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Unlocking your brand’s magical ROI multiplier: mobile + social + video

This article is part of the Digiday Partner Program and is brought to you by DG MediaMind.  The article was written by John Douglas, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Video at DG MediaMind.

Consumers have endless opportunities to engage with mobile content, whether they’re curled up on the couch or in line for their latte.  And we all know – from stats and real-life experience – mobile is where people are spending more and more time. According to Marketing Charts, consumers look at their mobile devices on average 150 times per day and spend nearly three hours with the device on social channels.

This rise in mobile audiences, combined with the skyrocketing growth of time-spent on social media platforms, creates a great opportunity for advertisers to unlock a magical ROI multiplier.  With mobile rich media ads delivering three times the video play rate and twice the ad engagement on social platforms over traditional mobile publishers, who can disagree?

Even though emphasis on multi-screen campaigns dominate the conversation among agencies and their clients, planners are quickly realizing that the social component of the campaign is much more than just a sponsored post or promoted tweet — its value lies in its versatility. It is the planted seed, the conversation extender, the VIP pass, the building block or better yet, the in-your-face engagement, just begging to be clicked.  The trick is, brands and advertisers need to think hard about how mobile best fits into their overall marketing mix, where it can be used best to meet campaign performance objectives and how it can create relevant, meaningful experiences for their audience. This isn’t a ploy to abandon traditional media channels, but to focus more on where your audience actually is, and not where “you hope they may be.”

The specific place where people are spending their time on their smartphones and tablets is more than likely a social media platform — and that is good news for brands.

From a messaging and deployment perspective, social is a game-changer.

For linear TV, the media planning and buying and creative production cycle can easily last six months.  On the online side, six weeks is a good average for the amount of time it takes to plan, buy and execute a full digital display campaign. In social, this timeframe can be compressed to six hours. Social enables near real-time deployment to a truly real-time audience.

Social is arguably the best way to build a truly authentic relationship with consumers, but it requires attention to detail.  Don’t build ads that link out to another app or pull the audience out of their current newsfeed.  You don’t have to anymore.  All of your video, all of your messaging and all of the opportunities you enable for audiences to engage with your brand can be done in a very natural way.   Take the same approach you would to video on the desktop, but ask yourself what’s most relevant and interesting from the point of view of a mobile user.  And then build on that.  If you’re smart about it, you’ll even be using the same creative tools and campaign management platform to really make things interesting.  All of a sudden you’ve got dynamic creative, retargeting, and a single repository for all of your analytics.

In many ways, mobile and social are considered “new frontiers” in digital advertising, but in the very near future tablets will become the norm, while desktops and laptops shrink to an unimaginably low market share. If you start pushing the limits today, you are well positioned to unlock that magical multiplier and drive higher ROI on your digital advertising investment.

 

 

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