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Overview
Online advertising isn’t only about eye-catching creative or attention-getting offers. Reaching your audience means knowing who they are, what they want, and, increasingly, how they behave—and trade—online. Even then, it can be hard to know just how effective your campaign actually is. Did you predict your customers’ behavior correctly? Is your advertising where they can see it? And, of course, the only question that really matters: Are they responding?
When the market’s opening bell rings, it signals the moment millions of personal investors begin following the ticker for opportunities. It also signals an opportunity for online brokerages like TD Ameritrade to increase revenue and expand their consumer base by attracting these investors. But to attract them, TD Ameritrade needs to reach them. And when it came to one of their most recent online campaigns, that meant more than just saturating the Web with banner ads. It meant taking a look at how the investing animal actually behaved in the wild.
Picture this demographic: Men, age 25 and older, with annual income of more than $50,000 and a general awareness of both your market and your company. With a core audience like that, the future might look promising. But any marketer worth their salt knows that the most desirable audiences are the most difficult ones to reach. Sought after by so many brands—including your competition—they are saturated with marketing wherever they go, in the hopes that something will compel them to purchase a product or service.
TD Ameritrade’s target audience:
Sex: Male
Age: 25+
Income: $50K+
Market awareness: Aware of online brokers and TD Ameritrade
TD Ameritrade was well acquainted with the need to place advertising in front of audiences, and with the challenges that come with its desired demographic. Yet even when they had developed campaigns that they believed separated TD Ameritrade from its competition and offered value to consumers, they still couldn’t be sure how effectively these ads were being used. Was a broad buy—perhaps a run-of-site (ROS) ad—the best way to get the clicks the company wanted? Did a specific ad placement—on a financial information site, for instance—make the most sense? Or did a more targeted audience require an even more targeted strategy for ad distribution? TD Ameritrade turned to MSN® to help find the answers.
MSN collaborated with Marketing Evolution, a leader in online marketing analysis, to engineer a study that ran for just over a month. During the study, TD Ameritrade creative ran across various sites on the MSN Network, including MSN ROS, MSN Money, and MSN Hotmail®. The Hotmail placements were further segmented into ads on Hotmail ROS, ads on the Hotmail demo, and behavioral targeted ads.
