2019 is already a historical year for digital advertising, with social media ad spend surpassing print for the first time. While the usual suspects Facebook and Google are still in the lead. Twitter, Amazon, and Pinterest witnessed a substantial increase in spend. Brands, enterprises, and marketers around the globe are not only taking notes, but they are also considering social media advertising an essential element of their 2020 strategy. And here is why:
In the following paragraphs, I’ll explain why each of these benefits should push social media advertising to the forefront of a brand’s strategy in 2020.
Social Advertising Improves Relevant Audience Growth & Targeting
Thanks to social media, we are all more connected than ever – half of the world is online. About 4.3 billion internet users. And, this number of internet users grows by 9 percent year to year.
This means that the opportunities are endless for targeting, reaching consumers directly, brand monitoring, and live customer feedback on services, products, and new launches. While some of those opportunities were available by traditional means, digital provides unique chances for scalability and responsiveness that were not available before.
For example, the Millennial generation is digital natives, responsible for the growth of online shopping and the most valuable target demographic for modern businesses. In fact, 30 percent of millennials purchase products directly from Facebook, and 61 percent trust a friend’s endorsement. This highlights the power of social advertising, and also the power of sharing branded content.
Social Advertising Helps Brands Stand Out from the Crowd
With great content publishing comes great responsibilities to stand out, to have a unique voice, and to create captivating branded content. The volume of content posted on social media per day is massive. On a daily basis, there are 300 million photos uploaded on Facebook, 5 Billion videos are being watched on YouTube and 95 million photos on Instagram.
Such an ocean of content means that branded content needs to act as a lighthouse – guiding a brand’s target audience to take certain actions. Social media advertising can help brands achieve this through collaboration, AI and automation.
According to the state of work 2020, 91 percent of knowledge workers crave modern technology solutions – in fact, 71 percent would like to use a centralized destination for workflows and task management. Collaboration between the marketing team and the paid marketing team ensures that only the top-performing content gets promoted. Through frequent reporting intervals, marketing teams can monitor content providing actionable insights on targeting, budgeting, social performance.
Additionally, AI can help brands create their unique voice by reducing the effort and time spent on promoting content that doesn’t resonate with their audience. Smart optimization of advertising doesn’t only promote the best – it pauses, stops or amends the content that appears in front of the customers reducing the negative effects of the white noise.
Last but not least, automation is the key to a successful paid marketing strategy in 2020. Advanced advertising automation features enable enterprises to get more done, in less time effectively. The main advantage for marketers is decreasing manual work by automating the executing process of campaign creation, reporting and paid performance.
Social Advertising Maximizes the Amount of People Who See Your Content
There is an old philosophical thought experiment that raises the following question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
The same question can be asked with respect to social media content. If there is a content strategy and a team that worked creatively to develop social posts, but nobody sees the content, does that mean the campaign even existed? There is no brand that publishes content externally across social media channels and hopes that it is never seen.
For years, marketers have been discussing ways to increase the reach of organic content. In 2018, Facebook & Instagram announced an update that said consumers would “see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.” With such consistent analysis and reports on low organic reach, it’s noticeable that this is not a trend but a pattern across the main social channels.
Having a documented paid content strategy ensures that if the tree falls, it is heard.
Sprinklr Modern Advertising
As the first Unified Front Office for Modern Channels, only Sprinklr enables omnichannel planning across a timeline including paid initiatives along with other non-social campaigns. This comprehensive view into a campaign strategy across all channels – combined with automation and strong governance – ensures that brands can increase media ROI and team efficiency.
In our recent fall release, we launched AI-powered Smart Bidding to help advertisers automatically ascertain the ideal bid strategy to deploy across channels to gain maximum efficiency for advertising campaigns.
In 2020, you can expect us to release a number of new features that help you plan, execute, analyze and optimize advertising to meet business goals.
