3 Reasons Why In-Housing Programmatic Works for Small & Mid-Size Businesses
If you’re a marketer at a small or mid-size business or a growing DTC brand, you’re probably wondering how you can make your budget stretch a bit further. You may be competing with an established brand with deep pockets, enough to engage several agencies to launch programmatic campaigns that span every digital channel.
But here’s an interesting fact: 69% of brands worldwide have brought programmatic advertising in house. In-housing offers a ton of compelling benefits to organizations of all sizes, not just the ones with household names. The benefits are not just financial: in-housing programmatic means in-housing the expertise that is gained anytime anyone manages, optimizes and reports on ad campaigns. You’ll also begin to build an asset that will pay dividends for years to come, namely first-party customer data.
With the right partner to back you up, in-housing programmatic marketing will help you bring your business to the next level without overwhelming your team.
Here are three reasons why it’s especially beneficial to small businesses.
Own the Data. Own the Relationship.
Small businesses, especially digitally native ones, have troves of online data available at their fingertips. This is the data that your customers generate when they buy your products, sign up for your newsletter, peruse your product pages, use your product configurators. This data is incredibly valuable and will go a long way in honing every aspect of your marketing, messaging, and even product development.
Additionally, campaigns generate a ton of data that’s highly valuable. Which consumers saw your ad? On which channel was it seen? Which ad type, creative and messages generated the most clicks? How many ads did they see before clicking on your landing page? Visiting your site? Buying a product?
Harnessing these insights and building this level of marketing expertise in-house allows you to have full ownership of and access to this rich data. It’s an incredibly valuable asset, one that will provide you with strategic insight into your customer journeys, help you prioritize which initiatives to fund, as well as hone your messaging and customer acquisition strategies.
Ability to optimize investments more agilely
One of the best reasons to use programmatic is that it allows you to collapse marketing and market research into a single process. Many brands dedicate a small portion — say 5% — of their budget for random targeting in order to help them uncover hidden audiences and pockets of demand.
Even if you have a strong notion of who your prospects are likely to be, programmatic still illuminates nuances you may have missed. You may assume going into a campaign that East Coast moms are the best candidates for a specific product, but it may turn out that West Coast singletons are even more receptive — as evidenced by their level of engagement.
Ditto for all the assumptions you made about the channel, time of day, messages, and ad format you prepared. Programmatic simply reveals what’s piquing consumer interest at the moment.
Having hands-on-keyboard talent in-house means you can adjust your investments quickly based on real-time signals in order to optimize performance and business outcomes. What’s more, your in-house marketers can leverage what they learn to plan better campaigns in the future.
These benefits are particularly relevant to small and midsize businesses that need to make smaller budgets work harder. Why waste media budget targeting a region or cohort that just isn’t responding, when another is engaging at sky high levels?
Efficiency and Effectiveness
In-housing with the right model is not just extremely effective for small and mid-size businesses, but much more cost-efficient. But take care to choose wisely. You want a partner that is willing to share their expertise so that you or your team can become in-house experts.
What to look for in a partner? Find a company that is willing to keep you up to date on industry trends and emerging technologies. And given that you’re likely to need extra support from time to time, choose a partner that can supplement in-house talent when needed without a lot of overhead. Finally, look for a partner that has the expertise in your sector and can help guide your investment strategies.
All businesses need outside partnerships that can round out the skills your teams will need to be effective as possible.
