In this article I will delve deeper into the expectations in the field of social media advertising. My thanks go to my colleagues Hannah, Patrick, Marvin and Danny, who helped to create this overview.
1. The short term versus the long term: customer experience needs to improve, especially now
More than ever, (online and e-commerce) marketers have a difficult choice to make between short-term results and long-term success. Due to the lost sales that many retailers suffered during the first (and to a lesser extent second) corona wave, there is ground to be made up. The obvious choice is to focus on short-term success with ROI ( return on investment ) focused advertising.
In the period before the virus broke out, we saw, also within social advertising, a clear transition to long phone number library -term value and building relationships through a sustainable paid strategy on social media. We must conclude that the focus has shifted to the short term. See also the Hootsuite research in which 73% of marketers indicate that finding new customers is the main objective for 2021.
to the store less and it is therefore more difficult to tangibly inspire your audience, setting up a strong, catchy experience on social media is more important than ever before. The customer experience must improve and for that you have to invest in the long term. Think of metrics such as awareness , brand recall , engagement , frequency, etc. Purely diving into social commerce in the short term will not help you in the post-COVID era. I therefore strongly advise brands not to focus blindly on conversion campaigns that help to fill backlogs. Start structurally building on the new reality in which the digital experience that the customer sees of your brand (and therefore also via social media) must be greatly improved.
Social media is an excellent medium where you can create a storyline with the right advertising strategy. With the advertising formats at your disposal, you can take your audience through the customer journey/funnel in a 'sequential' (successive) way. I notice that brands still often make a distinction between their 'organic' content (or timeline content) and their advertising campaigns. It goes without saying that there is a difference in terms of the type of content, but where storytelling is considered on the timeline , this is often completely forgotten in advertising. There it often comes down to promotional and stand-alone product ads.
To ensure a healthy funnel, with which you really engage your audience with your brand and your offer, we also need to work on storytelling and quality content in our social media advertising layers. Not just on our timeline!
Example of Facebook ad by Artipoppe.