Understanding Paid Social Media Marketing
[0:02] Introduction to Digital Velocity Podcast
[1:02] The beginning of Matchnode
[2:14] Why is Matchnode focused on paid social?
[4:11] Why should brands invest in paid social?
[10:31] E-commerce and the rise in CPMs over the last few years
[12:27] How much should brands invest in paid social campaigns?
[16:55] How do you get people to invest more in paid social campaigns?
[20:08] Brand awareness campaigns
[26:32] Leveraging paid social to help clients in competitive markets
[32:25] Why the creative is the best targeting to do
[35:00] Brian’s piece of advice
[35:34] Wrap-up
Why should brands invest in paid social media campaigns? How does paid social media drive more profit to your business? These questions are answered in this episode of Digital Velocity podcast hosted by Tim Curtis and Erik Martinez, together with Brian Davidson.
Matchnode is a digital marketing agency focused on paid social campaigns, helping businesses achieve ROI and drive more profit. The reason for this becoming Matchnode’s business niche, as Brian explained, is that paid social still drives the majority of demand generation ROI. There could be many different platforms where brands can spend their ad dollars, but social media is the most powerful ad network where brands can truly generate a demand for their product or service.
However, it cannot be denied that the landscape of social media has changed significantly over time (i.e., the rise of privacy legislation, the impact of Apple’s tracking prevention updates for Facebook Meta). When brands decide to do paid social within an ever-changing environment, how should they adjust their strategies?
Brian answered this by mentioning three things: (1) targeting piece; (2) tracking piece; and (3) where are you going as a brand. Measurement is important, but is more complicated than ever, that’s why one should use as many different options as possible to double-check what you’re seeing in every place. It’s essential to dial in your measurement across a lot of different ways and have that discussion within the organization and leverage your first-party data over time to make these models work for you.
In order to do this, it is certain that budgets should be well-appropriated when investing in paid social campaigns. Brands need to properly determine what spending threshold could give them their desired result. Relying on the size and situation of the business, modifications over the agreed unit economics could happen over time. Brian emphasized that trusting the data is the underlying principle to start making decisions with more certainty and to better understand how to move your budgets. Additionally, it’s essential to understand if you are harvesting demand or generating demand because these are two different things depending on your product or service. Conducting brand awareness campaign for your product or service in the social space is very beneficial to drive performance and for conversion to happen. It is important to take note, however, that you need to have a conversion metric within the campaign to actually drive conversions.
In a competitive market, how can a brand leverage paid social? The answer is to be open to changing, because pricing, environment, or even product offering, are all evolving. What’s relevant yesterday could not be as much as relevant today. Plan your creative, make sure it stands out in a lot of different ways for a lot of different audiences, and let it do the targeting for your campaigns. As what Brian gave as his last piece of advice in this episode, the only way to compete in this ever-changing environment is to understand your unit economics and objectives on different platforms really well so you could set a budget that is flexible over time.
Resources:
Digital Velocity Podcast hosted by Tim Curtis and Erik Martinez
