The future of advertising is full-on-digital. TV, Newspaper, Cinema, are already getting faded out and with today’s digital marketing and advertising tools we still live in the dark ages.
So what is the future of advertising?

• Personalization At Scale– to create phenomenal personalized experiences.
• AI Dynamic Websites – to adapt the website for each user to maximize the value of the website.
• AI Driven A/B Testing – creating thousands of automated A/B tests to improve and test product.
• Data Enrichment – to obtain much more detailed information of each user, whether subscriber nor not.
• Online & Offline ‘Events’ – combining data from offline events like retail stores and upselling them over digital channels.

Instead of just listing a few points and explaining them, we decided to provide you with an execution plan to use the latest technological advantages to increase the possibility for viral growth. And give you tips and tricks to innovate your own growth hacks to experience exponential growth. Keep reading in the following sequence to be able to up your organization and secure your position in new economy.

Data -> Setting Up A Growth Engine -> Viral Advertising

Step 1: Data

Data – the epicenter of knowledge

Today, advertising and data go hand in hand, and it has become the case that one or the other cannot do without. Traditional advertising is a form of mass distribution, impersonal communication and generic promotion of ideas, goods, services. Data in advertising can make impersonal, personal.

Focus groups and mass communication are out. Data-driven personalization is to conquer.

Data can be divided into two areas of application: understanding the behavior and predicting future behavior. By using registered customer details or anonymous user IDs to segment users into different segments. And systematically communicating to these users. But tomorrow’s advertising is to understand each user before they arrive to your website and use AI and Automation to programmatically personalize each customer touch point to successfully guide them throughout all stages of the marketing and sales cycle. Read more about this under growth hacking later in the article.

The terms AI & Automation might frighten you. However, to really get started with limited coding requirements, Street Inc. suggests the following marketing tech stack to modernize your data.

• Clearbit for data enrichment
• Segment for data connectivity
• Mixpanel or amplify for analytics
• Salesforce or Hubspot for CRM
• Twillo to centralize your customer service center

By implementing such a strong data & analytical setup, you will be able to fully what customers like, what drives growth, which advertisements are driving growth. If your company needs support with data capture, implementation, and analytics, check out our ‘Data & Analytics’ package.

Now as we have covered how to collect data, lets use the data to create a personalized user experience that becomes a self-propelling traffic generator.

Image By Geru

Step 2 - Build To Win

Setting Up A Growth Engine

Before we start driving traffic to our platforms, let us ensure that we maximize users personalization and conversions. Let’s build a product that is built and setup for scale.

Personalization at Scale

Never before have companies had such tremendous insights and means to communicate with people on a one-to-one level. This is where direct messaging and remarketing comes in.

CRM:

Every business needs to have a strong CRM (Customer Relationship Management System). As shown above, we suggest either Salesforce.com or Hubspot.com. Such tools collect all our customers data and allows you to segment your users into different social group (social graph) based on their current behavior and location. Accordingly, you can personalize messaging to each and every social group - whether it be emails, ads, sms, push notifications or cold calls.

AI Driven A/B Testing:

Machine learning algorithms can process huge, ever-changing historical data sets and predict products that the user will want to see next. Not just that, AI too, automatically segments people through A/B testing where it creates thousands of tests daily. Ideally, there will be far fewer ads but with 100% relevance, to the right audiences.

However, these are the current capabilities of product recommendation in advertising, if artificial intelligence technologies will allow creating completely new types ads: hyper-relevant, fully relevant to the context and, accordingly, having a significantly greater impact on user decisions?

At Street Inc, your advertising agency in Dubai, Zurich and Berlin, we are constantly exploring and testing new machine learning models that will predetermine the power of digital advertising. Our research on recommendation algorithms promises a bright future for product recommendation in advertising.

Personalized Messaging:

Ensure that every message, including its copy, creative and CTA, are specified for that specific social graph. Personalize the messages to languages, add their name to it, offer them a discount for the product they have been eyeing, or upsell a service once they go on their holiday. Twillo.com is a fantastic tool to get automated calls or Whatsapp chatbots running in no time. If you need help, check out our ‘Branding & Content’ package for Street Inc. to execute it for you.

Paid Remarketing:

You can also message users who are currently not on your product. To stimulate them to subscribe, become a paining user, or even to bring them back to the website for a specific promotion. Dive into making personalized messages on Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search & Display, Pintrest, TikTok, and many more platforms. Targeting according to various parameters, for example, socio-demographic (gender, age, etc.) or the location of the consumer, helps to determine it. Moreover, today it is necessary to take into account consumer behavior both online (it is much easier to do it there) and offline. Combining data from two worlds is a difficult task, the so-called online-to-offline marketing. If a customer walks into a store but hasn’t made a purchase, the company may assume that the person is still in a state of choice. However, if we were to put it into an online scenario and as the company would like to “nudge” a potential customer to purchase, they can easily make them a personal offer by analyzing his online behavior and product requirements - and there it goes, REMARKETED.

A super good tool for setting up remarketing campaigns is Clearbit Advertising & Perfect Audience

Since this gets quite tricky, Street Inc. offers a out-of-the-box package to help you with ‘Digital Personalization’.

Referral Strategy:

It is absolutely critical to make your advertising strategy and campaign as viral as possible. A referral marketing strategy does exactly that. Incentives and stimulates users to create WOM. Either, if your really intelligent, you can build a product that does that organically. Say, share your estimated arrival time with friends. Otherwise, inventive it, financially. Give your users free storage space like Dropbox did, or free taxi credit similar to Uber. Just make sure that the cost of the incentive will be earnt over the Life Time Value of that and every other user they bring in.

Snowball Effect:

We want every user to become an ambassador and help us grow. While a referral marketing stimulates users to invite and share, a snowball tactic is to make others contribute content that leads to growth. Say, once a user orders a pizza from your takeaway, ask them to give you a 5 star rating on one of the many existing review platforms. Google Maps (My Business) is a great tool to increase SEO while Clutch could be a fantastic way to increase your visibility as an agency on that channel. Whatever platform you decide to use as part of the snowball effect, double check that that platform has sufficient amount of traffic from the correct demographics. The point here is, your higher ranking will attract more people to your platform – free and organically. Since we have built now an incredible growth engine, personalized for each and every user, lets get down to driving traffic. If you have any questions, reach out to our advertising agency in Dubai, Zurich or Berlin anytime!

Step 3 - Traffic

Generating Web Traffic

Growth, growth, growth. To stand out in todays digital world, advertisers and advertising agencies need to beat the crowd. With standard Facebook, Google and Amazon Ads you do not only compete against the biggest companies in the world with every single advertise dollars. To us, Street Inc. one has to diversify advertising into linear safe advertising tactics, such as Facebook and Google Ads, but also exponential risky tactics.

Obsess about your target audience.

The first and foremost step of advertising is truly understanding where your clients eat, breath and consumer, digitally. Yes, everyone is on Facebook, but everyone also uses other digital platforms specific for their needs, hobbies and likes. Choose a set of channels with high engagement, less competition, specifically where your target audience lives and creative native ads on those platforms.

Experimental Ads

Have you ever considered doing ads on Tinder, WeTransfer, Product Hunt, Waze, Yelp, Zomato, Dribbble, One Dot? What about local classified and ecommerce websites? This exactly is what experimental ads. and experimental marketing is. Reach your exact target market, with less costly CPM. Check out our Ultimate Growth or Viral Campaign Package if you are interested to start such campaigns immediately.

Growth Hacking

The real future of marketing is growth hacking. Where your marketing and engineering team create technological systems that infiltrate other websites and redirect traffic from theirs to yours.

Airbnb growth hacked Craigslist by automatically cross posting and uploading their rooms onto Craigslist. Showing Airbnbs rooms to the multi millions of Craiglist users skyrocketed their web traffic. PayPal created a technical plugin for users to add a PayPal ‘pay’ button directly into the product page of eBay. This hack contributed to millions of revenue.

Every product, industry and team can achieve such growth hacks. However, one needs to be cheeky and think way out-of-the-box.

Targeting Paid Ads

Of course, you can either use the native advertising tools provided by Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tiktok, what not. But you can also use 1 centralized tool that uses AI to optimize the campaigns and their costs. A fantastic tool is Adroll

However, our favorite tool for is Clearbit. This phenomenal tool does not only enrichen your data, but also allows you to do ‘LinkedIn’ specific type of targeting on Facebook.

So, dear brands, marketers, advertisers and advertising agencies, as we have learnt, the future of advertising is not following a rule book and copying your competition. That will never achieve a market leading position. Instead, use data to learn every step of your clients, personalize the experience for each user, build yourself a growth engine, and use alternative experimental ways to drive traffic to your website and product. This way, we guarantee you and your business to define the future of your industries.
To get rolling, lets now check out our ‘Ultimate Growth Package’.