Online advertising is a broad term that encompasses a myriad of tools, tactics, and processes involved in buying advertising space, targeting potential customers, and creating compelling and optimized ads. SMB leaders need to be careful with their financial investments when allocating resources towards digital ads.

Without a doubt, one of the most important elements of successful digital advertising is the technology you use to make data-driven decisions, automate key processes, and optimize the end-user experience. Let’s discuss the digital ad tech you should use to surpass your competition and drive customers to your online sales touchpoints. 

Dominate with in-video advertising

When we talk about video advertising, we tend to only talk about creating video ad content. This topic is an important one, of course, because video advertising is one of the most lucrative ad types in the modern advertising industry. That said, we rarely discuss when, where, and how to place ads in videos on different platforms, from different creators.

This type of advertising is known as in-video advertising, and involves placing your ads (which may or may not be video ads) in other people’s video content. Some of the most commonly used are pre-roll ads, which are ads that come up before a video starts. You can place these ads on any website with video content, or on video sharing sites like YouTube, or other social media platforms.

Along with pre-roll, you can also place mid-roll or post-roll ads, which run during the video or after the video has ended.

Use intent data for accurate targeting

Collecting and collating customer and market data is of the utmost importance when you’re building an advertising campaign. Understanding the buyer’s journey, collecting key purchasing and behavioral customer data, and using industry insights allows you to optimize your unique approach to buying ad space and creating ads that inspire and sell.

What many business leaders tend to overlook is the importance of using intent data to gain a deeper understanding of your customers, what they’re trying to achieve, and how best to help them achieve it. Intent data is invaluable for all outbound marketing campaigns, and can also be instrumental in advertising.

Make sure that you’re collecting intent data with a dedicated tool that uses AI and predictive analytics to produce accurate and detailed customer profiles.

Leverage programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising is an integral part of advertising automation you can use to automatically buy advertising space across the web. But of course, it’s a lot more nuanced than that.

Modern programmatic ad platforms that use artificial intelligence and advanced automation are able to identify the best places to showcase your ads and connect you seamlessly to the global advertising space and its various technologies and systems. This feature allows you to eliminate financial waste and position yourself on the right platforms at the right time in order to deliver your ads to the right people.

Once you automate this process, you can allocate manual labor to the more complex tasks.

Enter the AdTech ecosystem with DSP

Demand-side platforms (DSP) tie directly into the programmatic advertising topic and are the most important tools for online advertisers. A DSP is an efficient and effective way for businesses to connect their operation with the global advertising ecosystem, allowing them to automatically bid for ad placement across platforms and content formats.

Using a DSP means that you are buying media space around the web, funneling your ads directly to publishers like blogs, social networks, video-based websites, and news outlets. There are many popular DSPs out there such as the Google Marketing Platform and Amazon DSP.

Digital fingerprinting and lead evaluation

Consider investing in supplementary tech solutions such as digital fingerprinting to automatically collect user data on your online platforms. On your website, for example, digital fingerprinting can gather vast amounts of useful data about every visitor.

When you are live streaming, for example, through a platform like OneStream Studio, you want to collect relevant data about your audience, both from the people who are passively participating and the people who are watching passively. On your website, on the other hand, digital fingerprinting can automatically gather vast amounts of useful data about every visitor.

From the type of device they’re using, their location, and their internet service provider to screen orientation and operating system – the more data you collect the better equipped you’ll be to optimize every aspect of your advertising strategy. 

This data is essential for lead scoring and evaluation, for example, as you can use it to analyze every website visitor and determine the best way to advertise to them with curated products and offers that fit their preferred price range.

Wrapping up

Using digital ad technology is crucial for growth-oriented businesses that want to develop a competitive advantage in the advertising space and achieve their marketing and sales goals in 2023. Start implementing these technologies and principles to make better, data-driven advertising campaigns that are fully-optimized for your specific audience.