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12 Innovations Event Marketers Need for 2022

12 Innovations Event Marketers Need for 2022

  1. YouTube Bumper Machine
  2. Audience Extension
  3. Programmatic
  4. LinkedIn Event Ads
  5. Dynamic Search Ads on Google
  6. YouTube Lead Generation Forms
  7. Video Action Campaigns
  8. Facebook Lead Generation Audiences
  9. LinkedIn Member Group Targeting
  10. Wi-Fi Targeting on Facebook
  11. Performance Max
  12. Enhanced Conversions

Each innovation is covered in more detail below:

1. YouTube Bumper Machine

An innovation that is coming soon in Beta is the YouTube bumper machine. Bumper Machine was built to address the needs of advertisers who have limited resources when it comes to developing custom or new Bumper creative from their video campaigns.

YouTube Bumper Machine. Source: Google.

Target audience: Any advertiser with a long form video (<90 sec) that would like to create a Bumpers cutdown to use in upcoming campaigns.

Advertiser benefits: 

YouTube Bumper Ads give advertisers the agility to create Bumpers in minutes, saving time and resources.

They can help inspire creative agencies of what a Bumper could look like and for them to build their own later. 

How does it work? 

No minimum spend requirements, just need a YouTube Channel linked to their Google Ads account that contains the base video (<90 sec) that they would like to cut down.

This will be a great addition for organisers who have long promo videos or content videos that we can cut down easily into a bumper ad to create additional YouTube ad types for the campaign. 

Image source

2. Audience Extension

“It is a great way to provide another value-added service to your clients and at the same time generate revenue for yourself”

Rick Strachan, VP of Business Development, Informa Markets

Provide value to your exhibitors and sponsors all-year round

Give your exhibitors and sponsors additional value all year-round by utilising your existing valuable event data. 

Audience Extension, a service offered by Tag Digital, uses your existing data, including previous show visitors or email database, to send traffic to your exhibitors’ websites. 

What’s in it for you?

You sell this service to your exhibitors on an uplifted CPM basis, with a typical ROI of 250-800%.

This provides high-quality audience exposure for your clients to their target audience, whilst generating a strong return on investment for you, purely through digital. 

More information on Audience Extension

3. Programmatic

Whilst programmatic advertising has been around for decades, it is becoming an increasing area of interest for event marketers looking for new ways to scale their campaigns across new channels and put more budget into digital.

What is Programmatic?

Any ad buying using automation or software as opposed to manual process – pretty much all paid media, using algorithms over human resource.

Some Key Facts

  • Automated process of buying and selling ad inventory through an exchange, connecting advertisers to publishers.
  • The real-time buying and selling of ad inventory through an automated bidding system. 
  • Includes ad slots for digital out-of-home (DOOH), online, streaming, TV, video and voice ads.
  • Uses a program to purchase ad slots on publishers’ websites
  • The artificial intelligence (AI) powered algorithms evaluate users based on their behavior, demographic data, cookie data, and other criteria to determine which ad should be shown to each user.

Benefits:

  • Programmatic offers access to premium publishers
  • You can used objective based bidding so can be focused on conversions/CPA same as any other channel
  • It offers more audience targeting at a deeper level, including additional first and third party options
  • There are more creative options available to you
  • Typically for events we use DV360 which allows us to build our an event industry specific prospecting strategy, coupled with first and third party audiences and rich media creative to produce performance driven campaigns

More information on programmatic.

4. LinkedIn Event Ads

LinkedIn Event Ads is a new feature that allows you to promote your event to a target audience with an event ad campaign – these are relatively new. 

You can use Event Ads for both in-person and virtual event promotion and create new event ads or sponsor existing posts with event URLs from your LinkedIn Page to increase event registrations. 

PROS – helps drive additional registrations and help measure the impact of your event.

LinkedIn Event Ads

Additional Information:

  • As a Sponsored Content ad format, Event Ads are displayed in a member’s LinkedIn feed on desktop and mobile devices and optimised to highlight important event details.
  • All we need is a LinkedIn Event Page with exact event details ie. date, time, location & event description. 
  • Option to use a LinkedIn registration form which allows you to download attendee details gathered

5. Dynamic Search Ads on Google

This is a new innovation that has recently come out of Beta for Search ads on Google. It came around as keyword lists on Google are growing rapidly as people are searching in new ways everyday. 

15% of searches on Google.com are brand new, every single day.

This has resulted in it becoming more and more difficult to reach potential attendees/ exhibitors with the right keyword.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) allow us to reach users searching for new keywords that we may not pick up in our own research. 

6. YouTube Lead Generation Forms 

A more recent version that google released on YouTube was the Lead Forms on TrueView for Action ads. 

This is a feature of True View for action ads, which is the skippable ad that shows before or during the user watching a video on this platform. 

How does it work?

The form pops up directly below the ad as it running,  which will allows advertisers to capture leads (emails, phone numbers, etc). 

User benefit:

This in-stream format is an in-app experience, where users can submit their information directly within YouTube as opposed to opening up a separate mobile web browser by the advertiser. 

7. Video Action Campaigns

Video action campaigns use the skippable in-stream and video discovery ad formats. So additional placements that true view for action.

As recommended with most YouTube videos, apart from the bumper ad, the video that you include in the campaign should be at least 10 seconds in length.

Ads included in your YouTube video campaign can use a call-to-action, headline (both short and long), and a description in the creative. allowing your ad to display much more detailed in all the placements which will encourage user to convert. 

You can add extensions (for example, sitelinks or lead forms) or a product feed to your campaign to influence conversions.

Video Action Campaigns. Source: Google.

More information on YouTube Ads and marketing, listen to our upcoming podcast episodes.

8. Facebook Lead Generation Audiences

This is a new audience that we encourage our clients to trial when running lead generation campaigns. This is the equivalent of an abandoned basket campaign from a website form, however the audience is stored on Facebook. 

It allows you to create an audience of people who have opened or completed your form on one of your lead generation forms across facebook and instagram. 

We can set up these campaigns to exclude people who submitted the form to ensure that you are always targeting new users. 

This allows you to remarket and reconnect to users who you know are very interested but just didnt take the action of completing the form, so is a high value audience that will be ready to convert

9. LinkedIn Member Group Targeting 

Although Member Group Targeting on LinkedIn is not a brand new innovation, this has grown significantly over the last year, so it is very much worth using and we are continuing to see it as a good driver for conversions at a lower CPA on this platform. 

As an overview, Member Groups Targeting reaches members who share interests or professional associations by belonging to the same LinkedIn Group. 

The theory of targeting by group is that generally people will only join a group if they are explicitly interested in that topic, so this give us some certainty that we are reaching the right people with our message.

It usually is a smaller audience compared to job title targeting but can be much higher quality, so should be a campaign that’s added to the audience mix.

10. Wi-Fi Targeting on Facebook

You can now target Facebook Ads to customers who visited your business and connected to your Wi-FI and/or target this audiences in a lookalikes format based on your visitors, ie users who match the lookalike demographic of those who connected to your Wi-Fi 

This can be useful if you are hosting an event in your venue or if you want to target people who visited your workplace. 

11. Performance Max

A new campaign type in Google Ads that helps maximise your performance across Google Ads inventory using automation, saving you time and driving towards your goals.

This new goals-based campaign uses the best of Google Ads automation and attribution technology to help you maximise your conversion goals and performance across Google properties.

When to use Performance Max?

You would use this when want to maximise the performance of your campaign, and are not limited by which channel your ads appear on.

Key Benefits of Performance Max:

  • This is a goal-focused campaign, so it puts your marketing goals in focus as the primary target for maximising the campaign’s performance.
  • It will steer automation with your campaign input as based on your goals, Google’s machine learning will find your customers wherever they are across Google properties.
  • It will allow you to unlock new audiences across Google’s channels and networks, along with simplifying the campaign management, allowing you to easily optimise your ads. 

Image Source: Google.

12. Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced conversions is a feature that can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement as it is a Google Ads Conversion Tracking feature, which enables accurate conversion measurement when cookies are not available.

When a customer completes a conversion on your website, you may receive first-party customer data such as an email address, name, home address and/or phone number. This data can be captured in your conversion tracking tags, hashed, sent to Google in its hashed form, and then used to match your customers to Google accounts, which were signed into when they engaged with one of your ads.

This feature allows us to have even more detailed conversion measurements as the hashed data will be matched in order to attribute your campaign conversions to ad events, such as clicks, views or registrations. 

If you need more support with your event marketing strategies then get in touch right now on LiveChat or at info@tagdigital.co.uk.  

Book a call today

11 January 2022