If you’re just getting started with automating campaigns, ad sets and ads, you might be wondering... what are all the ways I could leverage automation in my marketing strategies?
In general, ad automation lets you scale ad creation, personalize ad creatives based on data, and to automate campaigns management.
This article will introduce a few ways that marketers are using automation in their campaigns and strategies.
Tip!
For a list of more detailed instructions and example feeds, check out the article Use cases for campaign automation with example feeds. And as for working with more than one channel, see Scale across channels with automation.
Local ads: the neighborhood's favorite restaurants
In the hyperlocal strategy, you would aim to advertise your local items or services around a specific location. The ads shown to the audience would showcase location specific information together with the items or services.
Let's say you're promoting the favorite restaurants in a neighborhood. You find out what they are by analyzing customer behavior in the locations.
Your feed data would contain each restaurant's name, a picture of a popular menu item, and the resturant location. Ads would be targeted to be shown around the restaurants location (address + radius), so the audience recognizes the resturants shown in the ads.
In the ad creative, you can use video templates to create videos showing one or more restaurants with pictures of the popular menu items, as well as a localized call to action like "Order from the best restaurants in the Lower East Side!"
Case study: Deliveroo Reaches Hyperlocal Audiences with Neighborhood Favorites
Another idea is to use data about the best-selling dish in each area to display relevant art and copy in your ad.
Available inventory: Selling bookings for a popup event
You can also show ads based on the availability of the goods they advertise. It can be used to manage inventory consumption driven through ad promotion.
In this exampe, we have a touring popup event that will be setting up in different cities through out year. In each city, there are only a limited number of bookings that can be made to attend the event.
You can set up a list of each tour location, along with the number of bookings still available. This provides a sense of how much "inventory" is still left to book.
You would set up a campaign to target ads to each city on the tour schedule. Each location would be shown a localized ad.
The ad would contain information about the dates when the event is in the city, and have a call to action to book attendance to the event.
Using automation, we can set up when the ads are live and remove the need to manually create or manage ads. Ads would only be live in cities with upcoming events and paused after the event date. Ads would also be paused if the event is almost fully booked; this would help focus ad spend to cities where there is still "inventory" left to book.
External API: use any external data feed
If you use an external data feed as a condition to determine what ads to run, it opens up the whole world. Ads are shown based on how the data in the external API changes.
Weather-based ads
In the weather API example, a fashion advertiser can show ads based on local weather information.
By tying forecast data to targeted location, the campaign can be set up to automatically for ad creatives for items like sunglasses and beach wear when it's sunny, or items like rain coats and boots when it's rainy.
For more information, see Tutorial: Creating feeds with weather data.
You can also enrich your ads by creating a dynamic template and giving a feed as a data source, so that your ads display the current weather information.
Reacting to the stock market
As a stock broker, for example, you can show ads based on stock or market information.
When the market has beed doing well, the broker could advertise about "not missing out on the gains". And when the market is down, the campaign could be switched to promoting portolio protections like stop-loss.
As a bonus, the stock broker could even include live stock price quotes (or the previous close price) in their ad creatives, and use conditional colors (green when price is up, red when price is down).
There are external APIs for almost everything, and marketers can even create their own data sources that control which ads are active. When it comes to using these types of experiential data and related APIs, a marketers imagination is the limit.
Compare with regional average
If your company is a car rental service, for example, you could well benefit from ads that favorably compare your prices with the regional average. If you create a dynamic template to display the current average rental price for cars in the current region, and then display your price (perhaps calculating an automatic discount!), you can make the value you offer very obvious to consumers.
Automatic targeted videos
The video travelogue
If you work for a travel agency, you have to juggle a wide variety of audiences and destinations. You probably spend a lot of time thinking about matching them up so you can create appealing ad videos for all demographics, because of course you can't create a video about every destination for every demographic...
Except that with Smartly, you can!
Create a video template with several dynamic fields that are shown consecutively. Plug them into matching fields in the feed: "Opening", "Establishing", "Persona", "Activity" and "Closing" for example. Divide your footage into "puzzle pieces" and add them in the columns. Your "Establishing" feed column could contain various shots from a destination, "Persona" would include a group of people customized by target persona and so on. Then you can just let Smartly combine them into a huge variety of videos for each target audience or destination. One video - 150 combinations!
Same ad, different Instagram
You can also use video templates and dynamic content to create variations from one video ad to use in various Instagram accounts, even if they have different branding or target audiences.
Start by creating a Placements column in your feed where you specify where the creative will be displayed, and then specify a filter in the creative template element to show it appropriately.
Next level ad buying: automate your bidding
If you have a very granular bidding strategy or your bids change frequently, you will find it easier to use a feed to set your bidding.
In your feed, set up a numeric field in full currency units and fill it so it follows your bidding strategy. Then in your campaign workspace, select to use the bid value from the feed.