For all its promise, digital marketing remains an unfortunately siloed business.
Nearly every brand invests in both social media — teams of people who agonize about what content to place and promote on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms — as well as paid media — the ads you see across the “rest of the web.” Most brands have different strategies for how they approach marketing in these different environments, and at the surface this makes sense; they are very different channels.
The most glaring difference between social and paid media is the way users engage. It’s estimated that about 80% of users actively engage with brands via social. Compare this to the roughly 30% of users who leverage some kind of ad blocking software to avoid display ads and it’s obvious to conclude that users prefer to engage with brands via social media.
Brands have caught on and are investing more and more in their social content strategies. Exceptional content can drive great engagement as social validations (ie. likes, comments, pins, retweets, etc) support the authenticity of the post and increase the brands organic exposure and earned media presence.
Despite the advantages of social from a user engagement perspective, paid media is still an important part of most brands’ marketing strategies. Programmatic media buying offers significantly greater scale, price efficiencies, and measurement capabilities than social channels.
Why not bring the two together? Programmatic buys can and should leverage the power of great story-telling, user engagement, social validation, and unique signals (ie. hashtags, @ mentions, etc) on social. And social efforts can and should leverage the scale and transparency associated with programmatic buying. Social content ads enable the best of both worlds!
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