What Brands Need To Know: Social Marketing In 2023

 Search and display advertising aren’t the only parts of the marketing landscape that have changed over the past three years. As various social platforms have waxed and waned and mechanics and dynamics have shifted, brands are making new choices about where to invest and what to expect from those investments. 

“Facebook and Instagram [Reels] are still some of the top advertising channels with high conversion that we recommend to nearly everyone” Tayler Carpenter, vice president of advertising at Blue Wheel, told me. She said her agency drives more than $1 billion in e-commerce revenue across AmazonAMZN, TargetTGT, WalmartWMT, and others.

Social platforms are useful for targeting based on interests and behavior, rather than on search terms alone. Julianne Fraser, founder of marketing consultancy Dialogue NYC, said shifts in algorithms and user privacy restrictions have left brands struggling to maintain returns on social media advertising. "As a result, a great emphasis has been placed on influencer marketing as a way to break through the saturated landscape and avoid algorithm restrictions,” she said.

Ricci Masero, marketing manager at Intellek, a learning technology brand, said there have been shifts over the past few years that have led to a more competitive and expensive Facebook ad platform. Two of the main reasons for this are brands are not able to reach their target audience because the algorithm is prioritizing content from friends and family. Businesses are also using the platform more, leading to a surge in ad inventory demand. Overall, brands are no longer able to build organic reach, which has led to increased competition for ad space. 

"To combat this, brands are experimenting with newer ad formats and targeting options, such as [those within] Stories and Messenger Ads, to stand out and drive conversions," Masero said.

Despite the price increases on Facebook ads and the iOS14.5-induced shortening of attribution windows as data collection was limited, Craig Brown, senior vice president of strategy at Incubeta US, doesn’t expect a slowdown in advertising.

“Meta has always been a very strong revenue driver for e-commerce brands and it recently brought back views on longer attribution windows and segment data, such as placement — so you now know what's driving performance,” he explained.

Advantage+ campaigns on Facebook are stable, efficient, and working for many brands, Cody Plofker, chief marketing officer of Jones Road Beauty, wrote in his newsletter.

Reflecting on the reduction of available data, Brown said building full-funnel campaigns focused on video engagement such as views and comments will build an audience on Meta. Being able to supplement the on-site lists with the Meta audiences will help reduce the cost of customer acquisition and impressions.

But even with that, David Bates, CEO and creative director at Bokeh Agency, notices, that there is a transition away from a 360-degree approach to campaigns and media buying, with greater awareness of where consumers live and their behavioral patterns.

Once on a platform, Aaron Edwards, co-founder and CEO of The Charles NYC, a digital creative agency, cites shifts in targeting as a critical dynamic. He explained that with new privacy measures limiting granular targeting, brands are performing best when they embrace the broader targeting algorithms offered by platforms like Meta, PinterestPINS, and TikTok.

He added, that it allows “them to find the ideal end user, as opposed to intense demographic and psychographic targeting [which often drives up advertising costs and excludes potential customers].” 

“It was about people, not placement,” Matt Ferrel, vice president and head of growth at TickPick, said. Adding, “Because we know less and less about the people, our dependency on the platforms become greater. We have fewer levers to pull - budget, creative - and they're more important. We're creating more content than ever before and more of it's niche to allow each platform to optimize to the right audiences.” 

“Driving engagement and revenue from social media advertising heavily depends on content,” Fraser concured. Adding, “influencers are the pioneers of content creation and understand the messages and formats that best resonate with their audiences. They can help guide brands in creating advertising content that will perform best.”

This is where TikTok may come in. Carpenter, of Blue Wheel, advised that brands invest in their organic presence on the platform, first.

She also recommended leveraging Spark Ads, which rolled out in 2022 and “sparked a revolution in advertising” by enabling brands to boost what any creator shared in native ways and without additional tools.

Rudy Mawer, CEO of Mawer Capital, a growth firm and media buyer, said, “The move towards authenticity in advertising has had a significant impact on ad-buying strategies. Advertisers are now prioritizing influencer partnerships with those who align with their brand values by featuring more user-generated content which, in turn, demands more transparency in programmatic advertising.”

Bates of Bokeh Agency added influencers are more appealing because “consumers tend to trust the word of a human before a brand.”

In determining content, Michelle Songy, founder and CEO of Press Hook, a public relations firm, finds artificial intelligence to be helpful for both the brand and the consumer.

“AI can provide more targeted and optimized content generation. It can also help brands generate new content ideas tailored specifically to the interests of your target audience and… having the right tone in communications to better emotionally connect with customers in marketing interactions, using sentiment analysis.”

As it relates to other platforms, Twitter and Pinterest have made strides in improving targeting options and ad formats on their platforms, Masero said. Twitter’s Video Ads with Website Buttons, offer improved targeting options that include specific events and TV shows, and Pinterest’s Idea Ads offer new targeting capabilities such as interests and keywords, these are a few of the examples he gave.

“These improvements have made Twitter and Pinterest more attractive to advertisers and have resulted in increased competition for ad space,” Masero said.

Another proponent of Twitter ads is Plofker. “If you told me six months ago that I’d be running Twitter ads and it was our most efficient channel, I would have had a good laugh. However, that’s exactly the case right now,” Plofker wrote in the most recent edition of his newsletter.

He goes on to explain that drop-shipping businesses and direct-to-consumer brands alike are having success on the platform, where broad targeting is working, upper-funnel traffic is relatively inexpensive, and average order value is high compared with other social ads.

Video ads have become increasingly popular on display platforms and social media. A majority of consumers have been convinced to buy a product or service after watching a brand's video, according to a study by Wyzowl shared by Masero. Additionally, video ads on social media have been shown to have higher engagement rates than traditional display ads.

"Social advertising is still largely about awareness and for consumers looking for inspiration or a solution to a problem. We're not going to try to drive the most conversions there,” Carpenter said. But she does notice some correlation with price point, where Meta and Google are better at selling more expensive items while Snapchat and its valuable Spotlight Ads convert at lower prices.

This article was originally published by Forbes on 3/1/23.