More than 500 million tweets are published on Twitter every day, while Facebook sees around 300 thousand photo uploads and almost 4 million shares every minute. Offering advertisers and brands a very effective medium for reaching their target audience, social media platforms have been around for a while. By now, almost all brands and advertisers have managed to become well-versed in social media marketing, and more or less understand what works for them and where. It is easy to see that regardless of whether it is a social media banner ad or interesting display ads on social media – in recent years, these platforms have become one of the most engaging and highest-performing marketing channels in the digital landscape. However, as expansive as the reach of social media platforms may be, it is still a minor drop in the ocean in the overall digital landscape. The wide web has much more to offer in terms of audience, reach, and even returns. Utilizing what is in essence tried and tested with your target audience and amplifying its reach is one of the best ways to venture forth in this regard.
The Call of the Hour
The digital marketplace is a volatile landscape that seems to be changing constantly. From adding display banner ads on social media to using programmatic advertising to display the right social media post to the right audience, digital marketing has come a long way. To not only survive but to stand out from the competition, marketers must also advance with the times, keeping up with all the innovations that shape digital marketing. This is where social display ads come into play, bringing in several capabilities that marketers need in this scenario.
The modern-day customer too is nothing like you would expect several years ago, with the increasing penetration of digital. Today, brands need to cater to a consumer base that is “Always-On”. That is why advertisers need to get creative with their solutions. Whether it is social media or a banner ad, they have to work on maximizing media dollars while also maintaining and scaling their reach. That being said, here’s more on why social display ads might just be what you are looking for.
Integrating Social and Cross-Channel Marketing
Brands that want to keep pace with their tech-savvy consumers need to define an omnichannel journey that takes all customer touchpoints into consideration and weaves them into a seamless experience. In this endeavor, when it comes to display advertising, a social-first approach being integrated into the roadmap, harnessing the power, reach, and performance of social media display ads may prove to be highly beneficial for brands. They allow you to tap into what is arguably your highest-performing marketing channel and utilize content that has already proven to be effective and engaging on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Social display ads bring the concept of direct display advertising which adds to social media’s engaging experience and aids the expansive reach and precise targeting of programmatic advertising.
- Display Advertising: The most common form of advertisements are the display ads on websites and apps that use a variety of media, like video, text, audio, gifs, static images, HTML5 content, etc. They are designed to grab attention and can be part of awareness, acquisition, and retargeting campaigns.
- Programmatic Advertising: This is a process of automated buying and selling of available digital ad space. This is done in real-time based on the data collected and set parameters to ensure the right ads are displayed to the right audience.
Regardless of what the campaign objective is, whether it is conversions, retargeting, or brand awareness, the dynamic combination of social and display ads can affect huge savings on creative production costs, while also making it convenient for brands to unify their data.
What are Social Display Ads and How Do They Work
Social display ads are authentic recreations of your successful social media posts, which are then repurposed as programmatic banner ads. Social media messaging and communication involve a lot of research and strategizing to get it right and it is essentially an effective idea to repurpose it. In simple words, social display ads are about taking popular social media posts and reconfiguring them to create ads for banner placements. These ads are then dynamically delivered to the right audience using programmatic or direct display advertising, which offers capabilities for precise targeting. Social display advertising takes the benefits of branded social media posts and gives them a programmatic boost, taking them well beyond the boundaries and limits of social media platforms and increasing their reach significantly.
Why You Need Social Display Advertising
45% of internet users [source] state that they use social media platforms to research the brands they are considering buying from, while 49% of consumers [source] have claimed that they found the ‘perfect product’ through a targeted ad on social media.
All this goes to show that social e-commerce is growing and becoming a very well-established channel for both users and brands, which is why social media makes for a rich inventory of engaging posts, ads, and messages for digital campaigns. It’s as simple as this – If your current audience base on social media was interested enough to interact with the post, why not open up the playing field and use programmatic to display the social media post to a wider audience base outside of social media but in the same segment with similar interests and parameters? Social display ads remove guesswork, which can be potentially costly, from paid advertising, as they allow brands to capitalize on content that has already delivered good results and engagement. This combination of social and display ads, reconfiguration, and programmatic ad serving is one of the best “Always On” strategies that brands can employ.
Benefits of Social Display Ads
For delivery of social display ads via programmatic advertising, social media posts can be pulled directly from channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. The engagement factor of great social content, together with the scale and efficiencies offered by display advertising creates a blend of reach and performance, which allows you to amplify content that has already been refined and optimized for the right audience. Other benefits of social display ads include:
- Saving Time and Money: Social display ads hardly take a few minutes to generate production-ready creatives. As these ads are derived from existing posts and content, they involve no production time or costs.
- Overcome Ad Fatigue: Ad fatigue is not a myth! If your existing campaign creatives have been around for a while and are no longer leading to conversions anymore, why not switch them out with your popular social media posts? You will not only be able to combat ad fatigue but will also be able to ensure that your brand always has a new and fresh digital presence.
- Better Performance: Being tried and tested, when social display is added to the marketing mix for any campaign, you can expect an improvement of at least 50% in the click-through rate of any campaign. Social display ads perform better than traditional banner ads, are compatible across devices, and meet all third-party display ad specifications, helping elevate the overall marketing efforts. Advanced engagement metrics can easily be tracked through your ad builder platform to see the increase in conversions, time-on-screen, etc.
- Consistent Brand Communication: When you use programmatic advertising for social media posts that have been reconfigured as banner ads, you are using existing brand content from your social feed library to display across various channels. This helps ensure cohesiveness in the creative language and messaging everywhere, which translates to brand consistency.
- Extend Your Reach: Social display ads help expand the reach of engaging social media posts beyond the platform. The original analytic data generated by the posts can be used to choose the right creatives for the campaign. These high-engagement posts can then be boosted through programmatic, which will help them reach a larger base of users that match your consumer profile. Social display also provides you with advanced analytics, which can further be used to direct and fuel future campaigns.
Today, there are hardly any marketing campaigns that don’t include social media in some capacity or the other. So, it just makes sense to add the element of programmatic to ensure the best results and engagement. This is what makes social display one of the foundational components of modern digital marketing.
Enhance Your Marketing Campaigns with Airtory
Social media advertising has shown significant growth and evolution over the last few years and complementing it with the reach of other digital channels using social display ads can help you improve brand awareness and increase the ROI of your digital campaigns. Airtory can help you create effective and engaging rich media display ads, interactive video ads, and much more for your branding campaigns, along with capabilities for enhanced targeting through programmatic, social display ads, etc., all of which can help you achieve favorable outcomes by optimizing your cross-channel marketing efforts.
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