Weekly Media Note #154 from Lance Hanish: Why Retailers & Brands Use Dynamic and Social Media Advertising in Tandem
Furniture World News Desk on
8/26/2016
By Lance Hanish
How do marketers reach their consumers in today’s somewhat cluttered digital landscape? According to Jeffrey Finch, writing in Social Times, the answer is simple: A successful digital advertising strategy incorporates various channels into its strategy, as to diversify its reach.
Finch suggests leveraging both dynamic and social media advertising in tandem to reach consumers at each stage of the marketing funnel allows advertisers to ultimately succeed and arrive at their key performance indicators. Understanding the difference between the two forms of advertising, dynamic display and social media, is crucial to leveraging them both successfully and using them together.
Dynamic display advertising, or programmatic media buying, includes banner, video and mobile placements. These ads are bought and sold through a live auction, on a per- impression basis. Dynamic advertising brings the ease of use to those looking for a solution that connects marketers with third-party data and real-time bidding across display, mobile and video. Also, programmatic allows marketers to leverage vast amounts of data to deliver relevant ads to their customer based on online behavior and where they are within the marketing funnel.
In comparison, social media advertising refers to the process of gaining traffic or conversions through social media sites, such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Facebook advertising is a platform that allows businesses to increase their brand awareness and sales. This allows marketers to reach their target audience and show up on people’s News Feeds. Facebook recently revealed that 2 million small and midsized businesses advertise on the social network, which proves that there are many benefits of doing so.
A diversified marketing strategy is necessary when looking to market to consumers at each stage of the marketing funnel. Creating a plan that includes a variety of channels and mediums can help reach any target audience and lead to greater results.
Dynamic display advertising can cater to the bottom-of-the-funnel goals, such as retargeting or conversions. Dynamic advertising like banners and video can deliver messages to a targeted audience.
Retargeting is widely used in display advertising campaigns to help reach qualified customers. Retargeting is all about determining what actions indicate where the customer is in their buying process, and then matching it with the right messaging and content. A good example is the pricing page: If a customer is interested in the product enough to find out if the price is right, they are qualified for in-depth product information.
Social media can feed to top-of-the-funnel goals, such as building brand awareness and engagement. Social media advertising like Facebook advertising delivers content to a broader, less refined audience, and it still serves a valuable purpose.
For marketers, the Facebook advertising proposition is increasingly compelling. The site boasts more than 1.7 billion monthly active users globally. As a site built by users rather than publishers, Facebook is a rich source of consumer data. Moreover, because pages are designed individually for each user, marketers can reach their audience in their environment.
Understanding how your consumer is surfing the web is crucial to delivering the right message at the right time. Social media advertising allows marketers to engage their target audience within their environment, thus hitting the top-of-funnel stages: awareness and opinion. Dynamic display advertising can be used to target users that are at the bottom of the funnel with retargeting strategies.
Marketers should find value in leveraging the Facebook advertising and pair it with dynamic display advertising, to reach all facets.
Then there is Pinterest. Research has revealed the extent of this commercial potential: 72% of Pinterest users have bought something that they SAW on Pinterest in a real- world shop and 64% of Pinterest users actually look at items that they have pinned while they are in-store. Research has also show Pinterest’s users are more likely to make big purchases than users of other social platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat are places to socialize and share. Advertiser activity feels interruptive and intrusive, so it needs to be carefully managed. Not so with Pinterest. According to Neil Cunningham, writing in Mobile Marketer, ‘the platform has 100 million native users, a figure easily bested by even the stagnating Twitter. A third of US. Internet users have Pinterest accounts, according to Pew Research Center.
Women are driving the growth in social media. According to research compiled by Finances Online, with data from PEW, Nielsen, and Burst Media, women are using social media more often, and in more ways, than men. Plus, most of the major platforms including Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter, have more women users than men.
In particular, women are leading the growth of Pinterest. According to the report, 33%t of female online adults are using Pinterest, compared to 8% of all men. What is particularly interesting from the research is the unique ways that women are using social media in comparison to men. Women are more likely to interact with brands, with more than half using social media to interact with their favorite labels, while less than half of men are using social media in the same way.
Women also prefer to get news via social media, with 58% of women attesting to get their news fix from Facebook where just 43% of men saying they scroll through
their Facebook news feed for this reason.
Pinterest recently announced ecommerce tools that will allow users to buy multiple products from different retailers at once by putting them in a shopping cart that is active on any device on which they are signed into their Pinterest profile. Intent can now easily be turned into purchase. Pinterest has bought Instapaper, the app that lets consumers save content to view later. The deal gives Pinterest access to more behavioral data, enabling it to better target content and upping its capabilities to rival Facebook as the place to go to discover new things.
Each marketing channel has various capabilities and offers different value. Using social media and dynamic advertising in tandem can enable marketers to reach their consumer across the board and increase the likelihood of conversion. Understanding the complementary relationship is crucial to leveraging the two forms of advertising successfully.
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Lance Hanish is Co-Founding Partner in CNA | Sophis Integrated Marketing Communications.
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