By Yosha Ulrich-Sturmat, VP Product Marketing at Neustar
It's old news that social media provides significant reach and spend value for advertising buys, so why aren't more brands flocking to it?
For many enterprises, social is used to improve reach through targeting and retargeting because a call-to-action on social isn't to purchase, but rather to retweet, share, like, comment, etc., an extremely powerful tool for both branding and awareness. What marketers may not know is that social can also be used to improve advertising efficiency by providing an added layer of targeting data.
Through logins and other information, social provides extended customer identification data, and when used in conjunction with tools like Facebook Custom Audiences, Twitter Tailored Audiences and first-party data, it offers the ability to get even more granular information on top prospects. Further, when combined with in-house CRM data, social provides hyper-specific targeting capabilities to help marketers learn more, personalize a customer's experience and gain off-the-chart conversion stats.
How can brands ensure they get the most out of their social spend? Here are four tips to get started:
Social logins provide rich data about consumers, such as interests, place of employment, social connections, education, etc., which can help brands enhance consumer profiles, more effectively target prospects and customers and drive more meaningful interactions.
Tools like Facebook Custom Audiences let advertisers employ consumers' login and demographic information, which marketers can use to target specific attributes, such as females age 20 to 40, who like Jimmy Choo shoes and live on the West Coast. These targeting improvements can net brands big upticks in conversions, but so too can the ability for brands to now go beyond users' desktop computers to retarget mobile users on their phones and tablets (discover four conversion-boosting retargeting examples at wsm.co/4retarget).
Combine CRM data with social data to not only build on existing profiles but also create new profiles of prospects that look like your best customers. By combining CRM and social data, marketers can map user IDs from offline to online, and close the reporting loop from advertising to action. This provides an opportunity to understand the channel's relationship to buying and where customers are in the buying cycle and better tailor messages.
Marketers can use analytics to fine-tune campaigns. Advertisers should look at measures around location, device, date and time, demographics and history in combination and separately, and compare those against conversions. Now, they can also begin to correlate ads served to custom audiences through a single lens, which includes measurement and analytics tied to social influence and conversions, as well as reach and overlap compared to channels other than social.
Advertisers that only manage their analytics using a last-touch attribution (LTA) model could be losing the benefit of social's influence.For example, a shoe manufacturer might actually drive lower sales by focusing more on exchanges and spending less on social. The real value of social is in its ability to go beyond the upper funnel and tie more extensive profiles to CRM data. In doing so, brands can learn more about their customers, target more effectively and increase conversions. By following these tips, brands are sure to unlock advertising efficiency through utilizing social media.