Digitizing your media mix seems to be a given in an increasingly digital world. However, small businesses are far from finding what they are looking for, warn Pub Audit and the digital agency Day in Day, two local marketing specialists. Explanations.
Too complex, and not profitable enough. That’s what some retailers say to themselves after trying to invest in paid search or social media for the first time. “The problem is multiple: when the catchment areas are too small, the potential reach is mechanically lower. The budgets are often not high enough to obtain significant results, especially since the campaigns are mostly conducted in “one shot” rather than as a common thread. Finally, we come up against the issue of technical complexity, since these brands are mostly not equipped to interface their site with the tools of the online advertising giants.”notes Arnaud Dubin, Associate Sales and Marketing Director of Pub-audit, a company that supports many local players. He is joined by Denis Duval, CEO of Day in Day, a digital agency specializing in SEA and social, and whose particularity is to be paid based on performance : “Small retailers are focused on their core business and often only have experience with traditional advertising channels such as print or displays. In digital, they think they can respond in the same way to their awareness challenges, but also to traffic generation and conversion. This is wrong! It is often necessary to use very distinct channels.”
High cost and difficult optimization
According to these experts, digital is interesting when the retailer makes online sales. It will also be interesting in overpressure or as a replacement for print in certain areas. “By targeting only a limited number of personas using our geomarketing approach, we can optimize the budget allocated to printed advertising, increasing the ROI of this channel thanks to our knowledge of the populations in the territories where our retail clients are based. It is a local approach that sets us apart and allows our clients to free up budget for digital communication.”illustrates Arnaud Dubin. Indeed, small brands generally underestimate the costs of digital, while overestimating the results obtained. “In SEA, buying your name will cost you little, especially if few or no competitors are positioning themselves on your brand in paid referencing. But positioning yourself on generic keywords related to your activity, hoping to capture qualified and intentional traffic can cost you dearly, because you will quickly come up against national networks, which have more resources and above all benefit from greater seniority on search engines, which impacts the cost of auctions”explains Denis Duval. The same observation can be made on social networks, which are increasingly used as a prospecting lever for their ability to target small catchment areas: “If you don’t have a large budget, you have very little chance of reaching people interested in your offer. And whether in SEA or social media, you will be faced with the problem of measuring performance. You need a certain number of points of sale and a minimum level of traffic to use tools like Google’s Store Visit.”says the CEO of Day in Day, who provides some additional advice: “ AI can help optimize campaign effectiveness. This is particularly the case with the Performance Max format, which combines different formats (search, shopping, display, video). However, you must be careful not to allocate the entire budget to these formats alone, because while the format has advantages in terms of time savings, relevance of targeting and coverage, it acts in a more global way by giving less possibility of analyzing detailed results, to compare the performance of different channels. These formats aided by AI can therefore be more difficult to understand for advertisers new to the digital world, and very often could not completely replace classic formats. This is why it is important to approach experts. » Hence this latest recommendation from Arnaud Dubin: “We need to be supported by specialists in these subjects, who will build a communication system in complete transparency that is capable of responding to the specific challenges of the brand, and of arbitrating between traditional channels or digital channels according to needs. It is about building local campaigns and not national or multi-local campaigns that favor networks with a very urban presence.”
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Source: www.ecommercemag.fr
