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While cooperative advertising has long been popular with traditional media, this is the moment to incorporate it into your digital strategy. Marketers should be considering investing their dollars in digital if they want to stay relevant in the new normal. Whether you're a brand or a retailer, read on to learn how a digital co-op strategy can blow past business KPIs in 2021.

What is Digital Co-Op Advertising?

Back to the basics: co-op advertising happens between companies selling multiple brands who share the costs for advertising.

You may be most familiar with traditional co-op advertising appearing in Sunday newspaper mailers. Popular big-box retailers work in tandem with represented brands to build the placements and visibility of products. Digital co-op advertising works similarly: brands can partially or fully fund retailer ads to increase the reach of their brand or product.

Leverage as Much Data as Possible

The ever-changing digital ecosystem has marketers more pressured than ever to scale, a difficult task when faced with the recurring changes to audience targeting, especially data regulation.

A key point to take into consideration is the release of iOS 14. Knowing that Apple stated that in order to track users across apps or websites—or to access the device’s advertising identifier—user permission will be required, it’s important to be prepared for data loss. With this roll-out there’s going to be fewer web signals and limited access to third-party data.

With digital co-op advertising, brands can leverage the first-party data of large retail companies to reach a highly qualified audience without losing targeting precision. Moreover, access to this data accomplishes what Lookalike and Competitor targeting has always aimed to do. For retailers, partnering with others in a program of this kind will allow them to monetize their first-party data.

Consider the Advantages

With audiences growing and engaging online more than ever, thinking of ways to reach them and connect offline experiences to digital is certainly something your strategy should be covering. The exposure people are having to online sales has been increasing since September 2019. Only in the U.S., the number of exclusive online shoppers grew by 133% over a one-year period. Especially for brands with relationships to brick-and-mortar retailers, in-store first-party data could be the next gold mine audience segment.

A digital co-op strategy can grant some benefits worth considering:

• Enhanced Measurement: If you’ve only experienced traditional co-op advertising, bringing your strategy online makes it easier to gather and analyze performance data. Especially in the age of proving every media dollar can go farther, measurement is critical to proving media effectiveness and identifying optimization opportunities.
• Granular Targeting: By taking a granular approach to audience targeting, you have the opportunity to ensure that you are communicating with the right person at the right time with the right message.
• High Value Digital Experiences: Offering differentiated experiences is more effective and cost-efficient with digital media than traditional. Users are expecting to be delivered highly relevant and impactful content, so digital co-op campaigns allow for the opportunity to deliver custom messaging for key audience segments.

Rise has extensive retail and brand experience. Connect with us and let our team provide personalized solutions for you with effective strategies to reach more customers.

Let Rise help you drive record-breaking business results. In 2020, our B2B expertise brought hockey stick performance improvements to a leading B2B manufacturer. To learn more how a Rise partnership can benefit your brand, reach out to us.

Google announced that it began rolling out a core algorithm update on December 3rd, and was completed on December 16th.

Google made an announcement about its third core algorithm update of 2020, as core updates “typically produce some widely notable effects,” aimed at presenting the most relevant and authoritative content to searchers; Google did not offer guidance on which categories or content types will be impacted by this update. It follows the May 2020 Core Algorithm update that hit many categories across the web, most notably: Travel, Real Estate, Health, Finance, Pets & Animals, and People & Society.
 

What is the impact of this update?

1. The social December update was much larger than the disruptive May Core Algorithm update, with greater volatility in rankings for top 3 and top 10 search results.

2. While core updates typically impact two or three specific categories, this update has affected rankings and traffic across a wider range of categories, most notably: health, real estate, law & government, travel, and finance.

3. Google continues to emphasize the prioritization of pages and sites by their content and E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness), or page quality..

4. Many sites that were hit from the May Core Algorithm update have seen improvements from the December update.
 

How does this update affect you?

This update impacts keyword rankings and visibility across Google SERPs, which can result in a change in the amount of organic traffic driven to your website.

While categories with the highest volatility in rankings (health, real estate, law & government, etc.) will be most impacted by this update, it is likely that websites across a wider variety of categories will also see changes in rankings and traffic.

What to consider moving forward

Continue to monitor changes in keyword rankings and traffic across your website. If you observe a negative shift in rankings or traffic, it is important to assess the quality of content across your website by asking these questions:

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
• Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topics?
• Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

Please note this update is not the same update as the Page Experience update; the Page Experience update will roll out in May 2021.

Please reach out to Rise to learn how to best create, manage, and optimize the content across your website to maximize organic visibility following this update.

In the video below, Howard Diamond (Chief Strategy Officer) explains how Rise’s approach to B2B digital media drives remarkable growth for clients.

Rise can help you drive a better outcome for your media investments. Reach out to learn how to implement the best strategies and technology for your business.