How Digital Advertising Intelligence Can Boost Your Marketing Campaign
Can you afford not to use digital advertising intelligence? To remain competitive in today’s marketplace you need to know what your competitors are doing online. Digital advertising intelligence tracks your competitors’ online marketing and does a lot more – all of which can help you significantly improve the effectiveness of your own online marketing activities.
What is Digital Advertising Intelligence?
Data reveals that almost half of all ad spending in the U.S. today is digital – and it’s growing. According to the Digital Advertising and Marketing Global Report, the global market for digital advertising is expected to more than double by 2026, increasing from $350 billion in 2020 to $786.2 billion in 2020.
Digital advertising includes a number of different channels and media, from search engine marketing and display ads to email and social marketing. Keeping track of your company’s performance across all these channels is challenging. It’s substantially more challenging to track the performance of your competitors – even though it’s important that you do so.
To track your competitors’ online marketing, you employ digital advertising intelligence, a type of competitive intelligence. Digital advertising intelligence is business intelligence that helps you track the digital advertising efforts of competitors in your market.
Think of digital advertising intelligence as spying on your competitors – even though all the information is publicly available. You use digital advertising intelligence to track:
- Where your competitors are focusing their digital marketing efforts – what channels and media they’re using and what those efforts look like
- How much they spend in each medium or channel
- When their digital ads run and for how long
- What kind of results they are getting
Knowing what your competitors are doing and where provides invaluable intelligence that can inform your own digital marketing efforts.
Digital advertising intelligence is a form of competitive intelligence, as explained in the following video.
What Benefits Can You Gain from Digital Advertising Intelligence?
Gaining intelligence about your competitors’ digital advertising offers a wealth of benefits to marketers. Without digital advertising intelligence you’re effectively flying blind. With it, you can make faster and more informed decisions about your own digital marketing strategy, based on what is and isn’t working for your competitors.
Get a Big Picture View of Digital Marketing Activity
Digital advertising intelligence collects data from all the different channels and media on which your competitors advertise and across all possible ad formats. In doing so, it provides a total view of digital advertising in your marketplace. With digital advertising intelligence, you get a holistic view of all the digital marketing activity that affects your products and brands – you see the big picture, not just bits and pieces of it.
More Precisely Target Your Competitive Response
When you know what your competitors are doing, you’ll have a better idea of how to respond. Digital advertising intelligence tells you what ads they’re running, where they’re running, how much they’re spending, and more. This information informs your own marketing strategy – specifically, how you respond to your competitors’ actions.
Benchmark Your Own Marketing Activities
When you know how much marketing money your competitors are spending and what kind of response they’re getting, you can set better benchmarks for your own campaigns. If a particular channel or outlet is performing well for other companies, it should perform well for you. If a particular channel or outlet isn’t performing well for your competitors, you’ll know to avoid wasting your own money in that area.
Digital advertising intelligence also helps you determine how much money you should be spending on similar digital marketing efforts. You don’t want b outspent by competitors – but neither do you want to spend substantially more than you have to. The more you know about the digital marketing landscape in your market, the smarter you can be about your own digital ad spending.
Identify New Opportunities
Observing where competitors are advertising often reveals opportunities for your own digital marketing. Perhaps a competitor is having success with a medium you haven’t explored yet, such as social media. Perhaps you see competitors ignoring a medium that you could swoop in and dominate. Both opportunities are possible when you know where your competitors are focusing their efforts.
From your competitors, you can also learn what deals work and what deals fall flat. You may discover new products or new ways to present existing products that you hadn’t previously considered. Advertising intelligence also helps you discover new opportunities for pricing and promotions.
Become More Agile
Digital advertising intelligence provides detailed data in real-time. You don’t have to wait for weeks or months to find out what your competitors are doing. You see what’s happening as it’s happening so you can take immediate action with your own digital marketing efforts. You become more agile and more flexible in your marketing efforts.
How Can You Use Digital Advertising Intelligence in Your Marketing Campaigns?
The key to realizing these benefits is to choose a robust provider of digital advertising intelligence and develop a culture of curiosity, analysis, and action. You want to know not just what your competitors are doing but why. The smarter you are at analyzing your competitors actions, results, and motivations, the smarter you can respond with even better campaigns.
Digital advertising intelligence isn’t just for marketers – it can also unleash higher performance from your sales team. By integrating the insights you glean from digital advertising intelligence with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can help your sales team generate more and better leads and increase sales from those leads. You’ll know where to focus your sales efforts and how to nurture the most promising leads for better results. (Adobe/Marketo research shows that companies that nurture their leads generate 50% more sales at a third lower cost.)
Let Rainmaker Help You Integrate Digital Advertising Intelligence with Sales
Digital advertising intelligence tools can be used independent of other systems and processes but are more valuable when the data is unified. The Salesforce experts at Rainmaker can help you integrate advertising intelligence with CRM to deliver critical information to your sales team – and generate higher-quality leads and higher sales. We also offer a wide variety of Salesforce Managed Services to help your company manage its sales efforts, improve customer service, and make your business more profitable.
Contact Rainmaker today to learn more about digital advertising intelligence and CRM!
