If you keep up with our blog, you already know that two companies control a majority of the digital ad landscape — Google and Facebook. While these two platforms are essential to a successful strategy, there’s a third one that should also be on your radar: Amazon.
The combination of what’s going on across these three, in addition to your own collected data, is what brings the customer journey to life. In other words, implementing a cross-channel advertising strategy — rather than operating in separate silos — creates a massive opportunity for advertisers.
Our recent Marin Software webinar and the corresponding infographic takes a closer look at this idea.
3 Key takeaways from our Marin Software webinar
1) The most powerful tool in a marketer’s toolbox is their own data.
Three main components for any digital advertiser include integration, alignment, and amplification. This first takeaway falls under integration.
Integration: Whether it’s revenue from your obscure data sources, physical product returns, LTV values, or something else, the ability to align your media spend with the value extracted from it, leads to the best possible outcomes.
Alignment: Powerhouse platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon compete directly with one another. So with no incentive to share data or collaborate with each other, it’s incumbent on the advertiser to find an independent perspective. This means aligning their channels, get the perfect spend mix across those channels, and understanding the cross-channel influence.
Amplification: To amplify cross-channel campaigns, marketers need to focus their energy and resources on the channels that deliver the highest ROI with the least amount of effort. Secondary channels can then be added in where it’s sensible, efficient, and not distracting for your business.
2) Amazon is an advertising goliath.
Amazon has been dominating ecommerce for a while and is now also expanding its advertising platform.
Their ecommerce growth is staggering:
- 39% year-over-year increase in net sales
- 12x increase in earnings per share
- Over 100 million prime subscribers globally in Q2 2018
These numbers show that there isn’t another ecommerce company with the same market presence and influence over the customer journey.
Meanwhile, Amazon is also transforming itself into a powerful advertising platform, and with an estimated $2.2 billion in ad revenue in Q2 2018, their entry into the ad space is bound to shake things up. In fact, 33% of advertisers view Amazon’s rise in the digital advertising space as a very significant development:
3) Instagram continues to be a popular platform with advertisers.
According to a Marin Software Q2 benchmark report, Instagram proves very popular with advertisers, capturing 20% of marketers’ overall Facebook advertising budget in 2018.
This makes perfect sense considering:
- There are over 1 billion active monthly Instagram accounts worldwide
- 80% of users follow at least one brand on Instagram
- Over 200 million users visit at least one business profile per day
So while Facebook itself continues to dominate the social media marketing world, Instagram shouldn’t be ignored.
2 Great questions & answers
Q: What are marketers’ top 3 priorities for 2018?
A: Embracing social media (38%), enhancing the customer experience (35%), and optimizing paid search (33%).
These findings correspond with the fact that 70% of marketers plan to increase investment in paid social, and 65% plan to increase paid search spend.
As today’s consumers expect a seamless experience across channels and devices — and brand loyalty is on the decline — it’s clear that enhancing the customer experience is top of mind for most advertisers.
Q: How much are advertisers spending on Amazon?
A: An average of 24% of their total ad budget.
This is a significant share of advertising budget spent on experimenting with the platform.
Specifically, Marin customers advertising on Amazon are allocating 21.5% of their overall digital ad spend to the platform, with Sponsored Product Ads representing 79.3% of that spend, and Headline Shopping Ads representing the remaining 20.7%:
These early Amazon advertising adopters are likely spending aggressively to determine how much the platform fits their strategy with customer acquisition and ROI. As noted earlier, many advertisers think that it’s going to become an increasingly important part of the advertising mix.
1 Quote
Brian Finnerty, Sr. Director of Marketing at Marin Software, sums it up best when talking about advertising personalization:
Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5-15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%.
Catch the Marin webinar replay
By combining your own collected data with the three main advertising platforms, you can get a complete picture of the customer journey and bring it to life. Create a seamless, cross-channel advertising strategy rather than operating in separate silos to generate the best possible campaign results.
Watch the full Marin Software webinar to discover how you can maximize your ad spend with post-click optimization.
