Advertising strategies for the Internet automotive industry (Part 2)

In the above article "Advertising Strategy in the Internet Automobile Industry", we redefined the Internet advertising strategy and tried to classify the various advertising strategies using the five elements of traditional advertising. Next, we will try to construct a strategy classification method suitable for use on media platforms.

01

Classification by advertising process:

First of all, we can divide the advertising delivery process into three main stages according to the timeline: before delivery, during delivery, and after delivery. Each stage will include a series of advertising delivery tasks.

1. Before launch

The main work before the launch is to prepare for the subsequent launch:

The first step is to help advertisers complete account registration and recharge. In actual work, this link will also include many business processes, but it is not related to our advertising process and will not be expanded here.

The second step is to accept the advertiser's inquiry requirements and reply to the advertiser's information about the locations and traffic that can be delivered within a specific time period. The inquiry is likely to be a process that requires multiple rounds of confirmation.

In the third step, the client or its agency prepares the advertising materials needed for delivery according to the platform's material specifications. The quality of the materials and the size of the materials will have a great impact on the subsequent delivery effect.

In the fourth step, media executors or optimizers from the agency will help clients build account structures, which is the most common step of creating delivery plans, units, and creatives, and completing the upload and configuration of advertising materials.

The fifth step is to make various targeting settings under the account structure. Most delivery platforms support different targeting settings for different units.

The last step is to set budgets for different delivery plans and bids for different units. After the above six steps, the preparations before advertising delivery are completed.

2. Launching

When it comes to the actual advertising delivery stage, the first step is to include the various configured advertising creatives in the overall advertising auction. Whenever an advertising request comes in, it is first filtered according to the targeting conditions to determine whether to participate in this advertising auction.

When the targeting conditions are met, the auction is responded to, and the action of aggregating all the creatives that meet the targeting conditions is the second step of ad recall.

Next, all recalled creatives are sorted in descending order according to eCPM (eCPM=estimated ad click-through rate*bid), and the creative ranked first successfully bids for this display opportunity.

Finally, the system charges the advertising based on the bidding and ad display, and deducts the corresponding fees from the advertiser's account.

3. After delivery

After the campaign is completed, there are still several important tasks to be handled, namely: data statistics, cost optimization, advertising inventory management, and meeting some special needs of customers.

Since the Internet advertising delivery system is a truly data-driven system, data statistics at every stage of the advertising delivery process are particularly important. Based on the results of data statistics, we can optimize the delivery costs and the use of traffic, that is, advertising inventory, and finally meet the special needs of various customers.

02

Above we have given a brief overview of the process of Internet advertising. From this, we can see that the entire process involves many links, and various problems may arise in each link, such as: How should the targeting conditions be set to achieve both quantity and accuracy? How should the budget and bid be set to ensure smooth consumption during the delivery cycle? What should we do if there are too many materials for advertising recall and the sorting is too slow?

In the face of these problems, we need a systematic solution to deal with them, which is our advertising strategy. Mapping the strategies for solving each problem to the three major stages of advertising has formed our advertising strategy system classified according to the advertising delivery process, as shown in the following figure:

1. Pre-launch strategy

According to the workflow before launch, at this stage we need to focus on solving problems in five areas: traffic, materials, targeting, budget, and bidding, which give rise to these five types of strategies.

1) Traffic strategy

Traffic strategy is a very broad term. Its core is to solve the problem of how to allocate traffic more efficiently, so it is also called traffic allocation strategy.

The best traffic resources of each media platform are extremely limited. How to allocate the best traffic to the highest premium customers while maximizing the value of medium and long-tail traffic is the significance and value of traffic allocation strategy.

There are many ways to implement traffic allocation strategies. For example, the most common method is to classify customers, allocate traffic to customers according to their value, give priority to high-value customers, or allocate traffic according to maximizing platform revenue and platform traffic utilization.

2) Targeted strategy

The targeting strategy is easy to understand. It is a strategy to limit the scope of delivery. This will include the regional targeting strategy and crowd targeting strategy mentioned in the previous article, as well as a combination of the two.

Designing different targeting strategies for customers with different needs is the most common problem faced by advertising strategy product managers. Summarizing and generalizing the needs of customers in a certain industry to form a set of universal targeting strategies will become a very impressive-sounding targeting strategy for a certain industry.

3) Material strategy

Providing corresponding advertising materials according to the material specifications of the ad slot may seem like a non-strategic task at first glance, but problems arise when there are many ad slots on the platform and a large number of non-standard sizes.

Although major platforms are consciously reducing non-standard ad sizes nowadays, there are still many non-standard ad sizes in vertical media or affiliate advertising. For example, Autohome has 157 different advertising specifications, each of which corresponds to different material specifications.

When the amount of advertising materials that can be produced within a unit of time is limited, one has to face the question of which sizes of materials should be produced first. Only when the advertising materials of this size are covered can they be displayed in the corresponding ad positions and gain traffic. Therefore, the material strategy is essentially a question of traffic selection and traffic coverage.

From the perspective of the media platform, reasonable material suggestions should be given at this time. This type of suggestion is the material coverage strategy. If the same advertising material is shown over and over again, users will become aesthetically fatigued, so it is necessary to formulate corresponding material optimization strategies for issues such as material change frequency, style layout, and cold start.

4) Budget allocation strategy

How to allocate the budget has always been a core issue studied in the advertising process. The budget allocation strategy will vary greatly depending on the client's purpose. For example, when a new car is about to be launched, it may only consume 20% of the total budget in the warm-up period of 3 months before the launch. However, when a large amount of exposure is needed in the week of launch, 30% of the total budget will be consumed in that week. When a large number of leads are needed in the next 3 months, the remaining 50% of the budget will be consumed.

Whether the budget allocation is reasonable and in place directly determines the effect of the entire advertising campaign, so two key points must be grasped in the budget allocation strategy: the first is to cover the entire campaign cycle with the budget, and the second is to be able to exert force at important marketing nodes to achieve satisfactory results. This type of strategy seems simple, but it is very difficult to implement in depth and detail.

5) Bidding strategy

Bidding strategy and budget allocation strategy are actually inseparable. The budget setting limits the range of bidding. If you want to get a lot of exposure in a short period of time, you have to bid high continuously. If you want to obtain stable traffic without consuming the budget too quickly, you need a bidding strategy to continuously adjust the bid.

Since bidding needs to be changed frequently and manual operation is difficult, major media platforms have launched intelligent bidding tools. Although these intelligent bidding tools are mostly implemented by algorithm colleagues, it is equally important for advertising strategy product managers to provide them with various bidding strategies.

2. Strategy in the delivery process

In the process of advertising, based on the working principle of the advertising delivery system, a large number of product strategies are also interspersed in each link.

1) Bidding strategy

Following the budget and bidding strategy is the bidding strategy. The bidding strategy focuses on solving three problems: First, what is the bidding mechanism? That is, how to bid; what is the second settlement mechanism? That is, how to settle the amount after the bidding is successful; third, what are the conditions for participating in the bidding and when will the bidding be conducted? The three questions seem simple but actually contain complex mechanism design principles and relevant knowledge of game theory.

2) Recall strategy

Recall is essentially a core functional module in the advertising delivery system. Its main function is to aggregate the advertising materials that meet the targeting requirements together, just like the organizer of an auction needs to gather qualified bidders to the auction site before conducting the auction.

The reason why the recall module requires a strategy is that with the substantial increase in the business volume of the media platform, more and more advertising materials are recalled at the same time, causing the entire system to run slowly or even freeze, which will affect the overall advertising delivery. When the technical architecture cannot be upgraded on a large scale, advertising strategy product managers need to design recall strategies to solve this problem.

3) Sorting strategy

Sorting and recall are also core functions of the advertising delivery system. What the sorting module needs to do is to sort the recalled advertising materials according to the quality and bid of the materials, and finally the material ranked first will get the opportunity to be exposed.

The sorting module is like the host at an auction, receiving bids from competitors and selecting the winning bidder. In the sorting module, we not only have to deal with the problem of system performance, but also need to consider a series of issues such as the rationality of the sorting, the experience of bidders and users, etc. These problems require sorting strategies to be systematically solved.

4) Cold start strategy

The cold start problem is a problem that must be faced when optimizing advertising delivery according to delivery results. Cold start is usually divided into material cold start and customer cold start.

Cold start of creative refers to a problem in which a brand new ad creative, due to the lack of historical delivery data, often cannot beat those ad creatives with good historical performance during bidding, and thus cannot get effective exposure for a long time. Similarly, a brand new customer will also face this problem, so an advertising strategy product manager is needed to design a novice protection mechanism for new materials and new customers. This mechanism is the cold start strategy.

5) Frequency control strategy

From the perspective of system principles, the frequency control strategy is also a function implemented by the sorting module. Its purpose is to maintain and improve the entire bidding and sorting mechanism.

There are many scenarios where frequency control is needed. For example, in order to ensure user experience, the same user should not be allowed to see the same advertisement repeatedly within a short period of time. In automobile industry advertisements, we must also consider that the same car series cannot appear on the same screen, and the car series in the advertisement on the same screen cannot be the same as the car series in the article. These are all solved through frequency control strategies.

3. Post-launch strategy

After the advertising is completed, there are still a lot of problems that require us to design strategies to solve.

1) Cost optimization strategy

Cost optimization is actually a comprehensive issue. What needs to be emphasized here is that cost optimization refers to reducing the cost for customers to achieve their goals, such as reducing the customer acquisition cost from 200 yuan/person to 180 yuan/person, rather than helping customers reduce their advertising budget.

The cost optimization process involves various issues in the delivery process, but this is an issue that can never be avoided. After all, every customer hopes to spend as little money as possible to get better results, so the cost optimization strategy is usually a combination of budget + bid + bidding + delivery.

2) Inventory management strategy

In addition to delivery, it is equally important to manage the inventory of your own resources. Different from traffic management before the launch, after the launch we can clearly know the effect, sales rate, remaining traffic and other data of each resource. We can then classify these resources reasonably and effectively, and reasonably allocate and package them in subsequent advertising sales to achieve the goal of maximizing platform-side revenue.

3) Brand protection strategy

Brand protection is an issue that is often overlooked by media platforms. Some high-profile clients have many special requirements for advertising on media platforms, such as their ads cannot appear in marginal locations, cannot appear with some low-end brands, etc.

In response to the special requirements of these customers, advertising strategy product managers also need to design a set of strategies that can effectively protect their brand image, otherwise it will be easy to lose these customers.

4) Competitive product strategy

In fact, it is not a particularly wise choice to carry out targeted advertising to customers of competing products in regular advertising. However, among customers in the automotive industry, there is a general desire to attack competitors in this way. At this time, advertising strategy product managers are also needed to design a strategy for them that can satisfy customers without affecting the advertising of the entire platform.

Above we have briefly introduced the common strategies in the three periods before, during and after the launch, which can be regarded as a framework for subsequent articles.

In our daily work, there are certainly strategies that we have not covered, but as long as this strategy classification framework is established, I believe everyone can naturally classify new strategies into it for management.

In the following articles, we will discuss in detail the principles of each of the above strategies and how they are applied in automotive industry advertising. Stay tuned!

Author: Everything needs Jingsheng

Source: Everything needs Jingsheng