Why advertising technology (AdTech) is THE trend of 2023

Businesses are always finding new, innovative ways to find and connect with their customers—which is why staying on top of the top trends in marketing and advertising is worth it.

In 2023, the number one spot looks to be claimed by AdTech.

We’ll be exploring what exactly this popular trend is all about, as well as the reasons why it’s worth following. Once we’ve gone through all the ins and outs on the subject, we’ll round things off by considering whether AdTech is likely to keep making waves next year.

First, we’ll consider a definition of AdTech.

What is AdTech?

The name ‘AdTech’ is short for ‘advertising technology.’ This describes the kinds of tools companies use to optimize their online ad campaigns, and they help with a wide range of workflows associated with getting those campaigns just right.

For example, AdTech tools are great at helping businesses target their ideal audiences. They’re also useful for ensuring the ads get enough exposure and for gauging the campaign's success as a whole.

In other words, AdTech can support your teams at every stage of the advertising process.

On top of being ideally suited to helping track key metrics and fine-tune performance, AdTech is fantastic for young companies (or ones rolling out new products) that are still searching for their target audience. It can help you narrow your focus and reach out to the ideal leads, to then convert those into loyal customers.

Who can use it?

The brilliant thing about AdTech is that it’s in the same category of trendy business ideas as digitalization and hybrid working: just about anyone can make the most of it.

AdTech is for businesses that have products (or services) to sell and want to make sure their content reaches the right audiences. Since just about any business that hopes to stay in operation is bound to have this aim, AdTech is also useful to just about every business.

Some companies might be tempted to say that their ad campaigns are already successful, meaning they don’t need to look into new tools to help them achieve their goals. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Whether you’re about to create your first ad campaign ever or whether you’ve already put hundreds together, AdTech can help you optimize things. A good campaign can become great, and a great one excellent, by using AdTech to your advantage.

All of this is to say that if you’re someone who is in any way involved in advertising or selling products, AdTech can benefit you.

Examples of AdTech

So, AdTech is useful to just about anyone (more on why later). But what does it look like in practice?

The following are some common examples of AdTech you’ll likely come across once you start looking into how you can incorporate this trend into your business practices.

• Mobile AdTech. which is designed to appeal to anyone seeing your ad content on their phones or portable devices.
• Online AdTech. These solutions are all about helping you connect with your target audiences online, such as through search engines.
• Native AdTech. which involves designing ads to match the aesthetic and feel of a site so the ads blend in better.
• Video AdTech. which helps you market your products or services in video format on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
• AI AdTech. which we’ll be exploring at length below.

AdTech and AI

Another hugely important trend in 2023 is AI, which is only growing in popularity. From chatbot-style machines that generate answers based on keywords to conversational AI that mimics natural human speech patterns to simulate organic conversations, AI is as varied as it is useful.

It’s important to know, then, that AI is also completely compatible with AdTech—or rather, that you can fuse the two to harness the power of both.

AdTech solutions can use AI to introduce automation into buying ads, which helps you ensure you can target the precise demographics you’re after. They can also let you make adjustments to your campaign in real time, which lets you fine-tune your entire approach based on the latest information available to you at any point.

AdTech and user data

Your advertising campaigns can only reach their objectives when you craft them to target their intended audience, which AdTech helps you do through the power of data.

Since your company already generates data by virtue of operating in today’s increasingly digitized world, it can only benefit you to use that fact to your advantage. Plus, your customers are a rich and valuable data source that you can use to improve how your business operates.

Before we explore how AdTech helps you maximize the potential of your customer data, we’ll take a step back and assess what makes data so incredibly useful to companies looking to build ad campaigns in the first place.

The importance of data

If you’ve ever heard the saying “knowledge is power,” you’ll have a good idea of what makes data so significant.

Data is, after all, information.

When you collect data, you’re essentially arming yourself with as much information as you’re able to gather. This helps you make fact-backed decisions, adjust plans based on observed realities, tailor ad campaigns, and develop a deeper understanding of your customers (more on this below).

Using data properly helps you eliminate guesswork. For example, let’s say you want to offer a new color option for a product you sell, but you’re unsure which color would be the most popular among your customers. You could go with a color that seems to be missing from your lineup and hope that it connects with your audience…

Or you could eliminate the need to rely on hope altogether by analyzing your data to figure out which colors sell best among your customer base. You may be surprised. To continue with the above example, your customers might want a new shade of blue instead of a color you don’t offer at all.

By using data, you’re making sure that you can deliver real value to your customers.

Since AdTech is all about helping you optimize your advertising campaigns, logically, it follows that it’s great at helping you collect, process, and analyze data. You can get more out of every bit of information when you use AdTech, both because you’ll be able to gather more data in the first place and because it’s easier to make sense of the info with the help of your AdTech tools.

Capitalizing on the potential of customer data

You can use customer data in two major ways: to target your intended audience more effectively and learn to understand them better.

AdTech helps with both.

We’ll start with the first. AdTech helps you analyze the data you collect on your customers to identify commonalities among them. For example, it might show you that the majority of your customer base shares a gender, ethnicity, location, or other identifying characteristic.

You can then target other promising leads that share those characteristics. This ensures your campaigns are more successful.

In a similar vein, your AdTech solution might help you develop a deeper understanding of your audience by highlighting similarities in their preferences and habits. This also lets you tailor your campaigns for a better, more fruitful result.

When do you need AdTech?

Now that we’ve covered the details of how AdTech works, it’s time to consider what that means for businesses considering using it.

In each of the following situations, AdTech can bring tangible benefits to the companies that choose to deploy it. We’ll break the scenarios down briefly, then explain why AdTech is so useful if you find yourself in any of these positions.

After that, we’ll be considering the advantages of AdTech. Of course, in many cases, the promise of those advantages is actually the factor that pushes companies to try AdTech, so stick around for that exploration.

Anytime you want to modernize your marketing strategy

Can you accurately say that you’re fully prepared for the future of SEO, marketing, and business?

Even if you’re equipped to deal with your business’s immediate future, you can likely improve your readiness for unpredictable factors. For example, even the most future-proof businesses will have encountered unexpected obstacles during the first international wave of lockdowns in 2020.

Modernizing your business is the best way to make sure you can weather any storm. This rule continues to apply when you’re considering marketing in particular.

AdTech helps you stay on top of new developments in advertising and marketing. It also helps you ensure you’re always targeting your audience using data and that your campaigns are optimized to perfectly target people who are likely to be interested in your products or services.

When you’re looking to increase conversions

Anyone working in sales or marketing can attest to the fact that boosting conversions is a sure way to increase profits and secure more future brand loyalists.

And when your ads properly target the people who see them, you can secure better conversion numbers much more easily.

A great ad campaign can do a number of things that drive conversions. For first-time interactions, it should generate interest in your company so customers remember your name when they think of the kinds of products you sell.

After that, every point of contact with one of your ads should tempt and encourage leads to learn more and eventually make a purchase. This turns them from casual viewers into paying customers.

Since AdTech is great at helping you both target the right individuals and improve the effectiveness of your ad campaigns, it’s a good choice for companies looking to boost their conversions.

If you feel your ad approach could use work

It’s unfortunate but true—your approach to the idea of advertising your content might actually not be getting you the results you're looking for. Let’s consider that in the context of an example.

Say you’re hoping to teach customers all about your revolutionary new product. In that case, your ads should be full of useful and exciting information—to a point.

Would you click on an ad that was full of text and not visually attractive?

Many customers won’t. If this is how you’re approaching the idea of teaching them about your product, you’re not likely to get a lot of interest or drive conversions. That’s one example of how an ad approach can harm rather than help your marketing strategy.

AdTech is especially useful here. Since it helps you craft the optimal ad campaign, it can help you avoid harmful or fruitless approaches while making it easier to ensure you’re going about things the right way. So, if you’re feeling like your ad approach could do with some thought, AdTech can be hugely helpful.

When you want to make cost-effective upgrades

It can be tough to run a business on a budget, as anyone who’s ever had to do it can tell you. That’s especially true when you’re looking to implement upgrades in your company without breaking the bank.

Thankfully, AdTech is a budget-friendly option for many businesses.

Firstly, AdTech will generally pay for itself over time since it’s specifically designed to contribute to the success of the very ad campaigns that increase your revenue. This makes it a good option for anyone who’s got some room in their moderately tight budget.

Industry-leading AdTech solutions also combine a lot of relevant functionalities into one app, so you get all the ad campaign support you need without investing in lots of different solutions. This is why it’s so cost-effective.

Top 10 reasons to use AdTech

We’ve seen what sorts of scenarios drive businesses to turn to AdTec—but it shouldn’t exclusively be a last resort. In fact, AdTech is hugely beneficial even if you’re not in a position where you strictly have to rely on it.

The following advantages of using AdTech are reason enough to start investing in this new trend sooner rather than later.

1. Maximizing your ROI

AdTech is both cost-effective and widely useful. This helps boost your ROI while minimizing the initial spend on your end.

In other words, AdTech is built to give you as much ROI as possible.

That means more customers and leads for you without having to worry about putting more resources towards achieving that goal. This is a major AdTech advantage.

2. Effectively target leads

One of the best ways to ensure your ad campaigns are worth all the time and effort they take to put together is to properly target promising leads that will become long-term paying fans of your company.

AdTech is perfect for this.

Since it’s well-suited to helping you identify the right leads and then market directly to them, it ensures you’ll always target those leads as efficiently as possible. This makes for a major advantage of AdTech. 

Moreover, AdTech can also be utilized to sell digital downloads, software licenses, e-books, music albums, video games, stock images, and other digital content, providing a convenient and effective way to distribute these products to your target audience.

3. Lower your acquisition costs

Since AdTech takes a lot of the work out of finding the correct groups and individuals to advertise to, it helps you guarantee you’re not throwing money away on people who will never become customers. This leads to lower overall acquisition costs.

Also, thanks to AdTech’s capacity for specifically targeted campaigns and individual tailoring of ads, it’s built to bring your acquisition costs down even further.

4. Make your customer experience seamless

Great business people know that providing a unified customer experience across all touchpoints is a crucial aspect of building your brand identity, connecting with customers, and creating a strong reputation. That’s why it’s important that AdTech helps you do this.

AdTech makes it easier than ever to ensure your ads all present a united front for your company. It’s great at helping you show all leads and customers what makes you great and what gives your brand its personality.

This makes for a seamless customer experience that will have one-off customers coming back for more anytime they’re after something you sell.

5. Gather (and use!) more data

We’ve already covered the ways in which AdTech solutions can help you capitalize on the data you collect. It definitely bears repeating that this is a key advantage of using these tools.

Data gives you the power to make informed decisions and to approach your customers from a position of understanding and connection. This leads to lasting business relationships with customers while ensuring your company’s strategic choices continue to benefit you in the long run.

Plus, it makes it significantly easier to track and monitor your progress. Gathering and processing data lets you generate visual representations of your ad campaigns, so you can continue to grow and improve over time.

6. Streamline your marketing process

There’s always a lot to be done when it comes to marketing and ad campaigns. At times, it can be overwhelming for teams, who might feel like the list of tasks they have to complete is never-ending, not to mention full of repetitive tasks that they’ve got to do seemingly over and over.

AdTech is here to help with this.

By streamlining the marketing process, AdTech gives your employees back time in the day they’d otherwise spend on repetitive tasks, as these can be automated with AI-based solutions. AdTech also lets you monitor your campaigns’ success without having to manually collect data, as mentioned above, which further streamlines matters.

7. Integrate your tools

Every company has its own list of preferred sales enablement tools to rely on, which they’ll often have found through a careful process of elimination. Those tools are chosen because they’re perfect for the company in question—which is why any new solutions have to be able to work with what you’ve already got.

Modern AdTech solutions let you keep working using the tools you’re already comfortable with. This makes them valuable to both emerging and established companies and represents an advantage in either case.

8. Build your brand

From choosing the ideal domain names to picking out a color scheme, every aspect of how you express your brand identity communicates information about your company to prospective customers.

This is why it’s so important that AdTech helps you build and communicate a consistent brand across all platforms.

9. Connect with customers where they are

While some say TikTok represents the future of social media, others maintain that text or image-based platforms are here to stay.

AdTech helps you reach your customers across all types of platforms.

Customers are going to move from platform to platform as trends come and go. That’s all the more reason to invest in tech that helps you target your advertising campaigns to appropriately suit all manner of platforms, so you can keep building connections with leads and existing customers alike seamlessly.

10. Stay ahead of the competition

AdTech is a major trend this year for many good reasons, as we’ve established here. Because of that, investing in it helps you make sure you’re remaining competitive in your business practices.

From optimizing your ad-related workflows to lightening the load for your marketing professionals, AdTech helps you keep your marketing processes on track and running as well as they possibly can. That lets you maintain an edge over your competition.

This new technology is also adapting rapidly to other emerging trends, as we’ve mentioned. This further ensures you’ll be able to keep up with competitors as they respond to those trends because you’ll already be set to do so from the start.

Will AdTech stay trendy in 2024?

If we’re being honest, we can hardly imagine this trend fading anytime soon.

Since AdTech is so useful to a wide variety of businesses, it’s unlikely to fall out of favor or lose its momentum in the near future. From the fact that just about anyone can use it to the kinds of benefits we’ve walked through, it simply comes with too many advantages for it to stop being trendy.

However, AdTech as a technology is likely to continue to grow, evolve, and develop. It’s already compatible with another major current trend—AI—and will most probably be incorporated into other rising trends.

The future looks exciting for fans of AdTech.