Adtech serves multiple purposes for any company. Not only does it facilitate building and deploying ad campaigns, but it also measures your success and optimize for the best results. Because it sits at the center of so many important marketing efforts, which platforms companies choose can make a huge difference in their overall growth.
For Chief Marketing Officers, finding an ad platform that is effective at driving real business results is a top priority. But with so many options, it’s hard to know what is right for your team. We want to help ease the decision process, so we’ve compiled a list of questions to ask in order to choose the right solutions for your team.
What Problems Are We Trying to Solve?
Clarifying where your team needs to focus over the next 12 months is the first step in deciding how to accomplish your goals. As such, before deciding what you need from a tool, solidify the problems you’re trying to solve this year for your team and your customers. Write out what isn’t working internally and what it would look like to have those processes working. Document what success and failure might look like so you have a clear understanding of what you need.
With a well-defined problem, teams can avoid surprises that pull the focus away from growth and back into problem-solving.
Look for partners that have similar plans for growth as your own company. Ask how the platform wants to evolve in the future. Find out what ad channels and mediums they plan to prioritize and how they’re going to ensure accurate reporting as they expand. The right adtech platform will be the one that most closely aligns with your plans.
How Well Do We Know Our Audience?
With your strategy decided, the next step is to look at the audience you’re trying to target. For most companies, the most engaged customers change over time. New product offerings, new locations, and new customer interests can all impact who wants to buy your products.
You want to invest in advertising platforms that can reach your current customers and help you reach brand new audiences. Don’t settle for sheer numbers. Impressions from imprecise audiences will only decrease your ROAS. Ask the solutions partners how they create audience segments, what signals they use to determine users interests and how they grow their available audiences.
How Trustworthy Is the Data?
The next question to dive into is how the solution ensures the quality of the data the adtech partner uses, both for reporting and for audience targeting. Solutions that can offer first-party data will offer more precision for your campaigns than those that use third-party data. Additionally, solutions that can incorporate offline, real-world behaviors, like in-store visits, point-of-sale purchases, and more, will give you a more accurate picture of how your campaigns are performing.
When evaluating your solutions, ask about how the data is verified. Get an understanding of how the platform addresses optional cookies, MAIDs depreciation, and the growing trend of customer privacy. How a solution uses the data from its audience will make the difference between a growth year and a slow year, so this is where you want to spend the most time evaluating your options.
How Can This Platform Help Expand Our Real Business Results?
Finally, CMOs should invest in solutions that can tie marketing efforts to real business results. With slow customer spending and tighter advertising budgets, vanity metrics won’t cut it. Make sure your partner reports on something that is meaningful to your business. Something you can report up to stakeholders, like traffic or revenue shifts due to your media investment. The partner needs to show how their approach helped solve your business problem, not just resulted in better CPMs.
Ask GroundTruth How Our Solution Can Help You
Deciding on the right adtech is as important as picking the right messaging or clarifying who your target customer is. The choices you make now will put you on a path for success or make the year an uphill battle. Set yourself up for success by choosing platforms that offer real business results. To learn more about how GroundTruth can help, contact us today. We’ll answer all these questions and more.
