comprehensive guide social advertising techniques for ......advertise on social platforms.1 and...

COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE

Social Advertising Techniques for Advanced Marketers

© 2016 Sprinklr, Inc. All rights reserved. Social Advertising Techniques for Advanced Marketers | 2

Contents

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Introduction

Background: The Social Advertising Landscape

The Challenges of Driving and Defining Value

People Problems

Never-Ending Change

Conclusion

About Sprinklr

Introduction


Introduction

Social advertising, a concept that barely existed five years ago, is now a line item in almost every brand’s media budget. Sixty-five percent of marketers currently advertise on social platforms.1 And nearly three out of four companies plan to increase their budgets for social advertising next year.2

But while social advertising provides an opportunity to achieve unprecedented scale, efficiency, and effectiveness, it’s a difficult strategy to master.

The models that worked for TV, print, and early digital advertising no longer apply. What used to take months, like waiting to see campaign results, now happens in real time. And tasks that used to be easy – such as telling a publisher to run an ad for a certain time period – can be cumbersome and risky due to the self-service nature of social advertising.

Now, plenty of brands – including yours, hopefully – are running successful social advertising programs. But behind the success, there’s often a struggle. It can be hard to replicate big wins and pinpoint where the challenges lie, let alone update processes or allot resources to fix them.

Fortunately, we’ve identified several kinds of issues that affect many brands across a wide spectrum of industries:

• Defining and Driving Value

• People Problems

• Never-Ending Change

Salesforce, 2016, https://secure2.sfdcstatic.com/assets/pdf/misc/state-of-marketing-report-2016.pdfIbid.

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To conquer social advertising, you need to first understand how the landscape has evolved.

Facebook’s official ad product has only been around since 2012.3 In the same year, Facebook purchased Instagram – and shortly after, unveiled Instagram ads.4 Other players like Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat have since then emerged with their own placements, platforms, and unique contributions to media plans.

The ascent of social media advertising has been quick, yet rabid. And by next year, social advertising will be a $36 billion industry.5

Business Insider, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/explaining-fbx-facebook-exchange-2013-12 Instagram, 2013, http://blog.instagram.com/post/63017560810/instagramasagrowingbusinesseMarketer, 2015, http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Social-Network-Ad-Spending-Hit-2368-Billion-Worldwide-2015/1012357

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POTENTIAL REACH

*Based on June 2016 acquisition.**Estimate based on if network was independent from Facebook.

***Estimate based on if network was independent from Google.

$350Facebook

$16Twitter

$25Snapchat$11Pinterest

$26*LinkedIn

$25-50**Instagram

$70***YouTube

ESTIMATED MARKET VALUE(in billions)

313 mil. 100

mil.106 mil.

1 bil.

150 mil.

1.79 bil.

1.18 bil.

500 mil. 300

mil.

monthly active users daily active users


DEMOGRAPHICS

LinkedIn

are 25-34 years old31%

are 35-54 years old36%

There are 40 million students and recent college graduates on LinkedIn.

YouTube

YouTube reaches more 18-49 year olds than any cable network in the U.S.

Instagram

of people ages 30-4928%

of those who make over $75k26%

55+45z 55% of people online ages 18-29

Facebook

attended college

work in management

68%

37%

56% men 44% women

Twitter

of adults 18-29

of people making over $75k

37%

27%

30+70z 30% of college graduates

Snapchat

60% of smartphone users between the ages of 18-34 are Snapchatters

of users are younger than 2571%

make more than $50k38%

Pinterest

of adult internet users31%

of people who make over $75k30%

31% of people with college degrees31+69z

YOUR TARGETING OPTIONS

Target by location, age, gender, language, interest, behavior.

By creating custom “lookalike” audiences, brands can target people who are similar to their existing customers and contacts.

Target by language, gender, interest, device, behavior, geography, keyword.

Brands can target the followers of relevant accounts and created tailored audiences based on their CRM lists.

Target by location, target specific email addresses and mobile device IDs (Snap Audience Match), target people who consume certain types of video/content (Snapchat Lifestyle Categories), target consumers who exhibit characteristics similiar to existing customers (Lookalikes).

Target existing customers using email or mobile IDs; retarget people who’ve been to the website; and create lookalike audiences.

Target by location, company size, industry, job function, seniority, company name, job title, school, degree, skills, group membership, age, gender, field of study.

Additionally, LinkedIn will be unveiling Matched Audiences in early 2017. Matched Audiences will offer website retargeting, contact targeting (email upload or integration with marketing automation), and account targeting (uploading a list of target accounts).

Same targeting options as Facebook – ads are placed through Facebook’s ads manager.

Target based on age, gender, interest groups, location.


AVAILABLE AD FORMATS

Facebook

Show up to 10 images and/or videos, headlines, and links or calls to action in a single ad unit.

Carousel

Relevant and timely ads on Facebook based on the products people have visited on your website/app.

Dynamic Ads

Full-screen, mobile-optimized, post-click experience with images, videos, texts, and links.

Canvas

Reach a wider group of followers or spark engagement from existing users.

Suggest accounts that people don’t currently follow.

Suggest time-, context-, and event-based trends to users. These appear at the top of the Trending Topics list.

Twitter

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Accounts

Promoted Trends

Appear like regular pins, but you pay to have them seen by more people.

Include extra information right on the pin itself – such as app, movie, recipe, article, product, and place.

Seen in motion when the user scrolls, but the motion stops when the scrolling stops.

Standard Pins

Rich Pins

Cinematic Pins

A new take on brand activation, offering “play time” – the time people spend playing with the interactive ad you’ve created.

When Snapchatters in the location(s) of your choice take a snap, they’ll be able to see your Geofilter and use it to explain where, when, and why they took the Snap.

A 10-second vertical, full screen video ad that appears in the context of other Snaps. You can also give Snapchatters the choice to swipe up and see more, like a long form video, article, app install ad, or mobile website.

Snapchat

Sponsored Lenses

Sponsored GeoFilters

Snap Ads

Allows you to deliver content into the LinkedIn Feed of members beyond those who are following your company.

Provides an effective way for marketers to reach decision makers through a personalized and timely message on LinkedIn.

Allows you to get your business in front of the right audience and target potential customers on LinkedIn.com desktop pages with a budget that works for you.

LinkedIn

Sponsored Content

Sponsored InMail

Text Ad

Photo-based ad that appears in the feed of users.

Video-based ad – up to 60 seconds long.

A collection of images, plus a call to action button that leads to a website.

Instagram

Photo

Video

Carousel

Any video uploaded to YouTube can be an ad.

Pre-roll video ads appear before other videos on YouTube.

Other video ads appear beside playing videos and in search results.

YouTube

Pinterest

Sources: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, CNN Money, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Fortune, VentureBeat. Pulled 11/30/2016.



Paid social media advertising happens in real time, and it is largely a self-service affair, working with uninvolved third-party platforms rather than publishers who bring their own expertise to the table. In addition, customers expect constant, consistent brand engagement across every touchpoint, at every moment.

It’s clear that extracting the most value from your campaigns is up to you – and it ain’t easy. Effective social advertising requires a sophisticated approach to planning, executing, and optimizing your media investment. Even defining what “value” means can be a challenge, as social media’s flexibility and pervasiveness are appealing to multiple business units.

Here are the major sticking points we’ve identified when it comes to driving and defining value, along with suggestions on how marketers can proactively address them.

PROBLEM: TARGETING IS EASIER SAID THAN DONE. It’s axiomatic that to achieve maximum impact from social advertising, you need perfect targeting: getting the right message delivered to the right person at the right time.

But even getting close to this ideal is challenging. You need a deep understanding of your customer profile, from demographics to psychographics to any number of other metrics. Then you need to personalize your marketing message, and, because of how the platforms operate, you need to actively manage the media investment, down to the user or segment. Your ability to perceive, measure, and act on every level of consumer response – from the most holistic to the most specific – will directly affect every campaign’s performance.




WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:Sophisticated analysis and marketing practices are required to divide your total audience into relevant segments, craft strong messaging for each segment, and then determine how much to invest in each segment. Since social advertising is new, there are few rules, so there’s a fair amount of “spaghetti on the wall” experimentation. Even if a campaign is a hit, it can be tricky to interpret what drove the success, and how to repeat it.

This is made even more complicated when overall budgets come into play, because incorporating customized ad targeting doesn’t come free. And there may be limits of scale imposed by the size or makeup of your audience. Finally, you have to acknowledge that in some cases or for certain products, less targeting is more and casting the widest net is the best investment.

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS:1 | There’s no way around it: you have to make

a one-time, up-front investment in:

• Deploying channel and platform pixels.

• Connecting CRM / DMP systems.

• Aligning media planning strategies across social, programmatic, and search advertising where possible.

These core systems are vital to efficiently running the analytics you need. Once these core systems are in place, it’s much easier to ensure that your audience segments are correctly matched to their personalized messaging and creative variations, as well as other variables such as psychographics, general behavior (shopper, influencer, lookalike), relationship to your brand (prospect, customer, lapsed), language and cultural preferences, etc.

2 | With your core systems in place, calculate the “sweet spot” for each segment through ongoing testing (A/B testing is ideal and should be used in every campaign if possible). Be sure to firmly define your KPIs; it’s generally better to select data points that quantify true business impact rather than just clicks or engagements. If you’re not doing it yet, upload your conversion files to your ad-buying platform so that your reporting and automation mechanisms can identify which ads are driving the highest conversion value for each segment. Armed with this information, you can perform bid optimization to maximize your ROAS.

3 | As your social advertising programs develop, be sure to perform central, cross-segment analysis of your messaging and investment plans. This will clarify which tactics maximize impact per segment and for the brand overall. Winning strategies should then be distributed to all parties responsible for media execution, including agencies, platform service arms, individual markets, etc., to ensure enterprise alignment.

Since social advertising is new, there are few rules, so there’s a fair amount of “spaghetti on the wall” experimentation. Even if a campaign is a hit, it can be tricky to interpret what drove the success, and how to repeat it.


Your Data Siloes

Take Down


The key to successful social advertising – really, advertising in general – is to reduce data and strategy silos. Collecting device IDs, emails, cookies, etc. and linking them into a larger CRM profile will allow you to reach new and existing customers in a multi-tasking, cross-device world.

To do so, it’s vital to invest in data infrastructure that can ingest and organize those touchpoints. Consider that 57% of the time TV ads are on the screen during prime time, viewers are

looking at another device such as their phone or a tablet. And odds are they’re within an app environment. As an advertiser, you have to be ready to serve relevant messages to prospective customers across any screen. So focus your data infrastructure on creating a customer profile that can capture insights across the entire customer journey, and one that’s nimble enough to leverage marketing efforts throughout the purchase funnel.Leo Polanowski

GM & VP EMERGING MARKETS, AMERICASYAHOO


PROBLEM: TOO MANY COOKS, AND THEY ALL WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT.From customer service to sales to corporate communications, there are multiple business units (with key stakeholders in each) across the organization interested in reaching audiences through social advertising – and they each define “value” in a different way.

Organic and paid posts are typically owned by separate groups, but only through careful coordination can you recognize opportunities to boost owned media with paid budgets, or to use paid campaigns as a testing ground for organic activities. Creative assets necessary to run campaigns come from several parties such as agencies, owned media managers, and paid media buyers. These are just a few examples of the collaborative nature of social advertising, and the potential hiccups that can occur along the way.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:Inefficiency arises when cross-team collaboration doesn’t happen as seamlessly as it should – or worse, when teams are looking for opposing outcomes. Without clear understanding of goals and KPIs, campaigns cannot be optimized in real time. Less obviously, the brand is open to significant risk if ads – created by multiple departments, owned by “not me, maybe sales knows” – cannot be easily shut off during a crisis.

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS:1 | Formalize your media execution process

at the enterprise level. The process should incorporate all stakeholders and should set down clear responsibilities, covering division of labor, documentation, and safeguards. Where possible, the process could include divided ownership in the platforms.

A key part of the process will be defining value for each campaign and for the overall program, and communicating those goals to all stakeholders. Getting and keeping everyone on the same page is a huge part of maintaining efficiency, even when other areas are still works in progress.

2 | Don’t shy away from complex programs. Your program planning should allow for multiple campaigns reaching overlapping segments, and should embrace message sequencing, retargeting, multi-message ad units, and controlled media bidding.

3 | Build in a backup plan when establishing your media execution process. One way to do this is to create a “kill switch” through your social advertising platform. If events start to spiral out of your control, this function will help you know exactly where to turn to shut off a campaign or make other fast adjustments. It may not resolve the issue, but it will stop fueling the fire.




PROBLEM: OPTIMIZING IS A 24/7/365 JOB.Campaign performance fluctuates in real time, and opportunities to launch a new ad can present themselves at any time. Because responsibility for success is focused on the marketer or a small team, late nights and weekend work become the norm. Burnout swiftly follows.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:Social media is always on, and trending “moments” can happen any time, anywhere around the world. In addition, as each new time zone starts waking up, the number of impressions available surges. Furthermore, your own campaign delivery and performance can fluctuate significantly, and A/B test results will also reveal changing opportunity.

If you aren’t capitalizing on these constant shifts, you are leaving value on the table. But due to inefficient processes and a lack of automation, human intervention is typically required to recognize and act on these opportunities.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS:1 | While campaign planning (including decisions

about segmentation, bid strategy, and campaign coordination) should happen through a centralized process, campaign execution should be as distributed as possible, even to the level of team members who already own community management, local markets, customer service, etc.

Ideally, all end users should be empowered with platform access to monitor and engage consumers. For example, if a community manager sees consumer activity, he could respond with an ad buy (perhaps boosting a post, delivering targeted customer messaging, or sharing brand tags). More typically, customer service agents actively respond to consumers’ comments on organic and paid posts.

Set proper guidelines through strategic thinking, testing, and learning – and then train teams in the guidelines. Then ensure ongoing monitoring by a central team of seasoned practitioners.

With these steps in place, teams can work autonomously, with flexible work hours to allow for response when timing is optimal – even late at night or on weekends. Further support can come from offshore vendors or international offices to continue optimization around the clock. As your skills and understanding deepen, platform automation can enable near-real-time optimization, shifting budgets and targeting of campaigns to high-performance posts and segments.

Campaign execution should be as distributed as possible, even to the level of team members who already own community management, local markets, customer service, etc.


People Problems

People Problems

While so much of your social advertising program is driven by technology, it requires a significant investment of human resources as well. Continuous planning and re-planning of media programs exhausts marketing resources quickly. IT organizations have to deploy and maintain evolving pixel strategies. Data and analytics experts have to keep up with demand for more, better, specific insights. Creative agencies and regulatory bodies have their own established processes, which may or may not jibe with the speed of social.

Without proper organization, running social advertising can come with significant risks of inefficiency and exposure to crisis. Innocent mistakes can lead to accidental and wasteful spending of marketing budgets. Here are some ways to manage these variables.

PROBLEM: THE TALENT POOL IS SMALL. AND YOUNG. Most social advertising experts are millennials. The talented ones are hard to find, and therefore expensive. Once you’ve hired them, it’s equally difficult to manage and engage them.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:You need social media experts who can handle the responsibility of running millions of dollars of media through a self-service platform. Yet as social advertising grows in importance to marketers, these rare individuals are in increasingly high demand. As a result, they command high salaries compared to their peers in traditional marketing organizations. This is compounded by the fact that they need a high level of access to the rest of the enterprise and commensurate autonomy to deploy budgets fluidly. Top it off with the fact that they are typically millennials in their 20s or early 30s. This tends to make them young for their level of seniority (and salary), which can rile existing team members and even confuse senior management.

These are all the background issues that you simply have to deal with: find the budget, do the recruiting, make the hire, and introduce them to the team with positivity and understanding.

Now that you have them, though, you need them to do the job – and we’ve all heard the unsettling stories about millennials and their work ethic or lack thereof. They’re unmotivated. Disloyal. Unwilling to follow direction. It’s all generalizations, but most employers find they really do need new approaches to managing them.

Without proper organization, running social advertising can come with significant risks of inefficiency and exposure to crisis. Innocent mistakes can lead to accidental and wasteful spending of marketing budgets.

People Problems

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS:1 | Millennials tend to respond well to autonomy,

specifically when it’s paired with clear direction and a feeling of belonging to the larger enterprise. As long as parameters for their success are well-established, and their actions are reviewed and rewarded accordingly, they can very quickly prove their worth.

2 | Collaboration is also an effective style, and can both motivate teams and provide executional safeguards. A great tack is to assign overlapping responsibility between team members. Encourage them to discuss their campaigns actively and check each other’s work. The collaboration will minimize errors and spark innovation as well.

PROBLEM: THE REST OF THE ORGANIZATION IS PLAYING CATCH-UP (OR SIMPLY NOT PLAYING).Many contributors are needed to coordinate a major social advertising program and maximize the business impact. But too often, those outside of marketing are unfamiliar with how social advertising works.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:Great targeting of social ads relies on pixels deployed across web properties, and changes to these pixel strategies are frequent. This can cause friction with IT organizations that are accustomed to working at a much slower pace (or are resentful at a perceived incursion into their area of expertise).

Multiple technology platforms must be purchased for media buying, ad serving, analysis, and coordination of campaigns and audiences, so procurement departments – rarely at the forefront of organization-wide change – have to research, source, and negotiate, again and again.

Social advertising creates a rich, invaluable trove of data. Great – except it now requires many departments to collaborate on coordinated testing and learning, data sourcing, creative development and strategy, planning, and analysis. And while some teams will be familiar with these practices, it’s common that many teams are not. Education becomes yet another vital step.



People Problems

You Need Good People

Technology Can’t Do It All;

Brands think they know their customers; however, they cannot truly know who their customers are on a personal level until they fully understand them and their intentions. No piece of technology can help them to do this fully. Machines can collect, store, and manage data, but it’s individuals who must add human understanding and perspective to a world that hasn’t been turned to 0s and 1s – just yet anyway.

At iProspect, we lean on technology for the collection, management, and execution of data. But it is our strategists and data analysts who provide true understanding for our clients. Both are crucial pieces of the puzzle.

By leveraging agencies and tools that understand customers at their motivational level, and matching that to true site customer data, brands will be able to understand their customers at exact and personal levels, which will help create relevant experiences. In essence, it is only man, with the help of machine, who can provide truly relevant and personal customer experiences.

Misty LockeGLOBAL CHIEF MARKETING OFFICERiPROSPECT


People Problems

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS:1 | To get everyone in the organization on board,

start at the top. A clear demonstration of the business potential of social advertising, including its positive effect on go-to-market strategies, is important to ensure the alignment of your C-Suite (CEO, CMO, and CTO at least), and to keep social advertising as a top priority. With a mandate from above, departmental leaders can more effectively guide their groups and can escalate issues as needed.

2 | Start educating. Keep educating. Always be educating. All maturing social advertising programs require a concerted effort to educate the enterprise on the social landscape, best practices, unique processes, and risks to be considered during the deployment of campaigns and beyond.

Team members will need to spend a fair share of their time – up to 25%, depending on the needs of the organization and their level of seniority – preparing presentations, quantifying results, identifying opportunities, and reviewing with stakeholders. Leaning on platform services or other partners such as agencies can relieve a lot of the burden, but their input should be considered with a grain of salt.

PROBLEM: MISTAKES ARE NOT EASILY FORGIVEN.When it comes to implementing a major social advertising program, mistakes are easy to make and can be VERY costly. Many organizations try to deter mistakes by implementing harsh penalties, including termination.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:In other channels, there are additional safeguards built into the process, and risk is spread. For example, in a traditional print media buy, the publisher accepts the risk of delivering a campaign accurately, and will manage its own delivery of impressions to the right dates and volumes. In social advertising, this is all controlled by you, via a self-service platform. Even a small typo in a date or bid form can mean a premature delivery or an error potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars. The most innocuous-seeming photos can sometimes create social media backlash.

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS: 1 | The best media buying platforms will warn

users when they are about to make significant changes to their campaigns, and can also be set up to monitor campaigns and flag abnormal behavior of any type. Take full advantage of these services when available.

2 | Many platforms also allow the implementation of approval flows, preventing ads from going live before all decision-making authorities have had a chance to review and approve the ad and its parameters. Some also allow for tracking of changes and approvals by user for later review. Again, these services can be vital to catch errors before it’s too late, so use them.

3 | Even with safeguards in place, errors are always possible. A proven best practice to cultivate attention and minimize mistakes is to create a culture of rewarding precision.

This is the opposite of a harsh, unforgiving, penalty-driven approach. Firing staff for making mistakes is demoralizing and expensive for the enterprise (think of the investment needed to recruit and train a replacement, for example). It is often an overreaction that prevents an otherwise talented individual from learning from her mistake and continuing on to great performance.

Of course, you need to be able to weed out those who simply aren’t up to the task, but focusing on the positive is imperative. Teams in fear for their jobs won’t bring the innovation, creativity, and independence you need to efficiently run your social advertising program.

Never-Ending Change

Never-Ending Change

Social media as an industry is continuously evolving. New publishers appear all the time, and the best of them amass huge user counts in very short amounts of time. To maintain relevance, existing publishers must innovate and fight for every user – so they change ad placements, switch up algorithms, and develop new targeting options. As a brand using their platform, you’re lucky to get a few months’ notice of even the most significant changes, and you certainly don’t have any input on when, how, or where the updates occur. Not surprisingly (you’ve probably experienced this personally), the constant change is a major challenge for marketers.

PROBLEM: UPDATES, UPDATES EVERYWHERE.Publisher platforms like Facebook and Twitter control everything – targeting, optimization algorithms, bidding, placements, etc. – and can change any or all of these elements at any time (remember FBX?).

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE: When you’re advertising across multiple social channels, it’s hard enough to keep up with just the copy specs for each, let alone the nuances of different audience behaviors, best practices for advertising, and specific ad parameters. The challenge is compounded when publishers unveil new products or ad updates.

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS:1 | Simple but often overlooked: be sure to pay

active attention to all communication from your publisher partners, whether it looks like a marketing email or a system notification. Rely on them to convey changes before they happen. Of course, this can become overwhelming very quickly due to the number of channels and platforms involved and the frequency of their product release cycles (and, sometimes, lack of transparency).



Never-Ending Change

2 | Many of the main publishers assign a client partnership lead to provide personalized recommendations and notifications. Use them. The more information you can share about your business, the more they can help. However, be aware that publisher-supplied recommendations may err on the side of larger budgets. Nothing wrong with that, but worth remembering.

3 | Create and support a properly staffed buying team, either internally or with an agency or another service partner. Keeping up an active survey of the social landscape takes time, which costs overhead, but the value of planning for changes – and recognizing opportunities in new targeting and ad units – can drive measurable impact on the business. It’s also the most effective way to reduce the amount of noise coming at you and help focus your social advertising efforts where they’ll deliver the best bang.

PROBLEM: SHIFTING NEEDS CLASH WITH PRE-SET BUDGETS.Unexpected changes are just the frosting on the cake. Different channels, different objectives, different placements require channel-specific strategies, creative development, and flexibility in copy. It all takes time – and costs money. Trouble is, annual budget plans made 18 months previously simply can’t keep up.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:Budgets for social advertising should stay very fluid to allow for testing, responsive post boosting, and jumping on sudden opportunities. And no one knows when the next big thing will come along, or how fast your customers will expect to see you there. Yet enterprise-level brands have existing annual budget planning and adjustment processes that are often incompatible with this level of flexibility.

SUGGESTED SOLUTION:1 | Procure your budgets at the highest, most

general level with which your company is comfortable. This will allow for a more easily

shifted budget (you probably refer to it as a “slush fund”) and can mean significant return on investment as each channel’s performance fluctuates, platform changes are introduced, and new publishers come to the fore.

PROBLEM: POINT-SOLUTION OVERLOAD.With endless opportunities for innovation, point solution technologies are sprouting up all the time. Once you factor in open APIs for customization, the benefits are tempting – until the unwieldy set-up comes crashing down.

WHY THIS IS A CHALLENGE:

The pace of innovation in social advertising is astonishing – and exciting. But like a kid in a candy store, it’s easy to get tempted by the latest shiny wrapper. For many marketers this takes the form of new “best in breed” point solution technologies that promise to generate a key analytic or crack the algorithm of a new hot property. Pile them up, though, and suddenly those “must-have” point solutions, each helpful enough individually, will give you a big tummy ache.

Budgets for social advertising should stay very fluid – no one knows when the next big thing will come along, or how fast your customers will expect to see you there.

Never-Ending Change

SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS:1 | Give service teams responsibility for

maximizing their own efficiency, including finding the right technology for the job. Building a process for efficiently recognizing new platforms or point solutions and their potential value to the business is paramount for continued growth and performance.

2 | Consider outsourcing this research and ongoing industry monitoring. Consultants who continually engage with the social media scene, and who understand the evolving needs of the buying teams, can survey the landscape on behalf of the brand and issue recommendations. This is a great alternative to an internal, bespoke process.

3 | Evaluate all stand-alone point solutions with skepticism. Weigh the impact each proposed solution will bring to your social advertising program against the incremental effort of learning, integrating, and paying for it – especially when other platforms already integrated have similar functionality and will be more beneficial for your brand in the long term.


Conclusion


Conclusion

Even the most sophisticated, purpose-built organizations agree that staying “on top of it all” in social advertising is nearly impossible, and the work of running and optimizing campaigns never really stops. But they almost all agree: it works. What’s more, we’re just witnessing the beginning. The advent of social advertising has brought with it many new challenges, pitfalls, and unknowns for today’s marketers, who are (of course) being asked to do more with less. It’s a truly challenging period. But for brands that can find ways to execute social advertising efficiently and effectively, this is a very exciting time to be alive.

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That’s why Sprinklr offers the world’s only enterprise SMMS Experience Cloud technology platform, purpose-built to help large brands create, manage, and optimize valuable social experiences that customers will love, across 20+ social channels and brand websites.

Unlike point solutions or disconnected cloud services, only an Experience Cloud allows brands to consistently deliver valuable customer experiences at every social touchpoint.

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• Helps enterprise brands connect with an exploding number of social customer touchpoints

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• Provides a complete, integrated, and collaborative set of social capabilities for managing social media, brand websites, content, paid advertising, and listening

• Enables employees of large brands to collaborate across silos in a secure and scalable way

• Integrates with and extends existing IT investments

• Is purpose-built to put the customer experience at the center of the enterprise, where it belongs

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comprehensive guide social advertising techniques for ......advertise on social platforms.1 and...

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