Winning the War on Social Media Advertising
By: Element Three
Tags: Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Paid Social Media, Paid Advertising, Digital Marketing

Bad data and lazy marketing are killing your social advertising potential.

No, really. One doesn’t have to look too far to see a plethora of content published about the evil of digital advertisements and their decreasing quality. Make no mistake — there is a war being waged on paid social media advertising. In this post, we’ll see how the “War on Social Advertising” is a house of cards built by irresponsible reporting, how smart marketers are using good data and content to advertise effectively on social media, and the best practices for being smart about your paid social efforts, too.

WHAT IS SOCIAL ADVERTISING?

Chances are, if you’re reading this you’re not confused about what we mean by social advertising. But I’ll define it anyway, so there’s clarity and proper expectations around precisely what we’re going to talk about in this post.

When we refer to “Social Advertising,” we’re referring to paid digital ads being served on one or more social media platforms, particularly Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. There are other platforms, and other definitions of “social” and “social media,” but what we’re concerned with today is the continued assault on advertising within social media platforms, and why reports of its ineffectiveness are missing some crucial truths as to why it’s not working. Because in our experience at E3, it is working.

SOCIAL ADVERTISING VS. SOCIAL MARKETING

One distinction that is absolutely crucial to make: social advertising is not social media marketing. We’re talking about paid advertising on social platforms, including display ads, video, and other platform-specific ads like Facebook’s Canvas and Carousel ad types. What we’re not talking about is posting offers, discounts, or other marketing material directly into a company’s organic social media channels.

As a rule, our digital marketing experts at Element Three tend to shy away from organic social media for the purposes of strategic marketing planning and execution to meet client goals. That it’s not a service offering we cater to is not the story — because if we could find helpful, effective, and profitable ways to help our clients with social media, we would do so.

Instead we face the reality of what Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik calls “the broken promise of Marketing Utopia,” how companies quickly diluted building meaningful relationships within social platforms with selling (and yes, advertising). Where once the promise of social was readily available audiences interested in “your thing,” marketers instead created an environment where the platforms, informed by the desires of their users, began to become smarter about what users engaged with and truly wanted to see.

This led to what Avinash calls the “Zuck Death Spiral,” the practice of Facebook’s algorithm being updated to slowly learn what a user wants, and remove what companies wanted them to want instead. It’s a reality you’re all too familiar with if you’ve tried banking on organic social to help achieve marketing results:

“Real humans on Social platforms quickly got turned off by these low-grade Social contributions/posts by companies. That meant humans (us!) refused to engage with them. This was noticed by Team Zuck, who started to slowly turn down the presence of company posts in User feeds. This led to less Reach for brands. Which in turn led to even fewer customer interactions for content posted by brands.”

The “Zuck Death Spiral” is likely not confined to just Facebook. Other platforms have gotten more and more savvy about serving their users content similar to what their users engage in…and, in response to organic social engagement diminishing for brands as a result of over-saturation of salesy content, those same platforms created means to advertise, and to let users know and recognize those ads when they are seen.

The reality of organic social — that it’s worthwhile to maintain social posts that feature lifestyle content and other brand-specific material, but unrealistic to expect commercial conversion and monetized activity from posts — helped create the need and market for social ads.

It’s too bad that some of the same short-sightedness, misunderstandings, and critiques surrounding social media to begin with have been attached to social ad capabilities as well.

“PAID SOCIAL MEDIA DOESN’T WORK FOR…”

Take your pick of claims here. “Paid social media doesn’t work for…” Millennials. Or baby boomers. Or small business. Or…pick your poison. But I beg to differ. I believe the reason why we see so many “Social Ads Don’t Work…” and “The Death of Paid Social!…” articles is because of lazy marketing, lazy journalism, and bad data.

According to a Forbes article on a study of millennial ad-filtering habits, “millennials communicate with each other far more than any advertising campaign can.” Mostly because they rely on friends, word-of-mouth, etc. Just a paragraph down, though, look what the same article has to say:

“Fewer inputs were necessary for male decision buying than for female decision buying. There’s also a difference in terms of categories, so that the female millennials are more likely to focus on health and beauty aids, and the male millennials are far more likely to focus on electronics and technology.”

Wait…what? Paid social ads are ineffective because millennials are more likely to talk to one another…but when they do interact with ads, there’s a difference between the sexes for the amount of interactions and the categories of products? This indicates that there is in fact a time and a place where social ads are effective for millennials. The first statement uses bad data and lazy marketing to lead to a generalization that “ads don’t work for millennials.” But the second statement — that ads within particular segments and timeframes do work — that’s a different story.

Within the original interview with eMarketer, Nora Ganim Barnes, chancellor professor of marketing and director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, notes that traditional “push” style marketing is not effective among the younger generation. She notes, “Millennials are looking for information before they make purchases, but they’re looking for it from their trusted sources, and their trusted sources are not the manufacturers or providers of products.”

The rest of the interview highlights all the places where millennials do interact with brands, from apps to sharing content and more. It mentions ads once, specifically in how millennials filter out the things they do and don’t want. What the article doesn’t do is damn advertisements outright for the millennial audience.

Another study, executed by CivicScience and reported on by eMarketer, claims that “very few US internet users have made a purchase based on ads they saw on social platforms, like Facebook or Snapchat.” Directly below that claim is a graph showing that 16% of responders had made a purchase based on a Facebook ad…and even more striking data. According to the study, 45% of respondents have never purchased based on an ad on social media sites, and 35% of respondents don’t use social media at all.

Let’s look at those numbers for a second.

45% of those surveyed have never made a purchase based on a social ad. 35% of those surveyed don’t use social media.

If I think about those numbers for a second, the data analyst in me gets angry. There are some pretty irresponsible conclusions being drawn from this survey.

For one thing, how does “45%” equal “very few?” The article title — “Social Advertising Isn’t Really Driving Conversions” — and the first statement make it seem like paid social ads are totally ineffective. But the inverse statement — that 55% of respondents have made a purchase based on a social ad — seems to me to be rather positive. Maybe I define “very few” and “isn’t really” differently, but in advertising, even in aggregate, 55% is pretty damned good. I’ll bet there are a lot of CEOs out there who would love their close rate to be around 55%, especially just for people they advertised to on social media.

Another point of frustration: how is this 45% number figured? Does it include the 35% who don’t even use social media? I need to know this answer. Because if it does, that data is even further skewed. If I remove those who don’t use social media at all, then my actual conversion engagement number of 55% is that much greater, because now I’m comparing apples to apples — we’re only looking at those who use social media and, therefore, are actually relevant to my social media strategy.

I wouldn’t use the data from a survey that asks, “which guitar is your favorite: Gibson, Fender, or Paul Reed Smith” and fails to eliminate the respondents that don’t have a guitar. If I was trying to find out a favorite guitar type, I’d ask people who actually buy guitars, and I wouldn’t pay much attention to the folks who said they didn’t own one.

The mistake that the Forbes and eMarketer articles make is in drawing conclusions that are not supported by the data they’re using. Rather than breaking engagements down within social media and advertisements down to constituent parts (buying cycles and phases, content, platforms, audience segments), they makes an overall generalization that audiences don’t like ads, or being marketed to, or social media in general, and so social advertising must not work.

In short: you can’t make assumptions on the quality of advertising with generalized bad data.

It takes a more practiced, patient, and dedicated hand to tell the whole truth, the real story — not in macro-generalizations, but in micro-moments of effectiveness. Before we do, let’s look at what marketing keeps getting wrong with paid social media.

THE REAL REASONS WHY PAID SOCIAL ADS AREN’T WORKING

In our experience, there are six reasons why paid social ads aren’t working (and you could probably apply this same list to many other marketing activities). They fall into two buckets:

Marketers Are Lazy

Targeting and Segmentation Are Off

The second bucket, around targeting and segmentation, is often an outcome of the “marketers are lazy” bucket, but not always.

There are three unique reasons within each bucket, and they break down like so:

Marketers Are Lazy:

Marketers don’t have data

Marketers aren’t adding genuine value

Marketers don’t know the value of a lead

Targeting and Segmentation Are Off:

Marketers are targeting the wrong channel

Marketers are segmenting the wrong audience

Marketers are utilizing the wrong offer

Let’s take a look at each in turn to diagnose why it’s easy to make general assumptions around paid social advertising, and how to prevent the failure of your own paid digital efforts.

MARKETERS DON’T HAVE DATA

Marketers don’t always have every piece of the marketing puzzle. They might be missing market research, first-party customer data, or other helpful information. It never fails to astound me how many companies or products are launched without real market research or comprehensive data.

But as marketers we’ve figured out how to grow tough skin, make educated guesses, and learn as we go. Still, the lack of comprehensive data — particularly around customer demographics and psychographics — has the potential to hamstring any campaign.

Market research is often worth what you pay for it. It can save thousands of dollars in guesswork, start-and-stops, and stuttering campaigns in the long run. I get that sometimes a failure to research isn’t a matter of laziness; it’s a matter of budget, organizational buy-in, prototyping, and a dozen other factors. It does happen for legitimate reasons. So what to do?

In the absence of full market research, there are other methods to gather real, meaningful data about audience type, size, and behaviors online — and wouldn’t you know it, paid social is an excellent tool for just that.

Just don’t launch head-first into your one big, killer idea until you know there’s an audience there who cares.

MARKETER’S AREN’T ADDING GENUINE VALUE

This one goes hand-in-hand with the above lack of data, and is commonly matched by a decidedly un-humble, non-customer-centric approach of assuming “I know what the customer wants.”

The biggest killer of campaigns, whether it’s paid social, display, search, organic, email or otherwise, is a misunderstanding of value to the consumer.

As Nora Ganim Barnes said above about millennials, ALL audiences are getting better at filtering out the internet trash. And it’s true of more than just the younger audiences that we’re more apt to trust sources we know, be they friends, mentors, or colleagues, rather than fly-by-night (to us) companies or unknown quantities with unknown value.

The value has to be focused on the end consumer, and it has to be targeted to the right moment in time to be valuable to that customer. We’ll get to offers in a minute, but suffice it to say for now: not understanding your audience, their needs and desires, and how your product or service has a unique selling proposition that cures those needs and desires, means that you are not ready to advertise. You are going to fail until you understand the value to the customer. Simple as that.

MARKETERS DON’T KNOW THE VALUE OF A LEAD

Here’s another campaign killer built around value — only this time, it’s the value of the customer to your organization. Marketers the world over are familiar with the arguments with sales that always go something like this: “The leads you’re sending me aren’t qualified/aren’t good/aren’t what I need/aren’t interested in what we have to sell.”

Sales guys want it all: they want the best leads, cheaply, and lots of ’em. And sometimes we can do it all at the same time — but not without understanding how much a lead is worth to our organizations.

We’ve written before about calculating a customer’s lifetime value and using that to calculate the value of a lead. The quick math version says you find out what the average customer spends over the course of their average engagement with your company — their lifetime value — and then work backward across your lead and acquisition funnel from customer to opportunity, opp to sales qualified lead, SQL to marketing qualified lead, and so on, until you have the value of whatever stages are appropriate to your organization’s sales and marketing funnel.

This is extremely important. Why? Because you will use this number to justify your very existence — or, more directly, to justify the budget for your paid advertising activities.

Campaigns that don’t have enough budget to be effective are hard to overcome. You’re living on a hope and prayer, wishing for success. The key to unlocking budget is knowing the value of the lead you are going after, and being able to forecast results.

One thing is for certain — when you’re getting leads under the average cost per acquisition, it’s a LOT easier to get more budget for the campaign. Know the value of the customer, and use it to your advantage. Anything less is lazy.

MARKETERS ARE TARGETING THE WRONG CHANNELS

The rubber meets the road here when the lazy marketer is driving. One of the critical errors we repeatedly make in marketing is not being where the customer is.

You can call this “targeting the wrong channel,” or platform, or…several things. The overriding point is targeting the wrong place. I know you’ve heard “the right message, and the right time, to the right person, with the right offer!” platitudes enough to make you sick. The thing is, they’re true.

Where and how you are targeting truly matters, whether that’s social channels, or specific keywords, or time of day. And not having the right data or the means to test until you have the right data is likely the reason marketers keep screwing this up, unless they’re willfully targeting with no rhyme or reason, in which case marketers are just being stupid.

We’ve already seen how bad data and lazy investigation into what was really being said or really going on has led journalists astray in reporting the effectiveness of social advertising. It would be a shame if your marketing efforts suffered the same silly fate.

MARKETERS ARE SEGMENTING THE WRONG AUDIENCE

Failure to understand the customer is again at fault here. Targeting the wrong person is just, well, dumb. What a waste of marketing dollars!

The thing is, I know some of you are saying by this point, “hey, what if I don’t know who my audience is?” And that’s fair — we know that sometimes even the smartest marketers just don’t have the data, and don’t have the power to hit pause and make an organization do the market research to figure it all out.

But paid social and other paid channels where targeting by demographic, interest, and behavioral factors is available are excellent ways to narrow down your audience and truly start to segment them into useful groups for advertising and marketing purposes.

You have to start somewhere, I get it, but staying general and generic forever is a death sentence for your paid social (and any other marketing) efforts. Test, figure it out, move on. Don’t let the lack of data make you lazy.

MARKETERS ARE UTILIZING THE WRONG OFFER

Lastly, one aspect that everyone should really understand at this point is that marketing with the wrong offer is a quick and easy way to turn off potential customers.

You have got to understand what customers want. It’s even better if you understand their behaviors at each appropriate stage of the funnel, target accordingly, and accept that some of your ads may fall outside the perfect zone of where that customer is.

Marketing automation can help this a ton. Knowing how to segment an audience based on activity, cookies, and other factors can really help you become effective with your offers. Not doing this is unthinkable in today’s data-rich and customer-savvy environment.

The other side of the coin is knowing how to massage an offer to perfection — and when the offer is the problem, or something else is at fault. If you guessed where this is going — to testing and conversion rate optimization — congratulations, you get the golden egg. Your work, your offer, isn’t done at launch. There’s ways to improve.

Either way, getting your offer right is critical. Throwing something out there with little to no value to your potential customer is not going to work, and expecting it to do so is just lazy marketing.

HOW ELEMENT THREE GETS IT DONE

So how does social media advertising work? By now you know what we’re going to say: paid social ads that work well work because of great customer data that is utilized to develop the best marketing segments, targeting, and content offers. Here are the social advertising best practices that we use at Element Three to deliver ads that rock.

SOCIAL ADVERTISING STRATEGY

One thing our team prides itself on is being able to listen to a client’s goals, needs, and sales data, and craft the right campaign to reach their goals. This doesn’t always mean having the right answer right out of the gate — some campaigns start off low and slow, spreading budget across many channels with a broader range of demographics, psychographics, or offers, and using the early results as a way to zero in on what will work best within a campaign to deliver on our objectives.

Our approach also tends to focus on funnel-stage targeting — or better yet, full-funnel targeting where different tactics and offers are working in concert to reach, engage, qualify, and sell prospects across multiple stages of the funnel.

We do our best to engage with every client in both short-term and long-term paid digital advertising strategy, and how we use, test, improve, and lean into social advertising always has a place in how we approach advertising campaigns.

SOCIAL ADVERTISING TRENDS

There is something to being first to a new channel among your competitors. Seeing what’s going on in your industry and surrounding areas, not just topically, but technologically, can be a huge key to success.

We tend to stay away from “fly by night” topics. Newsjacking to promote your own thing only dilutes the value and quality of your content, and tends to attract folks not really interested in what you have to say and do for them. Ah, but jacking technological trends — like new ways to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more — can have a major impact on reaching audiences in fresh and interesting ways.

Social platforms offer new mediums for advertising and getting in early, where pricing is low and opportunity is high, can make the difference in advertising campaigns. Likewise, seeing when channels or tactics within them start to dry up is key to knowing when to shift. Element Three keeps a keen eye out for both — the new opportunities and the sunsetting ones — and helps craft campaigns that have maximum impact and reach based on those trends.

SOCIAL ADVERTISING BENCHMARKS

There’s a right way and a wrong way to report on paid social ads. Measuring social advertising should always start with the client’s goals, not the channel’s metrics.

Element Three asks all kinds of questions around a client’s goals — lifetime value of a customer, lead-to-close cycle, typical cost per acquisition — and uses those as barometers to pair with goal forecasting, budget estimates and more to craft campaigns with real targets, dynamic and agile goals, and positive results.

In other words, if you’re interested in leads, we’re not going to target impressions as a key metric, and we’re not going to sugarcoat a campaign report with fantastic impressions that missed the overall (conversions-focused) goals. You have real marketing needs — volume, cost, quality, whatever they may be. We craft campaigns around your overarching marketing goals and work backwards to campaign goals, KPIs, and benchmarks that cater to them.

There are reasons why paid digital is one of our fastest growing service offerings, and one of the major ones is because we know how to find and bring value.

SOCIAL ADVERTISING SPEND

In paid advertising, budget is one of the most important factors in how we strategize and execute campaigns. Having the right amount of budget for the goals you want to create — and a realistic expectation of return on ad spend/return on investment — is critical to campaign success.

If you don’t know the demographic and psychographic information of your customers, it’s going to take more money (and potentially a longer timeline) to get amazing results. The great thing about paid social is that audience targeting can be improved with positive and negative engagements, letting you learn more about your customers as you go. Activity can be gauged not only on engagement, but on conversions, helping to create lookalike models of your best buyers.

But without a history of success or the data to program this from the get-go, it will take time and budget to test. Some strategies start “low and slow” and test broadly across many channels and audiences in order to learn where the best target is. Having the budget to test and learn first, then pivot spend to the most effective channels and crank your campaign into overdrive, is crucial to reaching maximum value for your campaigns.

Balancing budget and overall cost per acquisition against lifetime value is also a key component to measuring campaign effectiveness and dedicating appropriate spend to your efforts. “That cost per lead is too high!” can be a valid response — but not if it’s not measured against the actual value of customers. If we can get you leads for $25, and your sales team closes 1 out of 20…you might think $500 is too high for a cost per customer. But if your customers are worth $5000, that’s hot — for every $1 you give, you make $10. That’s not a bad return at all.

Your willingness to spend should reflect the breadth of that ROAS ratio.

ADDITIONAL BEST PRACTICES

There are dozens of other factors that can help make social media advertising campaigns effective, but here are just a few more that we’ve seen become critical factors in campaign success.

Campaign Duration : audiences have limited attention spans, so it’s important to refresh offers, relax immediacy in campaigns, and give prospects room to breathe when appropriate.

: audiences have limited attention spans, so it’s important to refresh offers, relax immediacy in campaigns, and give prospects room to breathe when appropriate. Creative Refresh: likewise, audiences aren’t going to respond to the same ads they’ve seen time and time again; creative needs to be rotated to maintain engagement.

likewise, audiences aren’t going to respond to the same ads they’ve seen time and time again; creative needs to be rotated to maintain engagement. Advanced Reporting: there’s nothing like real-time reports on your campaign success, and we set up dashboards for just that — a place to log in and see results as the campaign progresses.

If you’re not keeping these things in mind when you’re building and executing your campaign, it might not matter if you’ve gotten everything else right — you may end up with a big ol’ turkey of a failed campaign.

WHERE PAID SOCIAL ADS ARE GOING

Unless things change in a major way (like, Facebook stops nerfing business posts, or somehow disappears altogether) social advertising isn’t going anywhere. Despite the Zuck Death Spiral, brands still need a social presence, and social ads are the best way to maximize your brand’s potential in that space. To win in the War on Social Advertising, the first step is definitely simply to be in it.

In too many cases lazy marketers, lazy journalists, and bad data are telling a story that you shouldn’t believe. They’re telling you that social advertising doesn’t work, despite the fact that the data doesn’t back it up. They’re telling you that it’s too hard, simply because they aren’t adding value or they don’t understand the value of their leads. They’re failing because they targeted the wrong channel, or they segmented the wrong audience, or they utilized the wrong offer — not because social ads themselves are wrong.

Don’t get drawn into the wrong conclusions just because the competition and pundits are lazy, or don’t understand what they’re seeing. Don’t reject social advertising because of the herd. Stick with it. Do it right. Find the right strategy for your needs, know the trends and follow the ones that make sense, set the right reporting benchmarks, and spend intelligently. Your ads will perform, and the next time you see a headline about the death of social advertising, you won’t be afraid. You’ll laugh.

Perspective from Dustin Clark, Digital Marketing Director at Element Three