Narrate your brand story with Ad Sequencing to drive impact

Today, companies are committed to bringing more relevant and personalized Advertising. Ad sequencing allows more complex marketing strategies with richer and longer storytelling – empowering the advertising ecosystem and innovation to introduce your products/services to consumers.

What is Ad sequencing?

Ad sequencing allows effective storytelling with your ads to create hype, make follow-ups, lead-ups or boost engagement. It allows you to test and try multiple ad formats and creative types and allows the advantage of mediasmart Audience Mapping solution and Household sync technology to find the same user across different environments and households.

Brands can use their wildest imagination to create 100% customizable strategies using linear sequences wherein you draft a story for the same target audience, showing them on multiple devices. This saves time for consumers and they appreciate their time going into relevant messaging for the products and services they are interested in, resulting in higher engagement and informed decision making. Although these strategies are more frequent in B2C models, it also happens that to drive warm leads, B2B companies could follow an account-based marketing or ABM approach to improve the storytelling advertising.

Marketers’ opportunities do not summarize just the top funnel where the relevance to personalized ads is run for the intended target. Rather, brands align their messaging during interaction with audiences to connect with them to humanize and personalize their experience. One-to-one campaigns in the bottom funnel allow specific, targeted ads to address pain points of consumer sentiments, influencing the buying decision, and closing the deal. The movement of prospects from the middle to bottom-funnel is important for loyalty.

Therefore, there are blurred lines between sales and marketing when it comes to advertising. It is clearly no longer just driving interest and awareness but also providing sales alignment and conversion.

Why is Ad sequencing important for brands?

• Ad sequencing allows you to storytell your brand narrative through retargeting engaged audiences as opposed to one single message. This, therefore, allows brands’ advertising to be more effective and utilize their marketing budgets better.
• Higher recall value facilitates users to make more informed decisions which in general leads to higher conversions. It is undeniable that relevant advertisements increase your chances of retaining customers. The secret of growing lies in understanding what your customers want and providing them just that in order to continue to grow. When users are familiar with the brand through multiple omnichannel distributed ads, all of them telling one story, conversions tend to happen on a higher scale.
• User-friendly branding strategies can go a long way to entice buyers to prefer your brand and have you on their minds. Stay in touch with them, understand them closely and plan the strategy accordingly. Customers expect fresh and creative content to be interested in your brand and Ad sequencing can help deliver more complex and creative brand strategies.

Let me give you some very simple examples of its usage.

How to ace your Ad sequencing campaign?

Mediasmart has developed several solutions that would make Ad sequencing more meaningful and easier to set-up. The foundation for Ad sequencing are Interaction-based audiences (IBA), which as their name indicates are segments created based on the users’ interaction with a given campaign, and Strategies to run different line items and manage budgets. Our Strategies tool on any campaign could also be used to A/B test creatives, targeting variables, and analyze your campaigns promptly, allowing you to determine the best ad sequences for different funnel stages. Segmenting the users in the right way reduces the risk of seeing a broken up story, while storytelling your brand purposely. IBA allows for enforcement and suppression of given sets of users and automatizes the flow of a campaign doing Ad sequencing.

Another very important step to avoid broken up stories is to make sure that the ads were actually seen by the intended targeted group, which is possible thanks to mediasmart’s viewability solution. You could get insights in real-time about AdViewed, AdLoaded and AdError; to adjust the strategy accordingly. Not only that, but our system would allow you to automatically create campaign interaction-based audiences on Adviewed (as opposed to Impressions).

To empower creativity and performance, brands can also make the best out of our Time-based audiences. We have established that users who actually saw the ad, clicked and converted can be identified; each to be served a different creative and personalised messaging in each of the stages. With Time-based audiences, you factor Time automatically into those strategies, thus separating users that viewed your ad today, in the last 7 days, 20 days and so on. With these retargeting solutions, you know whom to target strategically to reach your goal.

If you want to run part of your campaign on bigger screens, like a Connected TV, our Household sync technology will automate your cross-device strategy by using fresh data for each campaign. Compliant with privacy regulations, it allows you to make the most of three worlds: the storytelling or Banding possible in bigger screens, the interactivity inherent to Mobile and the measurability natural to Programmatic.

At this point, you are probably wondering what happens when it is harder to identify the user, because we don’t have access to their mobile ids or IP addresses (i.e. the impression is served on web traffic). Our Audience mapping solution has you covered. As long as we have consent from the end-user, our technology identifies users across environments to support Ad sequencing strategies. On top of that, our Contextual targeting capabilities will ensure you are serving ads in relevant contexts at every stage, hyper-relevance will be important to maximize reach, improve the ability to identify segments while being privacy-friendly and ensure brand safety.

Today, reinventions are prevalent in the world of digitalization across every industry. Reimagine customer experiences evolving in a fast-paced changing environment, boosting every organization’s ability to renovate. Strategic relationships combined with a tactical approach prove marketing efforts to go beyond just a normal banner and Ad sequencing is the logical conclusion, the ultimate tool to tackle what was mentioned above.