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The world’s fast pace in technological advancement pushes the advertising industry to also follow a fast pace in order to progress and grow. To keep up with the world and not fall behind, agencies and brands need to be aware at all times of the trends followed to stay relevant and reach their audiences in an effective manner.  

The Ad/Edge Forum at Arabnet Beirut X, powered by Arabnet and Arabad, will tackle how brands, agencies, and publishers are adapting their strategies to keep up with cutting-edge technologies and consumer behaviors, and the structural changes that are reshaping the industry as a result.

The current wave followed by advertising brands, agencies, and publishers is that of relying on data-driven content to meet client goals better and reach their target market more effectively.

For a long time, businesses have relied on third-party publishers to provide media content and platforms through which they engage with consumers. Today, businesses are flipping this model on its head by becoming publishers themselves. They are also relying on data-driven content to achieve several objectives, mainly increasing targeted consumer traffic and creating value.

There are several web tools and technologies that allow businesses and organizations to collect important data about their consumers and help them come up with compelling content.

Content Analytics: Whether it’s Google Analytics or one of the many other solutions available today, content analytics are essential tools to learn how traffic behaves on a website. With them, marketers can assess how their content is performing in real time. For example, they can observe on which pages a visitor clicks, how long they stay on them, the actions they take, and even the keywords that they have searched for before getting to the site, among a multitude of other information.

Social Listening Analytics: Also called social media monitoring tools, agencies use these to monitor internet mentions of a particular product, brand, business or individual. Social listening tools help articulate an effective response management strategy based on sentiment.

Marketing Automation Softwares: Marketing automation is about streamlining repetitive marketing tasks such as email and social media posts, and processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI) and campaign management. This provides customers with highly personalized and useful content, and grows revenue faster. Marketing automation makes repetitive processes, which would have otherwise needed to be performed manually, much more efficient and facilitates the creation of new marketing processes.

The process of using data analytics and interactive web technologies to plan an effective content strategy is not a linear one — different tools and approaches must be adopted and used interchangeably to develop compelling and meaningful content that is driven by useful and valuable data.

A study done by the CMO Survey showed that companies are planning on shifting marketing budgets and put more resources toward analytics. The percentage of marketing budgets allocated to analytics will increase from 5.8% to 17.3% over the next 3 years, which shows a 198% increase.

Digital technologies have transformed consumers from passive recipients of information to active players whose every choice can be observed. This alone is causing a salient shift in the practice of marketing and digital communication.

Learn more about the advertising industry with many leading experts attending and participating at Arabnet’s Ad/Edge Forum such as Ali Rez (Regional Creative Director for Middle East & Pakistan of Impact BBDO), Nicholas Oliver (Founder and CEO of People.io), among many others!

Visit our website for more information on the event and click here to register.