Hanging out with your friends? Download Zoom. Need entertaining this Saturday night? Catch the latest live-stream concert. Ready to workout? Open up your fitness app of choice and don those bluetooth earbuds.
Our devices are more meaningful than ever lately as the world grapples with various levels of lockdown to keep populations safe and healthy.
It’s a unique moment for technology marketers looking to reach consumers and stay valuable as their behaviors and buying patterns shift—a feat that can only be accomplished by considering several moving parts:
- Interests of technology consumers, right now
- Buying patterns, right now
- How consumer attention has changed, and what that means for your efforts when reaching your consumers
One powerful way to measure these three moving parts (in our opinion) is how consumers interact with content online—which makes up a quarter of their digital activity.
What Are Technology Consumers Interested in, Right Now?
Content about technology has collectively received 81 million unique visitors in the last 90 days, traffic which has increased by 81% in the last 45 Days.
Needless to say—now is the time to reach technology consumers. You have their attention.
But it’s not enough to know that they’re interested. To run a successful marketing campaign, you need to know why.
A deeper dive into their content consumption patterns revealed a high interest in operating system updates and news about major internet technology companies.
These bubbles of technology interest should help dictate the theme of your next marketing campaign, even if your brand isn’t directly related to the topic at hand.
For example, based on the topics above, a marketing campaign for a new camera might include the following angles:
- Upload Photos from the New ‘CAMERA NAME’ Directly to Your New iPhone
- iOS 13.5 Compatible With ‘CAMERA NAME’
- Freshen Up Your Instagram Feed with Professional Photos
These small shifts in messaging in your advertising content will capture consumer technology attention in the moment, while also staying relevant to your brand.
What are Technology Consumer Buying Patterns, Right Now?
Spikes in traffic on news sites are a great gauge of what’s on a consumer’s mind, but does that attention lead to them opening their wallets?
We took a look at the average changes in lead generation and purchases for technology advertisers in comparison to major spikes in traffic for technology content to find out.
When breaking news strikes, consumers are interested in learning more about technology brands. This is a great time for lead generation campaigns—sharing interactive content, whitepapers, webinars or any other type of valuable content for which a person would need to trade their email address.
As the buzz dies down, consumers are more likely to be ready to make a purchase.
This general rule of thumb does depends on the specific news topic, and should always be executed as a test initially. Testing different types of campaigns as dictated by the news cycle can lead to better performance for your brand.
How Can You Reach Technology Consumers Today?
The next step after identify trends in news topics, your campaign theme and a high-level strategy based on consumer buying behavior is building your creative assets and targeting strategy.
Ad Creatives
Ad creatives typically are build on two major pillars—an image and a headline. Our weekly trends pinpoint exactly what types of headlines are attracting technology consumers each week.
You should stay away from text on your images and animals as a rule of thumb, while also searching for images where the subjects are close-up rather than far away.
No need for headline guesswork—these are the keywords that are seeing the best click-through-rates (CTRs).
Strong engagement keywords are performing well, but might require upping the ante to beat out the competition. Strong competition keywords are seeing less engagement and a flood of competition, and high opportunity keywords are showing signs of growth, but aren’t being used much—yet.
You can use these trends to shape headlines in line with any specific consumer technology product. Here are some examples for a personal computer:
- This Monitor Has Chromebook Users More Productive Than Ever
- Computer Monitors on Sale Today from $100
- This Personal Computer Works Like A Dream
- Best Tech Gifts for Dad Include This Computer Monitor
- Work From Home Just Got Easier Than Ever
Because these headlines are using keywords that we already know are trending, they’re likely to perform well. If you’re not sure which one to start with, you can test your unique headlines in our title analyzer to see which has the highest predicted CTR.
For these examples above, the result looks something like this:
Based on these results, you’d definitely want to test the headline “This Personal Computer Works Like A Dream” and move down the line depending on how many creatives you need.
When it all comes together, you might get something like the following:
We always recommend A/B testing your creatives to see what works best for your specific audience and product. However, these best practices are a great place to start—they’re vertical specific and based on millions of campaigns that run through our network each week.
Targeting Tactics
The world has changed a lot more in the last year than it ever has, and it’s important to pay attention to shifts in where and when consumers want to hear from you, engage with you and make purchases.
To make recommendations for advertisers, we take two things into account: CTR, which we consider demand—if you click on something, we assume you want to see it. Spend % across news sites, which we consider supply—the more advertisers are spending in one vertical, the more competition there is.
When there is high demand and low supply, that’s an opportunity.
When: Time Targeting
The biggest opportunity for advertisers is between 6pm and 8pm (local time) on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
You’ll come across the most competition on Fridays, but we still think it’s worth it because the demand is so high.
Where: Device Targeting
The highest amount of supply and the lowest amount of demand in on desktop devices. You should be testing mobile and tablet campaigns, with an emphasis on tablets, which is a highly neglected device by technology advertisers.
How: Content Type
Prioritize testing landing pages that host video content as opposed to text-based content. There’s extremely high demand for this type of content amongst consumers, and the web is flooded with text-based articles in this vertical.
Examples of Technology Campaigns to Inspire
Sometimes it helps to see what other people are up to—these global examples showcase how brands of all types used trends from news sites to impact sales, lead generation and app download KPIs.
Vodafone
After experimenting with different marketing channels, Vodafone Turkey was looking to efficiently grow brand awareness and sales of mobile tariffs and home internet service.
They increased all sales in the display category 11%, and decreased their cost per sale by 42%.
ContaAzul
Their main challenge was qualified lead generation. Some channels generated a lot of traffic, but few leads. Others generated many leads that were later disqualified. ContaAzul wanted to balance volume with quality.
When they started advertising on news sites, they saw an 80% increase in new users, which is 40% more than the average from other channels.
Sociopal
This online marketing technology simply wanted to collect more users. When they advertised on publisher sites, app downloads increased by 30%.
Trends in consumer consumption of content on news sites is a powerful way to keep up with how to effectively reach technology audiences.
Advertisers—don’t miss your moment. Reach consumers while interest is high with relevant, valuable content and products that meet consumer needs.