spending a lot of time on Waze, but also the “eyeballs” on the app are highly engaged, loyal consumers.

Because of this, Waze ads are the perfect opportunity to capture the attention of your target customer and convert them into visiting your location and purchasing your products or services.

What is Waze?

Branded as a human movement company, Waze allows people to navigate their daily commute in and out of the office with ease, to avoid road closures and delays on vacations or trips to visit family, or to catch a ride with a friendly face in order to reduce their carbon footprint. 

Waze

 

This GPS navigation software app is more than just a way to get from point A to point B. It provides turn-by-turn navigation information and user-submitted route details to keep users informed and safe while on the road. Users can flag construction, abandoned cars, and even locations where police are radaring.

What types of ads does Waze offer?

Waze is now offering opportunities for businesses and advertisers to participate in this dynamic marketplace. The select ad formats all offer unique and effective ways to advertise to your target customers.

Branded Pins  

Think of these as digital store signs in the Waze app. Pins mark business’ locations on the map. Then, when users click on the pin, information such as the business’ hours, phone number, address, and special offers are shown. Users can select to drive there, save the location for later, or to save the offer. Advertisers pay on a CPM basis.

Promoted Search

When users search for your services, you will be given priority in the search results. With all the same information and actions as branded pins, the best part is that this offering is free alongside branded pin campaigns.

Promoted Search

Zero-Speed Take Over

If you are a large business or brand who plans to spend $169 daily or more, Waze offers this additional ad format. Think of these as digital billboards. When a user comes to a complete stop for over four seconds, the ad will pop up on the users screen with business information and relevant offers. This powerful tool is an effective ad format to reach more users and drive more navigations to your location. 

Do these ads work?

While Waze ads have only recently been introduced as a new platform for advertisers and brands to reach target customers, it has already shown to be extremely effective. 

Business using the Waze app in the United States have seen a 20.4% increase in navigation to their locations and am 82% lift in brand recall on average, according to data reported by Waze.

A big reason for this success is that it passes “The Toothbrush Test.” This is a “term to describe an app that provides such consistent utility that users feel as if they’ve missed some vital part of their daily routine if they haven’t used it twice a day.” This high utility typical leads to not only a deeper trust and loyalty among the audience, but also a deeper user understanding and better targeting for advertisers.

For more information on the success of these ads, check out their informative case studies.

Key Stats on the Audience

In the United States, …

  • 48% of Waze users are women and 52% are men. 
  • 48% of Waze users, the largest group, are between 35-54 years old. 35% of Waze users are between 25-34 years old. 
  • 46% of Waze users have household incomes of $100k+ USD/year.
  • 65% of Waze users have between 2-4 people in their household.

As you can see from the abundant data, Waze Ads are a powerful and exciting new platform for advertising. The large, highly engaged audience is on the move and ready to become your new customer. While these ads will not fit every type of business, it can be a powerful strategy for the right fit. Gas stations, restaurants, retail stores, and entertainment locations are all great fits for this strategy.

Adventure Ad Agency is proud to be a Waze Certified partner. If you’d like to learn more about whether or not Waze Ads are a good fit to boost your business’s brand recognition and sales, contact us here or call us at 1-864-400-9920. To learn more about the latest advertising trends and strategies, check out more of our blog.

CTV

Incorporating OTT/CTV Advertising into your Digital Strategy

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog

Taking first place by a landslide, OTT easily wins advertising trend of the year. However, actually defining OTT and incorporating this powerful new tool into your strategy is much harder to decide.

What is it?

The acronym OTT stands for “over-the-top” and refers to streaming media services that reach viewers directly over the internet instead of through traditional cable. Connected TV devices such as Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, or even your XBOX game console provide OTT streaming through well-known services such Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video. 

For example, watching Netflix on a smartphone app or even in an app on your smart TV counts as OTT. Connected TV devices then are often the medium through which viewers reach OTT services.

Among Netflix and Hulu, there are numerous other streaming services, such as fuboTV and Sling TV, that already exist. However, companies like Disney, Comcast, and more are all introducing their own streaming platforms. With many of these existing and new OTT services, advertisers are presented yet another medium for reaching viewers. 

If you are wondering if advertisers have already begun advertising on OTT platforms, the answer is a resounding yes, and the number of advertisers is only growing. 

In the first quarter of 2019, Roku’s platform alone double the number of ad impressions served on their platform as compared to the prior year, and Roku announced that it predicts revenue for the year to be over $1 billion with about two-thirds of this revenue coming from ads, according to AdAge.

The Growth of Cutting the Cord

Every day, more and more advertisers are adding OTT to their marketing mix. This shift is occurring not only because OTT is a powerful advertising tool. It is also fueled by advertisers’ premium target audiences moving off cable.

This trend has effectively been labeled cord cutting as many viewers are “cutting the cord” with their cable provider in favor of the ease and experience of OTT services. According to eMarketer, the number of cord-cutters in the US, defined as “adults who have ever cancelled a pay TV service to continue without it,” will grow by 32.8% in 2019 to 33 million. At the same time, the number of subscriptions to OTT video services will rise to 170 million. This is qual to 51.7% of the US total population. 

Additionally, the audiences on streaming platforms and CTV devices reach Millenials and Gen Zers. These two groups tend to be harder-to-reach and more sought after demographics for advertisers.

According to Nielsen, “out of total day viewers watching content aired across five networks on live TV, 7% are between the ages of 25 and 34, while 19% of connected device viewers are in the same age bracket.” 

Both the audience quality and the popularity of these services are major factors drawing advertisers and brands to OTT advertising.

Traditional TV Advertising Versus OTT Advertising

Naturally then, advertisers have adopted OTT advertising as an integral part of their digital advertising strategy. The advanced analytics and captive audiences in OTT presents a fantastic opportunity for advertisers, and while OTT ads tend to be shorter than traditional TV ads, the ability to provide targeted dynamic ad insertion and advanced analytics such as geolocation, demographic data, and device information are attractive for businesses looking to advertise to specific viewers.

Often the biggest question advertising agencies get from business and brands is, “Should OTT replace my traditional TV budget?”

The simple answer is no. It is more about finding the right channel at the right time. Traditional TV advertising is still a powerful tool to reach your target consumer. However, OTT is a powerful addition to your digital advertising mix. When done well, it is a perfect compliment to a strong traditional TV strategy. In fact, 2 in 3 viewers consume content across both linear and digital platforms, according to Xander’s latest white paper.

To learn how “over-the-top” advertising can be incorporated into your advertising strategy, reach out to Adventure Ad Agency. If you want to learn more about the latest trends in Advertising and more useful information, check out more of our blog or contact us!

Is your Advertising Campaign Holiday Ready?

by advwpman, posted in Advertising, Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media

‘The Holiday Season’ is the most wonderful time of the year! Halloween is just around the corner. Subsequently, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays are following close behind. In fact, before you realize it, the busiest time of year will be here. Are you ready?

How is your holiday advertising campaign? Is your business prepared and ready for the holidays? As a matter of fact, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been marked on the calendars as the official beginning of the holiday rush.

Do you want your business to ring with jingle bells and whistles? Keep reading this blog to see a list of tips on things to consider when jump starting your advertising campaign into this year’s holiday season. The following tips will give you an idea on how to promote your sales, and how to prepare for the best time of the year, for your business!

Tips on how to plan your Holiday Advertising Campaign

1. Start planning early
2. Research what your competition is doing
3. Offer specials and discounts
4. Stay focused on what works
5. Offer customer loyalty programs and specials
6. Keep your website and social media updated
7. Use a Geo Fencing strategy
8. Compete and drive customers to your business using TV, radio, and other media

Here is another article on some holiday tips to consider. If you would like more information on how to drive customers to your business, contact Adventure Ad Agency by clicking on this link.