In a world where brands compete for our attention as consumers, one channel many advertisers are dependent on for reaching their audience has garnered a lot of attention. Social media, whether we like it or not, is here to stay. There are many new D2C brands which do incredibly well on social, yet have become overly reliant on these platforms to answer all their paid marketing problems. The real answer lies somewhere in between: It can only be described as bridging the gap between social and paid display media.
One question is why now? For the last 15-20 years, big brand names started putting more and more attention into their presence on social as a way to meet and hear from their consumers.
As a result, they began to understand the two-way communication social affords them as far as building brand loyalty, providing increased customer service, and much more. Within the past 10+ years, there have been new brands of all sizes building their entire presence on social first, foregoing more traditional routes, and putting many of their resources into one way of generating business.
However, this is a flawed approach and why we want to bring attention to "Social Display" - a term and category Spaceback invented. Our creative technology automatically and authentically recreates social media posts as production-ready banner ads helping D2C marketers fill in the gap in their customer acquisition journey by bringing social and display closer together.
D2C brands and marketers should not think that just because they are considering investing or moving marketing resources away from social and into programmatic that it is any harder or more difficult. By leveraging Social Display, it is quite the opposite as Social Display is able to remove many of the biggest barriers.
So, why not leverage what D2C marketers already have? Then, they can drive superior performance in programmatic media by recreating social media posts as production-ready banner ads.
With the advancements in automation, the time is now to start leveraging and testing options on how to break away from the grips of the social media walled gardens. Using Social Display can help by not only increasing brand awareness but also achieving lower funnel KPIs and metrics.
Let's quickly touch on other benefits/ways Social Display makes it easier to move into programmatic:
Social has been beneficial to marketers, partially because they have invested in continually posting fresh, relevant content to social platforms. But imagine not having to pay a creative agency to reshoot something for the web, having a web designer construct banner ads in multiple sizes while they could be focusing their efforts into optimizing the user experience of their site to drive further sales, or planning which ads you are going to generate 6 months in advance. Planning for and pulling from social allows D2C advertisers to put those savings back into a working media budget in order to drive sales and grow their business.
While most marketers increase their spend on social media, it is inevitable that they will reach an ROI plateau. This is why leveraging a medium like display, with an updated and fresh new creative approach which mirrors the two-way communication of social, provides brands signals of what to use as part of their paid media strategy when buying across high-quality publisher inventory on the open web. This new scale helps provide an even bigger audience and leads to new customers outside the walled gardens.
With recent changes to operating systems and the inability to collect data on all users, social media platforms have gotten more expensive, even while performance continues to decline. Now, more than ever, marketers need the additional reach and cost efficiency that's available on the open web. No longer does a D2C brand solely have to rely on paid social placements within the various social platforms.
Social media posts which have already seen good engagement make outstanding creatives to use as Social Display for the open web. These banners are inexpensive to produce while performing 2-3x better than standard display ads while occupying the same real-estate/units on a given page on the open web.
Going from social to programmatic does not have to be hard for D2C brands. Weighing all of these benefits, I believe Social Display can be an asset for D2C advertisers when it comes to their marketing spend and transitioning to the open web with the use of their same social-first creative assets.
If you would like to give Social Display a go for your D2C brand, reach out to us, and we will help you get started.
