Exploring Six Emerging Digital Advertising Platforms

Shape the Conversation

LinkedIn
Should be on the short list of consideration for any marketers selling a B2B product. The combination of an exploding audience and rapidly improving ad targeting options is driving a lot more advertisers to consider investing in the platform.

We love that you can target a specific list of emails or LinkedIn profiles with campaigns and have seen great engagement with our ads using this targeting.

Be wary of the high cost per click you'll see on LinkedIn. If you are launching a new campaign make sure you monitoring it closely post launch.

Quora
The question and answer site provides a vast array of topics and questions that marketers can target ads to. We love this granularity. We also love the advertising experience on Quora. The ads are subtle and text only. We've seen great results from previous campaigns we've run on the network.

The downside of Quora for most marketers will be trying to generate a high enough volume of clicks to make the time investment worth it. If you are targeting digital marketers as a base this may even be getting tougher as Nicole feels like the activity on digital marketing focused topics has been waning a little on Quora over the last year or so from her point of view.

Reddit
Reddit is a volatile, unique corner of the internet. Proceed with caution. The community is tight knit and does not tend to take kindly to advertisers. But the vibrant and diverse interests of the community means that there are a lot of opportunities for B2B and B2C marketers. We love that you can target specific subreddits. On a site where you'll be vilified for pushing your company's products in the threads, we believe advertising is actually a more honest way to get in front of the reddit audience.

We have had success driving clicks by targeting r/ppc in the past. If you can find a subreddit where your target market is hanging out, we'd recommend giving it a shot. The platform is self serve and cheap to get started.

Twitch
The platform for live streaming people playing video games is starting to expand its ad business. Owned by Amazon, it's easy to see how they could be a force in the years to come. Twitch's audience is growing. Currently, 104 million monthly active users consume content and 2.2 million people create content on the platform.

If you are trying to reach the male demographic, this could be a great option. 81% of Twitch users are male with the majority being 18-34 yrs old.

One downside is you have to go through a third party to get ads going on the network (unless you are willing to commit $50k to an ad buy directly through twitch).

Pandora
We don't have any personal experience on this network but here's a link to a great explanation of what to expect if you do experiment with Pandora. Pandora has a lot of great targeting options to choose from.

Spotify
Spotify has a really cool self-serve option called Ad Studio. All you need is a minimum budget of $250 to run an initial experiment. You can "target based on age, gender, location, activity, and music taste. Select mobile, desktop or both so your ad reaches listeners in the right context" according to Spotify.

Our best advice with any of these networks is to start with really tight targeting and then branch out. You never quite know what you are going to get until you set a campaign live. We also think now is a great opportunity to get some discounted clicks on these networks before big ad buyers come into the networks en masse and drive up prices.

Reach out to us with any ideas, questions, or feedback on the podcast!

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