Accelerate your digital strategy with newly launched solutions

With exponential digital reliance that emerged from the pandemic but is here to stay, there has been tremendous pressure on marketers to adapt quickly and accelerate digital growth opportunities. It’s no surprise that people are working longer hours than they did before the pandemic, which has led to a 2.5-hour increase in the average working day across many countries globally.

The good news is that we have quick tips for you on how you can save time while not compromising your business impact in the age of digital acceleration. The better news is that all the solutions we highlight in this blog are either already available or will be by the end of this month! Learn how you can save time while optimizing for business results with the three tips below:

Tip #1: Use automation to your advantage

As much as we know you love a good challenge, we want to provide you with tools that make your life easier. Automation has evolved from tactical to strategic. Take advantage of this innovation!

• Increase your reach, automatically. With Target Impression Share,¹ you can optimize your bid at auction time so your ads can show up on the very first spot, top of the page, or anywhere else on the page. Especially during promotional periods, you are automatically going to get more eyes on your messaging.
• Optimize your bids across multiple campaigns at once. We gave you a sneak peek of our portfolio bidding pilot a few months ago in our Intelligent automation: The secret to an advertising executive’s success and happiness blog post. We are happy to share the pilot is progressing and we are moving to open beta next month. With Portfolio bid strategies,² you can now assign different campaigns under an account to share strategies. It’s an easy way to organize and optimize these campaigns collectively.
• Let us create your campaign for you. Are you a small business owner and juggling a ton of hats? What if full-stack, cross-channel, automated campaigns were possible? That future is here with unified campaigns on Microsoft Advertising. Unified campaigns are an easy way for small businesses to get started with search and social media campaigns. All we need are your advertising goals and your business website address and we’ll create the ad campaigns for you. We can also autogenerate your text and image ads. You will always have visibility and control of your ad campaigns.

Tip #2: Don’t let the fragmented digital landscape fragment your marketing efforts

The pandemic has brought more people online than ever before and with that also has come heightened fragmentation. However, your cross-channel marketing efforts don’t have to feel this way. With the Microsoft Audience Network, you can meet your consumers at every point in their decision journey. Don’t have time to take on a new platform? You don’t have to start from scratch! Lean on the power of extensions and imports:

• Extend your Facebook efforts into Microsoft Audience Network with our Facebook Import Tool,³ which helps you reach an expanded audience at the click of a button. Import up to 10,000 campaigns for each account and customize easily to meet campaign needs.
• Import audience campaigns from Google Ads through the Google Import⁴ smart workflow while still ensuring full control of the campaigns.
• Simply extend your search campaigns into native with the Microsoft Audience Network⁵ using a single budget, and use reporting to manage your campaign conveniently.

Not convinced? Let us share some numbers. People exposed to both search and native ads on the Microsoft Audience Network are 2.6 times more likely to visit a brand’s site and 3.5 times more likely to convert compared to those who are only exposed to paid search ads. Especially for Retail customers, the Microsoft Audience Network is a must.

Tip #3: Get creative with finding audiences as cookies are phased out

As cookies are deprecated, leveraging your first-party data as well as augmenting your remarketing efforts will become even more of a priority for delivering personalized advertising experiences.

• Navigate this cookie-less world with our Dynamics 365 integration. We recently announced the integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (our real-time Customer Data Platform) and Microsoft Advertising. Advertisers can now create and export customers segments from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into the Microsoft Advertising platform to target on our Microsoft Search and Audience Networks using customer match targeting. This will allow our clients who use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to leverage their very valuable first-party data to reach audiences across Microsoft Advertising.
• Let us find similar audiences for you. You’ve spent the time setting up remarketing. Now, with Similar Audiences releasing in the United States at the end of this month, you can make your lists work harder for you and help you reach more of your best customers, simply by looking for searchers with similar interests to those on your Remarketing lists. Learn more about Similar Audiences.

We know that you and your clients are working hard to navigate a new set of consumer expectations. While these tips will surely put you ahead, we also want to remind you that purpose will be a non-negotiable as you seek to create stronger bonds with your customers. Bonus tip: take the Marketing with Purpose Course, which was designed to empower marketers to drive growth through more trusted customer experiences.