When looking at the digital marketing industry as a whole, I really see one giant trend that has yet to break free and make itself truly known.
Feeds are the future, no matter what business you’re in.
We have more data, more channels, and more tasks that are required of us on a daily basis. The only way to really start managing everything at scale is to rely on feeds to automatically update and manage our marketing efforts. Feeds are more accurate and more up-to-date than the static ads of yore. If every marketing channel is built off the same feed, you’re guaranteed to have more of your organization on the same page, delivering the same message across different devices and channels.
Right now, Google Shopping campaigns reign dominant for feed usage. Google takes the information available in your product feed and automatically determines relevant keywords that your products should show up for. On the paid search side, Google also has Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns which enable them to crawl your site and find relevant keywords to match to. While I hate using these tools and giving up control on the programs that we run, I have to say that things scale quicker and run smoother when you just let Google handle it. From the looks of it, we may not even get that choice in the future. We may have to give up more and more control to stay in the game
But for now, you do have control. So what if you had that technology on your side? What if your feed was used across all the big online advertisers to keep everything in sync? What if your keywords were automatically generated by the data in your company’s feeds? What if the ads, sitelinks and callouts automatically updated whenever there were changes in inventory, price, or variety? What if display banners updated creative instantly and changed images based on the weather or current time in the geo you’re targeting?
This year at PMG, we’re developing new tools to manage and take advantage of the feeds our clients have. While we don’t know exactly what the future holds for feeds, I can guarantee that it will be exciting to test the limits.
I challenge your organization in 2015 to take a look at the feeds you have and the ways you can utilize this data for your marketing. If you take a good hard look, I’m certain you’ll start to open up some opportunities that will grow your business immensely.