How Paid Social Can Complement Programmatic Display
Social media has been a trending topic in the digital advertising industry for a few decades now. Through the years, different platforms have fluctuated in popularity. Still, no matter which platform is ranking #1, one thing remains true: consumers spend large portions of their day scrolling, watching, connecting, and browsing on these social platforms. It’s now estimated that the average consumer spends upwards of 2.5 hours on as many as nine different platforms every day.
In turn, it’s essential for advertisers to stay up-to-date with new platforms, trends, and features on these networks. Social platforms are transitioning away from a closed “network” and more toward discovery platforms (take TikTok, for example). This creates a consumer eager for discovery. Beyond people, consumers are interested in finding, interacting, and even making purchases from new brands and products. Having an organic profile on this social platform (albeit important) is no longer enough. Brands need to present their brand to these new curious consumers with paid advertising placements.
What is paid social?
Paid social or paid social advertising is when brands pay to have their content (ad) displayed in front of a specific audience. This can be done by either boosting organic content or through designated unique ads across platforms such as:
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- Twitch
- Youtube
Each social platform has its unique advertising opportunities varying from photos and videos to sponsored messaging and in-mail ad formats. There is a platform, and ad type brands can use across social for every stage of the buying funnel. Whether a “promoted pin” on Pinterest to garner brand awareness or a shoppable ad on Instagram enticing a purchase – the opportunities are seemingly endless to get your brand in front of consumers.
Fitting Paid Social into your Digital Advertising Strategy
You may be thinking: my current digital advertising strategy is seeing great success. We’re reaching our target audience and hitting our KPIs. Why invest part of my budget in a new channel?
Advertisers need to remember, despite the success your seeing across one channel, the current shopper is an omnichannel shopper. So, marketing efforts must, in turn, mirror this journey. Every advertising channel is just one piece in the whole omnichannel marketing puzzle.
Pigeonholing yourself leads to missed opportunities on devices and channels consumers spend huge portions of time on, which puts your brand behind the competition.
If you’re already using a digital strategy like programmatic, paid social is a natural progression in expanding your portfolio. Check out four ways paid social and programmatic complement each other to further your strategy toward omnichannel success.
4 Ways Paid Social can Compliment Programmatic Display
1. Expand your media mix.
A mentioned above, today’s shopper is an omnichannel buyer. Consumers no longer take to one site to browse for and buy products. Instead, the shopping journey continues as they move from googling on their desktop to checking Twitter on their phone to listening to music on their smart speaker device. Adding paid social to your digital advertising strategy eliminates silos as your brand makes a splash with consumers no matter where they move throughout their day.
2. Tell a cohesive story.
Consumer privacy and data concerns are at the forefront of the industry as regulations are put into place to ease consumer concerns. Although these changes may be complicated to keep up with and understand, it’s crucial to remember that they’re put in place to enhance and protect the customer experience. And, when data is used correctly and safely, to benefit the user experience, about ⅔ of consumers are comfortable with their personal information and data being used.
Compliantly using data during the customer journey allows your brand to tell a cohesive story across all channels and platforms. You can retarget, upsell, cross-sell, and use competitive conquesting to reach consumers with ads based on where they are at in the customer journey. And when you’re using both programmatic and social, you have more opportunities to reach consumers, so they move through the customer journey quicker and more efficiently.
3. Easier to Optimize
Programmatic advertising gives you the ability to target users based on a variety of characteristics and data points. This includes their web and app activity, demographics, interests, purchase history, offline data such as subscriptions and loyalty programs, and social media activity. With this information in hand, you no longer have to look to serve an ad to someone simply because they like a particular page on Facebook. Instead, the platforms can work together so that the consumer insights gained with programmatic advertising are used to target consumers on social media better.
With both channels in play, the data intake increases yielding easier, better, and more opportunities for optimization.
4. Offer a holistic approach.
Like increased channel optimization, adding paid social to your programmatic campaigns enables a complete picture of the success of your media investments. You’ll understand which channels are working best to move the needle for your brand, where the budget could be better allocated, and what messages resonate best with consumers. All of this information will be obtained in the same place, at the same time, giving you an overall holistic view of your digital media.
Get Started with Paid Social
Implementing a new channel doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch. Social media, for example, is a great platform to use in conjunction with your other digital advertising effort because there isn’t a drastic lift to get started. Assets can be used for display and social posts with minimal resizing and editing.
Conversely, if you have an organic or paid social media presence but are looking to expand into channels like programmatic, capabilities such as social to display ads offer you a no lift point of entry. Social Display ads repurpose or recreate organic social media posts to use as traditional display ad units.
Whether you currently use paid social and not programmatic or you’ve invested in programmatic but yet to dive into paid social, understand that the two channels work wonderfully in tandem to elevate your digital media goals and further your brand’s overall growth.
Digilant’s Paid Social Capabilities
By working with Digilant, you are getting an expert team that knows the ins and outs of each social platform. We’re committed to staying up-to-date with the latest features and offerings from social channels, so our team has weekly calls with each platform to talk about the latest updates, campaigns, and any troubleshooting.
Our Paid Media team will provide a strategy based on your campaign goals and objectives to ensure you are on the right platforms to reach your goals. And because Digilant has expertise across programmatic, search, social, and beyond, you’ll have access to holistic reporting that gives you a clear picture of how all your digital media efforts are working together.
Interested in learning more about how Digilant can works as an extension of your team to reach your social goals? Let’s talk.