The best marketing campaigns deliver the exact right message, at the exact right time, to the exact right consumer. If it’s the wrong message, or even the right message, delivered at the wrong time, it won’t work. Timing is critical to the success of your marketing.
Advertising can be a distraction when you’re online. The right advertising, however, can be an attraction. With laser targeting – and timing – it becomes INFORMATION.
Timing in Marketing
You probably won’t do too well selling snow shovels in the heat of summer or selling swim suits when it’s freezing outside, or Winter, however, might be a great time to tempt you with a quick trip to the Caribbean. Timing your message to seasonality, consumer behavior, and consumer mindset is a proven technique.
Current events and trends can provide a window of opportunity for marketers if they can respond quickly. Recognizing trends quickly and tying in appropriately can work wonders, but if the timing is off, your campaign can flop.
Timing in Targeting
No matter what you do, you need to get your message in front of the right customers. By aggregating audiences and creating deep target audience profiles, you can aim at the right consumers. Data, however, can get dated quickly. Let’s say you’re in the home mortgage business and you want to target people looking to buy their first house. They may not be on anybody’s purchase intent list today, but when they start searching for home loans, you’ve got a small window of opportunity to grab them before somebody else does.
Timing in Retargeting
Retargeting is an effective advertising technique that can make even small advertisers look big time. By serving relevant ads to people strolling across the internet that have shown interest in your product or company already, it can make your brand appear as if it’s everywhere! Timing is important here, though, as well.
Shoppers have abandonment issues. 77% of the things people put in their online shopping carts are abandoned before being purchased. Even the best remarketing and retargeting efforts won’t work if time passes.
Timing in Buying
By using RTB (Real Time Bidding), you can efficiently buy advertising. Programmatic advertising software allows for instant buying decisions based on parameters you’ve set up ahead of time. The typical B2B purchase decision can place 10 people between product and sale – and that’s just for interaction between two companies. Programmatic allows you to look at a vast array of available inventory. When it finds the right inventory, at the right price, it can snap it up immediately – before someone else does, or before the price is raised.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Does all this sound complicated? It can be, especially if you’re trying to do it yourself, or relying on people to do all of the heavy lifting and analysis. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can aggregate massive amounts of data, cross-reference and search for causation, spot trends and targets, and create lookalike audiences faster and more efficiently than any one person – or group of people – can ever do.
It can also create efficiencies that are simply unachievable in the old way of doing business. By the time a campaign manager might recognize a problem, or an opportunity, the time has passed. Algorithms that analyze real-time data and can make calculated, immediate decisions, can optimize campaigns for peak efficiency. A particular ad set is getting higher engagement? Serve more it! A pattern emerges in the type of consumer that is engaging with content? Get more of it in front of them! Something happens that changes the cultural conversation? Test creative and find out quickly if it’s going to make a difference!
Paul Dughi.com 