Social media marketing is just the tip of the iceberg for the team at Blue Wheel Media. After putting together a case study on their adoption of Choozle, we wanted to understand more how they integrated programmatic advertising into their overall marketing solutions for their clients.
We sat down with Tayler Carpenter, the Advertising Manager at Blue Wheel Media to better understand the art of social to programmatic.
Megan Sullivan-Jenks, Director of Marketing, Choozle: We sometimes like to kick these off by asking the most important questions first. If you could only have one technology device for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
Tayler Carpenter, Blue Wheel Media: As cliche as it sounds, my iPhone. Not only does it allow me to work on urgent matters in the middle of a vineyard while wine tasting (true story) on a Saturday, but between Siri, Google and other apps, answers any questions I may have. Bonus point, I’m able to call my mom, no matter where I am in the world, which is pretty cool.
MSJ: Let’s start with an explanation of what you offer for your clients at Blue Wheel Media.
TC: At Blue Wheel Media, we don’t offer services, but tailored & actionable solutions for our clients. Typically, a brand will come to us with a challenge they are encountering, such as low SEO ranking, a lackluster website design or poor-performing digital campaigns. We take a deep dive into everything they are currently doing and put together a strategy that will help them not only get past whatever problems they have, but scale to meet their goals and beyond!
MSJ: As a social media-first agency, what was the driving force behind bringing programmatic advertising into your service offering at your agency?
TC: With Facebook being one of the top visited social site & Instagram being the top used app, we make sure we have a commanding presence on those platforms, engaging with our customers. With some of the recent data scandals in the last few years, the levers we were able to pull to target certain audiences were limited or taken away. We knew immediately that we had to generate awareness outside of social platforms to market to new customers, which is when we started to toy with the idea of programmatic.
MSJ: What won you over when you started exploring Choozle as your in-house programmatic solution?
TC: Cookies! Our Choozle rep Kirk walked into the Blue Wheel Detroit office with Detroit Cookie Company and we knew that it was meant to be!
All joking aside, we scheduled a few demos and were surprised at how many different verified data sources they were pulling from and how we could target just about anyone who we wanted to. For example, we were looking for a programmatic partner who had location data, and Choozle allows us to target people who have visited brick & mortar stores for several larger retailers, which is clutch.
We specialize in the beauty & high-end home furnishing verticals and we’ve been able to craft outside of the box audiences to reach new customers, that we haven’t been able to in the past.
MSJ: Have you seen any immediate success on your team? Or with your clients?
TC: In terms of success, Choozle has been paramount in awareness campaigns that we run, especially with our beauty clients. We recently had a client ask us to target “Commercial Real Estate Brokers” for an upcoming campaign and the only platform we found that we could target that particular job title was Choozle! Not Facebook or LinkedIn, but Choozle. That was a pretty cool moment.
MSJ: Knowing that social media metrics can be different but very similar to programmatic advertising, how did you and your team adopt the new performance metrics?
TC: We are a performance-focused agency and our favorite acronym is ROAS. My team has always monitored CTR as a complementary metric, but with programmatic, it’s one of the key storytelling KPIs, as it shows how your audience is responding to your ads. As soon as myself or any of my team members sign into Choozle, a switch flips and we go from ROAS to CTR mode.
MSJ: What programmatic advertising strategies do you use to promote your clients? Why these over all the others?
TC: Mid-funnel Retargeting is our primary strategy. It’s a great way to re-engage & stay top-of-mind with someone who has visited your site, but not converted. We do a lot of competitive analyses for our clients and it’s amazing how a lot of brands are not engaging in this type of campaign.
We also utilize Choozle for our new customer acquisition strategies. This is mainly due to the plethora of qualified data sources that we can tap into. It’s not our primary focus, but we’ve been including this in more and more of our strategies.
MSJ: How do you integrate your social media strategies with the ones you are implementing in Choozle?
TC: We do two things: 1. Mirror who we are targeting on social platforms and 2. Supplement new audiences who might not have heard of brand via different data sources. For example, if we have a client who is sold exclusively in Ulta Beauty, we can only target Ulta fans on Facebook. With Choozle, we can target people who actively buy from and visit Ulta stores. It’s a win-win!
MSJ: What are some of the challenges do you face when putting together strategies for your clients?
TC: It varies from client to client, but one of the main things is the amount of content and imagery. A common challenge we face is having only a set amount of content that we have to use for 12 months on end. Black Friday, Friends & Family, a random Tuesday, it’s the same creative. We have a genius designer who can literally turn something so cool out of just a PSD and a screenshot. It’s great!
MSJ: What are some long-term benefits of using Choozle for your clients? What are you hoping to implement for your clients?
TC: The stellar targeting options is one of the best benefits of Choozle. It allows us to target and tailor messaging and creative to each individual segment for optimal performance. Another benefit is the support! Kirk, Chaz & Matt have been absolutely instrumental with our campaigns and go above and beyond to answer any questions we may have. We’ve also dealt with customer support and they have been fantastic as well.
One thing we are hoping to implement is revenue tracking. We recently setup the dynamic passback pixel on a handful of clients and have started to see some additional data that we hadn’t up until that point. I’m excited to see how Black Friday & Cyber week goes with all of this new found tracking!
Tayler Carpenter | Advertising Manager
Tayler has over six years experience in digital marketing, having run successful campaigns in several industries including automotive, beauty, B2B, health & wellness, hospitality and so many more (including cat litter)! Since joining Blue Wheel Media, Tayler has built the digital advertising team from the ground up and is the go-to resource when it comes to understanding how to successfully scale brands.
