TELECOM The telecom marketer’s guide to mastering display advertising Featuring
Tre
Telia
Autumn 2019
Telenor
With the right strategy and supporting technology – all of this is possible, and more! That is why we have created this guide to inspire your display advertising processes and performance. Here you can expect the latest research and data from the telecom industry to help you overcome the main challenges to effective display advertising.
For telecom marketers worldwide, the landscape is becoming ever more competitive, with a multitude of players and an oversaturated market. No doubt, you have downloaded this guide today because you’re struggling with these very same issues. Display advertising may be a significant part of your ad spend but is it attracting new business as much as you need? You may also want more engaged, loyal customers and at the same time exceed your competitors’ time to market.
We will provide you with best practice from industry innovators as well as a step-by-step walk-through for targeting the right audience with dynamic creative optimisation (DCO). Do you want more effective digital advertising? Get inspiration from established giants to the digital challengers – this guide has it all!
Lotta Laurin Lotta Laurin CMO Bannerflow
Do you want more effective digital advertising? Get inspiration from established giants to the digital challengers – this guide has it all!
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Table of Contents
Part One: “What strategies should we adopt for attracting new customers?” 1. The essential elements of an effective brand awareness strategy
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2. How Three Sweden use technology for agile and impactful display advertising
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3. 4 key takeaways for attracting new audiences
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Part Two: “Customer churn is a big problem in our industry, how can display advertising help me to reduce this?” 4. Practical solutions for boosting customer loyalty
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5. Telia Company’s digital transformation journey: Enabling innovation in telecom marketing
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6. 3 key takeaways for reducing customer churn
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Part Three:: “How can I increase the ROI of my display advertising?” 7. A guide to targeting the triple play audience with DCO
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Part Four: “What are my next steps?” 8. Conclusion
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9. Reference page
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PART ONE
“Which strategies should we adopt for attracting new customers?”
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1 The essential elements of an effective brand awareness strategy Attracting audiences at the top of the funnel is a key strategy for telecom marketing teams and an essential part of driving new business. In the competitive telecom industry, with both disruptive players and global giants – it’s increasingly important to attract the right audience, with the right message, at the right time to drive new business. Nowhere presents more opportunities for this than display advertising. With Google’s Display Advertising network alone you can easily reach relevant audiences. Plus, with new developments in creative and personalisation technology, you can create ads that are hyper-relevant and show offers to prospective customers well before your competitors do. For leading operators such as Telia Company, Three Sweden, and Telenor display advertising plays a crucial role in their top funnel marketing strategy. Read on to learn how you and your team can use display advertising to your advantage…
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Strategy 1: Video advertising
Social video has shown the most rapid development supported by the rise of Instagram TV and stories across platforms. But what about display advertising? In Europe, video display advertising still lags far behind; with over 80% of banners still stuck in a static format.
Across marketing teams worldwide,
Yet for driving engagement with your
according to IAB Europe, video
consumer’s attention is essential –
video usage is on the rise. In fact,
brand across channels, catching the
accounted for 33 per cent of the display
and video is one of the most effective
Plus, in a 2019 Bannerflow report on
Video advertising is not something
market and â‚Ź7.6bn in spend in 2018.1
display ad performance we discovered that video banners performed 18.4% higher than their static equivalent.
CTR
18.4%
ways of doing so.
that should be limited to Instagram stories either. Adding video to your banners is simple with a creative management platform (CMP) too.
Display ads containing video have 18.4% better CTR.
Get an overview of the statistics here. 6
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Bannerflow customer, Telenor, have recently started experimenting with video in their display ads as a simple addition to capture the attention of viewers. Engaging, effective, and creative – video is an excellent way to increase brand awareness.
Using an in-banner video widget to tell a story to viewers
Featuring close ups of a family to match the family price offering
Click here to learn more about the effective use of video in display advertising. 7
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Strategy 2: Automated feeds and real-time offers In a rapidly changing market, it’s essential for
operators to be able to reach new audiences with the latest products and offers. However, for a display advertising campaign the time to market can be long, with a month between design concept to publishing. What’s more, for ‘real-time’ adjustments to products and offers within your ads, an agency may even quote you a 48hr turn-around! Using a real-time sync to your product inventory and automated data feeds offers your team the chance to reach new customers in the moment. Automated data feeds can be used in-banner and can link directly to a product inventory, pricing list, or media library – in fact, any of your live data! Without this technology, you will struggle to be both timely and relevant using display advertising. The opportunities automated data feeds present for brands across industries cannot be denied. Yet astonishingly, only 17.3% of display campaigns in Europe use this technology today.
only
17.3%
Most display campaigns are not utilising feeds, infact less than 1/5th.
It is remarkably easy to set-up too. Using a creative management platform (CMP), it can be done in-house or by a member of the creative team in a matter of minutes. Thereafter, your campaigns will always be ahead of the curve showing the latest 5G payment plan or iPhone contract days before your competitors. 8
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Telia Company have worked hard to pair both creativity and data in their display advertising. This campaign is a great example of using realtime data feeds to show the latest offers and pricing to prospects!
A range of sizes to suit all devices and publishers.
With Bannerflow, we can reach out to our customers
with the latest offers and opportunities three times faster than before.
Caroline Ekstrand Head of Marketing Projects & In-house production Telia Company Sverige
Pricing is connect to a live feed for this product to ensure up to date deals. To learn how dynamic creative works with a CMP, click here. 9
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Strategy 3: Geo-location data
Targeting is essential to any marketing campaign. But are
you using the right form of targeting? Geo-location is cited as one of the most common factors of any successful display or digital-out-of-home ad. Geo-location data blurs the lines between online and physical stores. Indeed, brands across industries are using geo-location data to direct foot traffic into stores. Using dynamic creative, operators can provide specific rewards and discounts in areas nearby to selected stores and tailor messaging to specific customers. Sony Mobile is an excellent example of a brand using geo-location data to drive in-store traffic. Using geofencing technology, Sony identify potential customers in close proximity to a store which stocked its mobile devices and then used targeted display advertising to reach them at home when connected to Wi-Fi. The result? 2
Average engagement for Sony footfall
9.9% Average footfall up by 9.9%
84% higher than industry standard. engagement
84%
to Sony stockists.
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Using a CMP geo-location data can be used to target the right person in the right place with ease. Simply sync feed data tailored to location into dynamic creative or digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads. No coding, no
complications. O2 are an example of a brand successfully using geo-location advertising in their DOOH campaigns for this Samsung phone.3
They used geofencing to target ads on digital radio, Soundcloud, and Deezers within 500m of the OOH site for a comprehensive multi-channel campaign.
To learn more about all the possibilities with dynamic creative, click here. 11
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Strategy 4: Interactive rich media campaigns
Interactive elements in your display advertising can
make the difference between success and failure when it comes to your campaigns.
Use of rich media has proven to increase click-through rates by as much as 200%. CTR
And It doesn’t need to be complex either! Rich media
200%
can be something as simple as a small animation or a search function.4
The fact is that, display advertising has lagged behind other digital marketing channels when it comes to creativity and innovation. Yet, rich media provides as an effective tool for brands to catch the eye of consumers and stand out from competitors within display advertising UK telecom operator, Talk Talk5, made the switch to HTML5 rich media and managed to decrease their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for campaigns by 12%. The learning? Static banners might be an easy way of producing campaigns, but they will not produce the same results that rich media ads will.
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This is best demonstrated by Icelandic telecom brand, Nova, who used video and rich media in their display advertising as part of a campaign involving local singers/ songwriters – each one linked back to the artist’s playlist on Spotify that encouraged high levels of engagement with the ad.
This Spotify widget links directly to the artist in the video.
Video as well as rich media for higher engagement.
Voted the best Bannerflow display campaign of 2018, Nova demonstrated that video and a unique idea is all you need to catch a viewers attention.
See Nova’s process from design concept to publishing, here. 13
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2 How Three Sweden use technology for agile and impactful display advertising
Telecom operator, Three are known worldwide for their creative and engaging advertising. In an overcrowded and competitive market, having display advertising that stands out from the crowd is essential. We spoke to the Head of Creative Agency and Creative Director of Three Sweden, Kristian Lundman to find out how they operate to encourage creativity internally.
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Kristian Lundman Head of Creative Agency Creative Director Three Sweden
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Three’s in-house agency: Tre Creative Agency Tre Creative Agency is the beating heart of all things creative at Three Sweden. From television ads to display advertising, it oversees advertising across all channels and formats. Uniquely, Tre Creative Agency has developed a particular look and feel for Three’s brand identity which they call “Threeality”. This ensures that all advertising produced shares the same unique and impactful characteristics.
What are the challenges facing
your industry when doing display advertising?
What makes your digital marketing unique?
We are fast and we are not afraid of
Telecom is a fast-moving business.
testing new exciting ways of getting
The biggest challenge when it comes
our message across, for example,
to display advertising and telecom is
the use of digital video. We also have
staying relevant with the right offers,
an agile process once our display
at the right time. Plus, then being able
advertising has gone live, and are
to adjust your offers once a display
always ready to make adjustments,
campaign has gone public.
react and optimise our ads.
How has Three Sweden overcome
How important is in-house
these challenges?
We’ve overcome these challenges by
marketing to Three Sweden? How do you see it changing in the future?
having the right set-up internally,
Very important. Tre Creative Agency
and hiring the right skills and
is the cornerstone of our marketing
competencies when it comes to our
department. Moreover, we look upon
in-house organisation. Tre Creative
ourselves as constantly evolving
Agency (Three Sweden’s in-house
when it comes to both creativity and
agency) allows us to have closer
marketing processes.
collaboration between our product and online departments.
It’s likely, we will face the challenges of even more high-speed marketing, but we are confident that we have the organisation to meet these new demands.
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The 4 key takeaways for attracting new audiences
The opportunities for improving your display campaign may seem overwhelming. Indeed, the gap between where display advertising is to where it should be can appear impossible. Yet, bearing in mind these four key takeaways and using the right technology can transform the performance of your campaigns – and make it easy in the process.
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1. Video is a king.
18.4%
Video ads perform 18.4% higher than their static counterparts.
2. Automated feeds and real-time data enable greater relevancy. At least 80% of ads could
ads
80%
benefit from personalisation technology.
3. Geo-location drives in-store traffic.
footfall
9.9%
Sony increased average footfall in-store by 9.9% using geo-location data targeted advertising.
CTR
Rich media can increase click-through by up to 200%
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200% Bannerflow.com
PART TWO
“Customer churn is a big problem in our industry, how can display advertising help me to reduce this?�
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4 Practical solutions for boosting customer loyalty Telecommunications is a crowded industry, with increasing
competition from both global brands and new disruptive players making it a struggle to retain customers year on year. In fact, according to a recent study by Accenture:
41%
41% of consumers switched providers last year in the US alone.6
As a telecom marketing team, reducing churn is one of the toughest tasks you’ll be faced with. But there are solutions. New display advertising technology is leading the way in providing opportunities to reach customers – and more importantly – retain them.
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Solution 1: Real-time offers The sync between creative and data in display advertising
used to be too slow. Which is why social and email marketing has proved so successful, compared to display ads, for improving customer loyalty. Yet, engagement levels for these platforms are falling and marketers are asking, ‘what next?’. Today’s display advertising now offers marketers the opportunity to reach customers with the same level of relevancy and personalisation as any other digital format. Using a CMP, you can update banners in real-time with the latest offers or products. This can either be done by manually updating banners (in less than 15 minutes), or by using a dynamic creative function to pull live data from your product and pricing inventory. Now, you can combine creative design with the latest offers to reach your customers before your competitors do.
Solution 2: Leveraging data Your data management platform (DMP) or customer data platform (CDP) is
crucial in creating personalised marketing. And there are a variety of ways you can use this customer data to produce effective display advertising for customer loyalty. DMPs allow you to create custom audiences based on customer information, demographics, household income, past browsing info, purchasing information, location, device – the possibilities are endless (GDPR allowing of course…). But at the end of the day, it’s not just creatives that should be personalised. If you want to retain customers it’s important to know where to find them. Which is where the demand side platform (DSP) comes in. Partner your DMP with your DSP to buy ad inventory to reach the opportunities you want most.
Learn more about how you can use dynamic creative here. 20
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Solution 3: Targeting and timing Knowing when to target your customers is often the key to unlocking the
true potential of retargeting. As a marketing team, you shouldn’t rely on the customer service team to tell you when a customer is about to churn! Accessing your CDP, you can use your data to create timely and relevant advertising. For instance, if you may notice that a particular customer is frequently sending messages abroad, you could target them with the offer an additional package with a discount to messages sent to this country. Or is a customer frequently downloading movies to her devices? Maybe, you could present them with a better suited plan with better service quality and a faster download speed. Essentially – used correctly – display advertising now allows you to reach consumers on a granular level like never before.
Solution 4: On and off-site DCO For telco brands, capturing the attention of visitors on your site is an essential strategy for both attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.
Off-site DCO offers you the opportunity to retain customer loyalty without the repetition of ad creatives, bringing ad sequencing or retargeting to the next level. Using information from your DMP and DCO, you can keep your customers engaged and up-sell with timely and relevant messaging which differs at each stage. The result is that a sequence of ads builds a narrative which keeps customers engaged and up-to-date with the latest products and offers. In fact, you can present unique ads with different messaging, alternative interactions, and new creative at every stage of the sales funnel!
Read our in-depth blog on DCO, here. 21
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Telia’s Digital Transformation Journey: Enabling innovation in telecom marketing
Telia has redesigned the way their digital marketing operates. By using the right technology and an agile way of working, they have enabled a process that is both faster and more effective. We spoke to Telia’s Digital Transformation Manager, Lena Lindgren, to find out how they use display advertising to stand out from the crowd, increase sales and boost customer loyalty.
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Lena Lindgren Digital Transformation Manager Telia
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What are the biggest pain points facing your industry right now?
Telecom is an extremely competitive
How has technology helped you
innovate the way Telia operates your in-house marketing?
field and to win the customer you need
Technology has allowed us to scale
to be relevant and offer an excellent
our production without using extra
customer experience. Disruptive
resources, it’s a very cost-efficient
players are also setting completely
way of mass-producing our online
new standards for the digital customer
advertising.
meeting, with high expectations of seamlessness and personalisation. For Telia, what are the most effective marketing strategies for boosting
customer loyalty/ reducing churn?
Using a creative management platform, we have been able to shorten our goto-market time from 20 to 4 days! We’ve managed to largely automate the production and activation process across channels, together with cross-
We’ve found personalisation to be a very
functional teams this has streamlined
effective tool for our online marketing.
our time to market.
This means we tailor our messaging and creatives as well as offerings, across paid and owned channels, to meet our customers with the most relevant content at any given time or channel. How has working with display
advertising helped you overcome these challenges?
Working with display advertising has helped us to iterate and test our ideas quickly at relatively low cost. With the right tools, we can rapidly adapt
What makes your digital marketing process unique?
We have an audience-first approach for all our marketing activities. This is what people usually talk about, we really do it. Basing our strategy on the audience we’re targeting and building up from there. Where do you see the future of telecom marketing leading?
budgets, channels, and content to suit
The rapid development of digital
the expectations of our audience. This, of
marketing capabilities is setting new
course, requires cross-functional teams
expectations and standards and we no
and flexible processes, to gain efficiency
longer only compete with players in our
and incremental uplifts.
industry, but with new and fast-moving digital natives. We will need to have an
It’s excellent for personalisation too,
online customer experience on the same
as we can target our ads to specific
level as digital leaders such as Netflix or
audiences depending on where they are
Spotify, or we will fall behind.
in their journey. 23
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3 key takeaways for reducing customer churn
Generating loyalty is something that can be done across all formats – digital or otherwise. And display advertising is just one of those options. Today, display advertising offers the opportunity to target customers with the right messages at the right time, plus the possibility to present timely and relevant offers, through exciting and captivating design.
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Here are your top three takeaways for boosting loyalty with your display ads: 1. Use real-time offers as standard in your ad design. Currently, iGaming
(28%) and Retail (16%) 28% marketers lead the way
16%
with using dynamic content.7 2. Leverage data for your publishing strategy. CTR
Average CTR rises from 0.07% to 0.7% when applying a retargeting strategy.8
0.07%
0.7%
3. Use digital storytelling throughout the customer lifecycle.
CTR
DCO
10%
One Bannerflow customer reported a 10% lift in CTR when applying DCO to their display ads.
In Part 2, we covered the essential elements of creating engaging lead generation campaigns. For our final section, we will walk you through a case for dynamic creative optimisation.
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PART THREE
“How can I increase the ROI of my display advertising?”
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A guide to targeting the triple play audience with DCO The challenge for any marketer is proving return on investment from their marketing efforts. Whether it’s attracting the right audience or increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU), achieving this can be difficult. By combining your ads with data, and using the latest technology – display advertising can be a game-changer for lead acquisition. Acquiring the triple play audience is the ultimate win for telco marketers. Securing the TV, broadband, and mobile plan in one conversion present the opportunity to generate a considerably higher ARPU. The challenge? Reaching this audience with the right messaging at the right time. This is where dynamic creative optimisation can be used as an effective tool for marketers to convert these rare consumers. In the following chapter we will discuss the ways you can reach, advertise, and acquire these customers using advanced targeting technology.
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Your 8 steps for targeting the triple play audience
Step 1
Set your buyer personas for the triple play audience. For this example, let’s say
your target consumer is male, between the ages of 25 to 35 years old, and is about to move or has recently moved into a new home. They’re searching for a provider to set-up their TV and broadband – they might even need a new phone plan too!
Step 2
Identify what their particular interests might be and where they might typically be browsing online in the lead up to this decision. Whether that’s a site for
finding your next home, blogs on home furnishings, or interior design, Facebook group pages, telco comparison sites and especially your own website – all of them provide a potential location to reach this particular consumer.
Step 3
It’s important to use historical data to work out what devices your buyer persona browse on and then testing which devices achieve higher conversions. For
instance, brand awareness campaigns might work better on mobile but lowfunnel tactics on desktop. Plus, consider geo-fencing your ads to keep them as relevant to your target market as possible. This will help you identify where your ad spend is better targeted. 28
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Step 4
Get into the mindset of these consumers. Remember, you don’t want to target your messaging too narrowly but it’s important to customise your message to read well with consumer who might be searching for a new home and on the look-out for a new provider. Make the process sound as easy as possible and lead them to where they should go next!
Step 5
Of course, you can expect your consumers to shop around. Indeed, according
to ThinkwithGoogle, the average consumer will have around 3.4 touchpoints on
their consumer journey before making a final decision9. Therefore, at this point, your messaging should change and lean more towards a low-funnel retargeting strategy. You want to clearly outline your USPs and how you stand apart from your competitors.
Step 6
Once you have all this information mapped out, this is where the dynamic
creative optimisation platform comes in. To set-up your DCO platform you need to first make sure it’s connected to your DMP. After that is done, your team can create the decision tree within the platform which will determine which ad is presented to which viewer at a certain time in their user journey.
Step 7
Next, pair each junction in the tree with a creative. The creatives can be
produced manually, however, this will be an extremely tedious task for your designers as DCO often requires thousands of creatives. Instead, we recommend you use a CMP to build, design, and scale the required creatives for every stage of the user journey in a matter of hours.
Step 8
Once this is in place, you can execute the campaign! Ideally with increased
display advertising performance, as you are now providing the right ad, for the right user, at the right time.
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PART FOUR
“What are my next steps?”
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8 Conclusion
Telcom marketing can be a challenging field these days, with high subscriber acquisition costs, increasing churn, and declining ARPU – achieving a substantial ROI for your ad spend can be difficult. Yet, it doesn’t make it impossible. Simply make your advertising faster, more agile, dynamic and test different offerings for different audiences. Moreover, with the right tools, and the right approach to online advertising, boosting customer loyalty and driving inbound leads can be achieved easily.
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Reference page
1 - https://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/europe-digital-ad-spend-2018-iab-adex-benchmark 2 - https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/FutureStoresBlisInterview15.pdf 3 - https://econsultancy.com/six-clever-examples-of-what-dynamic-outdoor-advertising-can-do/ 4 - https://blog.bannerflow.com/advanced-format-banners-why-rich-media-brings-rewards/ 5 - https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/experience-design/talk-talk -increases-reach-and-lowers-cpa-with-doubleclick/ 6 -https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-68/accenture-global-anthem-pov.pdf 7 - https://blog.bannerflow.com/display-advertising-trends-2019-infographic/ 8 - https://blog.spiralytics.com/retargeting-statistics 9 - https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/search-intent-marketing-funnel/#/
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Bannerflow.com
Founded in 2010, Bannerflow is a Creative Management Platform (CMP) that enables in-house marketing teams to take control of their display advertising. Bannerflow is a software solution that empowers teams to design, scale, publish, analyse, personalise, and optimise display campaigns. Trusted by leading brands including Lonely Planet, Three, and
Shutterstock, Bannerflow continues to invest in innovative ways to help customers succeed in digital marketing. Get in contact with us to find out more about how Bannerflow’s technology can help you achieve better results from your display advertising.
Website: www.bannerflow.com Email: marketing@bannerflow.com Phone: +46 (0) 825 20 20 Address: Sankt Eriksgatan 46, 112 34 Stockholm
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