According to research by eMarketer, advertisers are accelerating investments in programmatic advertising. The agency believes they collectively spent more than $97 billion in 2021, $15 billion higher than their 2020 estimate.
However, despite its incredible benefits, the majority of small businesses still aren’t using programmatic advertising. Either they believe they can’t afford it, or they simply don’t know what it is and how it can help them.
In today’s digital environment, programmatic ads are essential. Estimates suggest that the average three-year ROI across a variety of digital platforms is anywhere from 36 percent to 748 percent, depending on your industry.
Why Is Programmatic Advertising So Important?
Programmatic advertising is critical for small businesses because it lets them reach their target audience at a lower average cost. Ads run on third-party digital properties, such as websites, blogs, and news sites. Background algorithms continually bid for advertising space on these platforms based on objectives set by the business. When an opportunity arises to place an ad at a low cost, computers automatically take advantage of it, displaying the company’s adverts where users are most likely to see and benefit from them.
The benefits of programmatic advertising are considerable. Marketers, for instance, can benefit from real-time reporting and get up-to-the-minute information about their campaigns. They can also improve the efficiency of their digital marketing efforts by improving targeting and saving money on traditional advertising methods. Targeting is easier because of programmatic advertising’s flexibility and tools that allow brands to target their ideal customers, based on customer personas. Geolocation targeting, contextual keywords, and even event-based targeting are all possible.
There are administrative advantages, too. Manually posting digital marketing materials is almost impossible. Furthermore, the vast majority of companies competing in any particular digital online advertising space are also using programmatic, making it even harder to compete.
Despite this, many small businesses see programmatic as too complicated. As such, they avoid it entirely and rely on tried-and-tested approaches instead. A clothesmaker based in Bangalore, for instance, might prefer to use billboard ads instead of programmatic ads on digital properties, potentially cutting ROI by 50 to 100 percent on each marketing rupee spent.
Unfortunately, businesses that fail to adopt programmatic advertising miss opportunities and can’t update their marketing to reflect new consumer realities. The result? Lackluster performance, declining sales, and, ultimately, business failure. McKinsey found that SMEs lost 30 to 50 percent of their revenues coming out of the pandemic, despite accounting for more than 70 percent of the economy.
Making Programmatic Advertising Accessible
Making programmatic advertising accessible, however, is now feasible, thanks to personally identifiable information (PII). As digital privacy attitudes shift, we’re seeing the emergence of users who opt to provide their data to advertisers. Thanks to this consent, companies that use PII know precisely who they are targeting and where the engagement took place
What’s great about this approach is that it lets companies adapt. Here’s how:
- If the strategy is working, companies can divert more of their advertising budget to it
- If the strategy is not working, PII provides real-time information facilitating the budget reallocation
In other words, lower data collection requirements and more targeted information mean that firms no longer have to operate at a conventional scale. Instead, they can drill down into the data, conduct regular experiments to see what works, and then divert resources accordingly.
How Mplan Can Help
Programmatic advertising is a compelling frontier in the advertising space. Small and medium-sized businesses want to reap the benefits that it offers, but they don’t always have the know-how. Traditionally, they haven’t used it.
The good news is that with Mplan, a programmatic advertising company in India, you can bring down the costs of media planning significantly.
For instance, our services remove many of the upfront costs associated with programmatic advertising management and offer it as a service. Furthermore, because we can access a large Indian audience that we know well, we can offer advertising in a more precise fashion to independents and agencies with discounts. A small textiles firm, for instance, could discover prospective customers they never knew they had marketing through conventional channels.
At Mplan, we believe that state-of-the-art marketing should be democratized, and available to all. It shouldn’t be the preserve of a small cadré of firms with deep pockets and massive online reach. With us, any business, regardless of size, can benefit from the technology.
If you’d like to learn more about our programmatic ad services get in touch with our team today. Find out how much you could save versus conventional approaches.
