I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Social Advertising in preparation for my “Social Ad Crash Course” panel next week at Ad:Tech SF. At the end of the day, everyone wants to know how to use social advertising to drive business objectives -- and anyone working in the space knows there are an awful lot of opinions out there on the topic, and not enough clear data in one place.
I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that social advertising didn’t even exist. And since it has existed, it’s been a pretty bumpy ride. We all felt the ripple of uncertainty when GM publicly announced that Facebook ads don’t pay off. And very recently, Econsultancy published an article saying social media and advertising are like “oil and water."
As someone who has been working across earned, owned and paid social media for years, I don’t agree … but I get it -- many companies are struggling to find success. The questions become, how do you create engagement through advertisement on platforms where consumers are there to consume content? And then, how do you move people up the slow and windy conversion funnel that is social marketing?
As I kept diving deeper and deeper into these questions, I
started trying to boil down a framework that all businesses could use to create
great social advertising campaigns that drive business objectives. So far, I’ve
come up with three steps that, when done well, lead to success. Those are:
Target, Connect, and then Convert.
I created a V1 graphic to represent the three steps for, “A Framework for Social Advertising.” The steps look simple enough, but there are a lot of aspects to consider in each step, and as always, the devil is in the details. For example, targeting has become much more technical and complex. Ad-serving platform, CitizenNet, now leverages conversation tracking to identify brand new audience targets for brands beyond their core audience, and the company says they have even seen affinity targeting outperform core audience targeting(!). And then very recently, Facebook rolled out new "Lookalike" audiences to allow brands to find audiences on Facebook that are similar to their customer database.
During the panel, we will be looking at examples of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn campaigns against this framework; learn about social advertising data and trends from Nielsen’s EVP of Product Leadership, Dan Beltramo; and do a deep-dive into some of the best social ad targeting around via Facebook Exchange with Adam Berke, the President of AdRoll, and VP of Digital Strategy at Alex and Ani, Ryan Bonifacino.
If you would like to join the discussion, our session is next Wednesday, April 4th at 1:15PM in Room 3022/3024 (use discount code SF13SPEAK64 to get 25% off of your ticket). If you are unable to attend, you will be able to follow the conversation by using a combo of #socialad and #adtechsf hashtags.
Hope to see you there and looking forward to your feedback on the graphic!
By Gretchen Fox, Social Architect at grtchnfx
