OUR APPROACH TO DIGITAL MEDIA

We are not here to bore you with a long-winded description of what digital media is. You already know this, or you would not be reading this. What you want to know is why these guys?

The team at Neural Digital first worked together at one of Brisbane’s largest media agencies and over many years they have watched the media buying landscape change in many ways. The behemoths that are Google & Facebook have grown far more than anyone in the early days would have ever thought. Smart mobile devices are now the most used devices across the globe. Data and privacy controversies mean that platforms are offering less and less transparency to advertisers. For instance, Google recently announced search term reports would be disappearing for keywords that do not have a minimum threshold number of searches.

With all of these digital platforms now boasting more campaign & ad formats than you can shake a stick at, and with even more demands on your marketing dollars (websites, CRM tools, content & creative). The decisions you make as a marketer have never been more crucial. it is imperative that which businesses you choose to collaborate with is of vital importance and trust is key.

Neural Digital was founded with the purpose of working more seamlessly with in house teams. As a group of ex-agency employees, we understand the pain points between agencies and in-house teams and have purposely designed a model of engagement to improve the product and relationship between both parties. We currently do this across all of our clients who vary greatly with skill and experience.

Here are a few areas were our expertise can be of value:

Google Ads

The channel formerly known as AdWords has had something of a facelift over recent years but the most common campaign type associated with Google Ads is of course paid search.

Paid search, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), PPC, CPC, text ads, search ads, search words, keyword ads, – doesn’t matter what you call it. At Neural we’ve heard all the names. The key to understanding Google Ads in this day and age should be obvious to anyone who thinks about that official name change. From Google AdWords to just Google Ads. The removal of the “words” should tell you everything you need to know. Google no longer wish for its key advertising property to only be associated with just ‘keyword’ searches.

There has been a push over the last few years to expand their audience targeting capabilities. Targeting options like interests, in-market and affinity segments coupled with customisation of demographics, locations, day parting and the wonderful ability to connect your Google Ads account straight to your analytics accounts to serve out remarketing to your website visitors.

Display, video (via YouTube) and Email all go to making up the Google Ads platform and a media buyer can have an easy time of it utilising a single audience segment across multiple channels at once – and then finally converting a prospect into a valuable customer with search.

Paid search can offer very profitable low hanging fruit for companies who struggle to rank organically for certain keywords. Just make sure you aren’t paying over the odds for your clicks with vague bid strategies (maximise clicks/conversions) and make sure you have back up options for new generating new business leads/revenue should the paid search ecosystem ever change again in ways that have shaken up many industries over the years – remember the panic when enhanced campaigns came out?

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DIGITAL MEDIA BUYING

We understand the return on investment from performance channels and in our many years of working with clients large and small, we have learnt the shortcuts the pitfalls of the digital landscape

OUR APPROACH TO DIGITAL MEDIA

We are not here to bore you with a long-winded description of what digital media is. You already know this, or you would not be reading this. What you want to know is why these guys?

Here are a few areas were our expertise can be of value:

Google Ads

The channel formerly known as AdWords has had something of a facelift over recent years but the most common campaign type associated with Google Ads is of course paid search.

Facebook

Or the ‘F word’ as we say around here. Facebook is certainly something of a dirty word in some circles and its not hard to understand why. Not a week goes by without some Facebook controversy making front page news.

The biggest of these controversies from a few years ago (you may have read about it) drew attention to Facebooks privacy policies and how user data was being bought and sold. As a consequence of this, Facebook would no longer allow advertisers to tap into audience segments from data providers like Experian or Quantcast – instead relying almost entirely on its own interest/behaviour segments.

While this was a blow to the effectiveness of many big advertising accounts at the time, since then Facebook has pulled out the stops to improve how its own audience platform works. Custom lists based on 1st party customer data and the ability to build out similar (lookalike) audiences are some of the most effective audience building tools on the web. Campaigns from small advertisers can be just as sophisticated as any Tier 1 client with millions of dollars to spend.

At Neural we are experts at Facebook audience building and are generally happy to boast of campaign achievements well in excess of the usual benchmarks for things like clickthrough rates and cost per lead.

How Do We Work With Clients?

Our experience coming from larger media organisations has taught us that bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to clients that require more attention. Smaller team, flatter organisation means far better ability to roll with changing needs and that has become evident with our current client set.

A current and live example of this in action (as of September 2020) is with one of our clients, Southern Queensland Country (SQCT). There has been no time in the history of travel and tourism where there has been greater change than the last 6 months. Who can travel, where they can travel for what time period has been changing on a weekly basis which affects all digital media and communications coming from SQCT.

To ensure that Neural is catering to the changing needs of SQCT, we ensure that staff are on standby to get the right message in front of the right people as soon as government announcements around Covid restrictions are made.

For example, when the announcement was made that Brisbane was to receive a Ekka long weekend, we had a campaign for SQCT live and in market within 90mins of the premier's announcement. Preparing in advance for what’s possible and designing our process and structure around flexibility ensures that we are capable of responding to any and all changes, no matter how rapid.

An incredibly valuable part of working within larger agencies is to experience first hand failed transitions when an agency wins a new client. All too often, a new client’s onboarding is rushed and within 6 months, both the client and agency are unhappy with the arrangement. By experiencing this first hand, we were able to design a process for Neural that ensures we don’t make those same mistakes and to ensure we have a smooth transition which leads to a great client-agency relationship.

The first step, before we even say the words “Media Plan”, is conducting a Business Audit which is designed to help us understand the expectations of the business across all levels, identify knowledge gaps and barriers to optimisation and predict where there are weak points that we need to be aware of.

Below we expand on the five pillars of the audit.

1) Expectations

This section of the audit is to determine the expectations from all key stakeholders involved in our relationship. Our experience tells us that while our everyday contact might be interested in one metric, the CEO or other parts of the business will be interested in other metrics. By understanding our role in the organisation and the expectations on us, we are able to tailor reporting and relationship management to ensure that all levels of the organisation expectations are not only met but exceeded.

2) Internal Skill Set

An important element in digital marketing is constant and incremental optimisation. In order to do this, over time we will need to improve landing pages and switch in and out creative to keep it fresh. To be able to do this effectively, we need to understand what your internal skill sets are. For example, do you have someone in house who can build creative or someone who can assist us in setting up the landing page? These are considerations that will help us plan and ultimately get the best result for your business.

3) Internal Processes

As well as understanding what skills clients have internally, we also need to understand the process. For example, does all new creative work have to be approved by the legal department, CMO, or both? Understanding your processes will help us request items earlier which again will help improve your digital metrics.

4) Tagging and Analytics Set Up

Critical to being able to track and optimise toward return on investment is ensuring that your analytics suite is set up in accordance with best practice and we are able to track events effectively. We will also ensure that digital platforms’ pixels are properly set up and collecting audiences which can be used across the clients paid and owned assets.

5) Audiences

Target audience analysis is a central component to any marketing strategy, as it gives you an informed view of who your audiences are and who your audiences are not. It’s critical that we determine how the audiences collected, set up and used internally, as well as what complexities and legalities do we need to be aware of when using audiences

DIGITAL MEDIA BUYING

We understand the return on investment from performance channels and in our many years of working with clients large and small, we have learnt the shortcuts the pitfalls of the digital landscape