Programmatic advertising, as we’ve discussed many times in the past, is a way of automating the process of purchasing ad space and displaying creatives on the Internet. It takes the lengthy processes out of the equation, allowing your ads to reach the right audiences quickly and in far-reaching ways.

But one of the biggest factors to the success of Programmatic advertising comes from the main objective of Content marketing – authority.

In this article, we’ll break down the concepts and provide you with a concrete example so that you can catch a glimpse of its potential.

Breaking Down the Process

Programmatic advertising enables you to get your brand in front of relevant potential customers at scale, efficiently. A very simplified breakdown will look like this:

1. You set ad targeting parameters that include your market’s browsing behaviour, demographics and location.

2. The programmatic platform takes all these parameters you’ve set and finds ad space that matches them.

3. The ad exchange conducts an auction where your business and competitors outbid one another for the right to serve ads on the display spaces found.

This is important as often, this is the first exposure these potential customers get to your brand and will then come to your website to read more about you and your product/service.

How Content Marketing Factors In

As effective and informative as your ads or site may be, there is usually a stage of purchaser decision-making where they are looking for permission to purchase. What this stage boils down to is content found on the web somewhere, ideally from a third-party that sings the praises of your product or signifies your brand as the premier knowledge-base in the industry your product/service exists in.

Sound familiar? That’s because it is. This also happens to be the overriding strategy employed for Content Marketing though with the added nuance of being aimed at specific audiences.

Here’s an example to demonstrate:

Let’s say you sell paper. You engage in a content marketing strategy that aims to inform audiences that your methods of creating paper is the best available. It’s eco-friendly and recyclable and your content explains how this is possible, why this is good and why you’re the only paper seller that does this. You publish these articles on your site and engage third-parties to also feature your content.

You also engage programmatic ads to generate traffic at scale, efficiently.

User A sees a programmatic ad and comes to your website, the love the product and read an article singing your paper’s praises. However, this is the first time they’ve heard of you and they’re still a little wary. So, they open a new tab in their browser and search for you.

Since you’ve engaged in a content marketing strategy that engages third-parties to feature your content, they find an article on one of these sites and reads it. This pushes them over the edge and they are now fully convinced to purchase your paper. So they close that tab, come back to the tab with your site open and make their purchase.

Ultimately, that piece of content on your site was the first step but the third-party article was the tipping point. It was this that ultimately drove this person in our example to make a purchase.

Conclusion

Now, this is a rather rudimentary example, but it’s very much a possibility that demonstrates how content marketing drastically enhances your programmatic ads, how they two are intertwined. The potential benefits are immense, and we’ve really only just scratched the surface here. When done right, there’s no doubt that the integration of content marketing and programmatic ads will help your business grow.

If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve just discussed, feel free to send us a message. We’re a digital marketing agency in New York, and we specialise in helping small businesses drive more sales.