A New Normal

As digital acceleration continues, people are settling into a new norm where hybrid work is the reality, and people mix doing their jobs and personal tasks online during the day. The need to be productive in everything, from online shopping to getting work done, from reading the news to attending meetings. This new phase of work and life is blending and with this change has come new opportunities for brands to connect with their consumers in a place and moment that they are actively getting things done. This new, hybrid reality makes targeting your target consumer ever more challenging.

Georgina Wall, National Head of Product, Resolution Digital says, “Advertisers increasingly want to find more cost-effective ways to reach their target audiences, and the expectation of precision targeting has elevated, despite all the changes surrounding user privacy. This poses a big challenge for advertisers and agencies like ‘us’ [Resolution Digital], as we are faced with a black box of audience data, and often exceedingly small target markers to hit.”

The rise of automation has meant that people have naturally come to accept the offset of granular reporting detail, with heightened efficiency and scale they can drive with automation. However, this tends to only last so long before advertisers crave the level of consumer detail they have previously been accustomed to. In recent years, platforms have evolved their toolset to make use of machine learning and AI – features like response search ads, dynamic search ads, audience expansion, and of course bid automation. To stay ahead and ensure brands’ success, it has become so important to leverage as much of the data available regarding the audience to help refine search ROI (returns on investment) whilst supporting growth ambitions. A lot of the day-to-day optimisations our teams do is focussed around making sure the settings are right, based on the capabilities within the platform and the data sets available.”

The Great B2B Challenge

B2B has always been a huge challenge for marketers. Typically, people will try to decipher any differentiators in the way a user is searching for business goods as opposed to consumer-facing, however, search matching methodology has become far more predictive, which creates flaws in this approach where the machine will automatically enhance matching to synonyms, variations, and alike.

Georgina explains, “Decreasing manual control is often offset with enhanced scale and results and is the reason we continue to embrace these new functionalities. Data is so important to advertiser strategies, which is why leaning on data sets like the LinkedIn integration Microsoft Advertising has, has been so useful for several of our B2B clients such as Telstra who have been able to combine key business attributes with their search campaigns to really excel their results.”

Adam Goodman, National Agency Lead at Microsoft says, “the Telstra & Resolution Digital success story is a fantastic example of collaboration in partnership, the utilisation of trusted 1^st party data and leveraging solutions like LinkedIn profile targeting to drive the best possible outcome for the brand. The importance of trust and privacy continues to be as important today as it ever has been. We believe we can further empower brands across our search and native solutions, reaching a rich audience intelligence across Microsoft’s ecosystem like that of Windows, Microsoft Bing, MSN and LinkedIn within trusted and brand-safe environments..”

Having access to trusted ad placements is important from a brand safety perspective and is something all advertisers should take into consideration. LinkedIn is synonymous with B2B marketing, and a tool that has long been used from a direct social campaign perspective thanks to the depth of targeting capabilities. Being able to tap into these user attributes is a core tactic many have success with. Resolution Digital leverage this as part of their group’s own integration within Omnicom Media Group’s marketing and insights platform “Omni”, and it is now also available directly from the Microsoft Ads platform. Georgina explains, “Search has always been a little late to the party when it comes to advanced audience capabilities, however with the rise in adoption of automated bidding tactics, it’s become critical to feed the machine with as much data as possible to continue to deliver scale and efficiencies. This particular integration opens up a mass of opportunity for our B2B clients by combining the best of both worlds; a data source you can trust, and a conversion driving ad unit to do it.”

Automation in action

The industry continues to evolve at such a significant speed, that marketers all must adapt and leverage the power of automation to drive the most efficient way of reaching new audiences. Across industries around the world, marketers collaborate to recover and accelerate results, as well as increased testing of new customer experiences to drive engagement. The lines have blurred between people’s professional and personal lives and the implications of this are not just how marketers can help brands tap into these audiences, but it is also about how they increase productivity and save time through automation. Growing marketers’ knowledge through education programs and by using the strength of wider Microsoft technologies can only increase marketers’ productivity. More importantly, this helps drive increased collaboration, people development growth, and save people time.

Globally, there has been a monumental shifts in the ways people work, which in the Microsoft Work Trend Index is known as the Hybrid Paradox. This is where people want the flexibility to work from anywhere, but they simultaneously crave more in-person connections. The importance of world-class technology to help facilitate and empower businesses like agencies to grow continues to be of huge importance. Adoption and use of products like Microsoft Teams, the introduction of new employee experience platforms like Microsoft Viva and the reliance upon productivity tools like PowerPoint, Excel and PowerBi are critical. There is a new way of working between employer and employees, agencies, and their teams, and collectively we are focussed on helping empower people to save time whilst delivering fantastic outcomes for brands. The growth and retention of people including personal development and hiring, as well as additionally tapping into B2B audiences is also where LinkedIn and LinkedIn data can play a huge role.

The opportunity to save time, increase efficiency, streamline processes, and drive strong return on investment for brands sets up as marketers for greater impact going forward. “Brands and agencies could be utilising simple yet effective automation like Google and Facebook import functionality through to trusted 1^st party data solutions like LinkedIn profile targeting. Taking our audience data to create effective in-market audiences and the growth of our native solution the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN), is an exciting opportunity for brands to diversify their advertising strategies. Even more so when we consider the high-value audiences like that of the 1.3 billion Windows users globally.” Adam states.

The importance of trust and the cookie-less future

A thriving, free, and independent web supported by advertising can coexist with privacy protections. It is critical to uphold data, legal and personal content protection, maintain user control, provide transparency, and offer a clear value exchange that benefits users. Digital acceleration, new consumer behaviours and values, and expectations for privacy are requiring brands and agencies to adapt how they reach and best serve people’s needs. As a result, there has never been a more crucial time for marketers to forge deeper relationships with people and ensure they have strong trust and transparency with partners. It can help build a brand that is welcomed into people’s lives by earning genuine trust, upholding their core values, and ensure inclusivity is at the heart of authentic marketing. There is an exciting future ahead of us, a future of hybrid work and life and if the power of automation can be leveraged to reach rich audiences, this will help us be more efficient marketers to help us grow, adapt, and thrive.

To learn more about Resolution Digital please visit: www.resolutiondigital.com.au

To learn more about Microsoft Advertising please visit: www.microsoft.com/advertising

Authors

Georgina Wall, National Head of Product, Resolution Digital & Adam Goodman, National Agency Lead, Microsoft Advertising