Is your social media strategy stuck in the year 2022, or worse yet, are you still using tactics from before 2020? What can your social media agency do to help you update your strategy or keep up with current advertising trends and get your campaign on track? The Future of Advertising panel at the Agorapulse Summit, which was held recently, dives deep into these topics, both from an agency and client perspective.
This article will cover the key takeaways of the panel, to help social media marketing professionals understand the state and future of advertising.
What are the biggest changes in digital advertising since 2020?
The Future of Advertising panel, led by Amanda Robinson of The Digital Gal shares its thoughts on the major developments in paid-social. The biggest changes for advertisers have been the mobile-first ads, video ads and personalization.
Consumer habits
Since 2020, attitudes and purchasing habits of consumers have changed dramatically. Online shopping and ecommerce grew, while online events replaced many in-person events.
Kristin Gallucci confirms, as senior manager for Strategic Marketing at Adobe: both brands and agencies are still adapting to these changes. Many wonder if the buying habits of brands and agencies have reached a new level of stability.
It’s vital to update your references if you are still using audience or advertising benchmarks from before 2020 to guide your campaign. Compare ad performance to recent periods, and examine your audience’s makeup and attitudes.
Social commerce
Katelyn Krulek, of Have Soul agency, explains how social commerce has grown significantly in the last few years. Platforms such as Instagram (below), TikTok, and others can guide shoppers’ shopping habits. They even let them check out without having to leave the app.
Social commerce is the future of advertising.
Social selling and social commerce are essential for agencies that work with ecommerce companies. Social selling is still relevant for B2B agencies. The platforms’ lead generation tools will help you achieve your advertising goals.
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC), while still having its place, has grown in popularity and effectiveness over the last few years. Kristin explains how UGC is a great alternative to large scale brand campaigns and can help increase customer engagement.
UGC: the future of advertising
The UGC tools on social media platforms are changing in response to an increasing demand for this kind of content. If you want to use UGC efficiently, ensure that your agency is aware of new developments such as Instagram’s partnership ad tools.
Media planning cycles
Before 2020, both agencies and brands planned their ad campaigns one year in advance. Kristin explains how in 2023 both parties will have to be more flexible when it comes to media planning.
Planning cycles are shorter as a result. Even global brands plan one month ahead rather than an entire year. This allows brands to monitor consumer attitudes and trends as well as review new technologies before making any commitments.
Optimizing and scaling
Agencies are now spending more time on testing and optimizing new technologies, in addition to reducing the planning cycle for clients. Amanda explains how the agency structure has completely changed.
The agencies can’t just take a road map for one client and use it on others. In order to maintain the results and determine what works, agencies are often forced to work exponentially harder. This can make scaling operations for agencies incredibly difficult.
How should social media agencies position themselves in 2023
Social media marketing agencies that master the above changes can also position themselves to succeed in 2023 by using the following ideas.
Innovation and creativity
Brands rely heavily on their agency partners for innovation and creativity, no matter how well-versed they are in advertising trends. They hire agencies for these reasons in many cases–especially when brands have small internal teams.
Kristin explains how her team at Adobe prioritizes working with agencies who are on the cutting edge of technology, innovation, and creativity. Her organization can take the lead on events by partnering with agencies that are at the forefront of technology and innovation.
Strategy over trends
However, trends and innovation shouldn’t interfere with the execution of strategy. Katelyn points to the fact that brands can benefit from embracing certain trends. In some cases, however, trends can lead to vanity metrics or temporary spikes of exposure instead of genuine or long-term outcomes.
Katelyn advises agencies to put the brand strategy at the forefront and assess whether trends are right for brands. By focusing on strategy, agencies are able to make a greater impact in the business and achieve more important goals for brands.
Metrics that Matter
Advertising campaigns produce many metrics. However, it’s not necessary to use them all. Amanda suggests ignoring vanity metrics such as impressions and follower counts and instead focusing on key performance indicators like return on investment.
Agorapulse helps you prove the ROI of your social media campaigns
By focusing on metrics that are important, agencies can assist clients in achieving their most important goals – especially those that matter to stakeholders. Amanda recommends being as specific as you can when reporting metrics. She suggests that, instead of reporting on clicks you should report on links clicked.
Transform data into takeaways
It’s easy for agencies to get carried away with the details. Kristin suggests that agencies should focus more on optimization, insights and analytics.
What would that look like for your agency? Translate the metrics you report on into key takeaways to help your clients understand what is happening with your campaign. Use those insights to optimize the campaigns of your clients.
Kristin clarifies clients want more action. Successful relationships are built by agencies that can explain to clients the campaign insights they need to achieve their end goal.
What Advertising Agencies are doing Wrong
Social media marketing agencies will have many options in 2023 to position themselves and provide real value to their clients. Nevertheless, some agencies still miss the mark. Avoid these mistakes to provide better customer service and secure longer contracts.
Not meeting KPIs
Kristin says that one of the worst things an agency could do is to fail to meet or surpass KPIs when working with clients. While neither party has control over the outcome of an advertising campaign, agencies have the ability to take steps that will improve performance.
Before launching a campaign, it is important to establish KPIs that are appropriate. Benchmarks from the industry and similar results of other clients at your agency can help you determine what KPIs are reasonable. It’s also important to look at the past results of your client’s ad campaigns.
Your agency’s team can identify underperforming ad units by closely monitoring ad campaigns. Meta’s Automated Rules, for example, can alert you when certain thresholds are reached and turn off ad sets automatically.
Skipping regular check-ins
Clients hire agencies for projects they cannot manage themselves, usually due to lack of resources or expertise. They expect their agencies to manage projects effectively, but that does not mean they expect them to be silent.
Kristin suggests that agencies maintain open lines of communication. Check-ins are often only done once every quarter by many agencies, which is not enough. Check in more often to better understand your clients’ needs and ensure that your team is meeting those needs.
Branding is not properly invested in
The same care that in-house marketing takes for a brand and its audience is not always expected from agencies. Katelyn suggests that agencies should find a way of integrating themselves into the brand in order to improve relationships and results.
In certain cases, this means that multiple members of the agency team are assigned to a brand account in order to give it sufficient attention. In some cases, this means that agency teams will only work with clients who fall into specific niches, making it easier to understand their brands, audiences and trends.
Should agencies embrace automation in advertising?
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation have revolutionized marketing and advertising. New tools and features are launched almost every day. Should your agency be using AI and automation technology for advertising?
Kristin explains how this type of advertising technology can in many cases help your agency to run more efficiently. Meta Advantage tools, for example, can be used to create Facebook and Instagram ads more efficiently.
Meta Advantage automates campaign creation in every stage of the process. You can select campaign-level features like shopping campaigns and app automation, or ad-set-level features like Advantage Placements for more efficient ad delivery.
You can optimize videos and images at the level of your ads using Advantage Creative. You can add music and call-outs automatically to your ads with this option.
It’s also important to keep in mind that using these tools will remove many of the customization options you would have had with manual campaign creation. Kristin suggests that you do extensive testing and research before using these tools to manage client campaigns and accounts.
Amanda warns against automating campaigns and communications, no matter how many AI or automation tools your agency chooses to use. Social media marketing requires a human touch. Agencies can differentiate themselves by finding the perfect balance between automation, personalization and AI.
Messenger Marketing: How Social Media Agencies can Leverage it
In 2023, the organic social media landscape will shift to sharing content in DMs instead of public feeds. Should brands use sponsored DMs as a way to reach out to prospects and customers in 2023? What can agencies do to anticipate and resolve potential issues?
Messenger marketing is a great way for brands to connect with their customers. It allows them to do so in an area that is usually reserved only for family and friends. Messenger marketing may not be the best fit for all brands or objectives.
Amanda suggests getting to know the client and their customers before adopting this channel. Do their customers use DMs? What questions or tasks would they like to accomplish in Messenger? These questions will help you to determine the best approach.
Kristin urges agencies to exercise caution when automating Messenger Marketing. Automated chatbots are great for simple questions and information that does not require much nuance.
Humans are better suited to answer more complex questions and inquiries that need personalized answers. In order to accommodate customers who want to speak to a person, agencies need to include an option in automated chat sequences.
While getting Messenger marketing just right can be difficult, it could pay off for agencies. Amanda urges agencies to use Messenger marketing and automated messaging as a way to stand out from the crowd.
How Agencies can Prepare for a Cookieless Future
You’ve probably noticed that tracking technology has changed dramatically in the last two years if you’ve even run a single social media ad. Amanda explains that Apple’s App tracking transparency (ATT) is often blamed for this shift.
Apple’s ATT, which will be launched in April 2021 on iPhones, allows users to opt-out of tracking across apps. Users who click on a Facebook advertisement and visit the advertiser’s website are able to opt out of being tracked while they browse.
Apple’s ATT was launched in early 2014, and initially presented significant challenges for reporting and attribution of results. Since 2021, advertisers have been able to use new tracking technologies that most advertising platforms offer.
Meta Events Manager, for example, allows agencies to create and prioritize conversions events for their clients. Meta’s new ad-tracking tools use modeled or aggregated data. This can cause a 72-hour delay in ad results.
In the future, agencies will need to include this three-day delay in their campaign planning and optimization process. In many cases agencies and clients should work together to report conversion data via the API.
First-party data is another option to improve reporting and attribution. Kristin suggests prioritizing data of this kind, and using tactics such as uploading customer lists to target customers.
The agencies that use Google Analytics to run campaigns should work with their clients to switch to Google Analytics 4 instead of Universal Analytics which will sunset on July 1, 2020.
Five ways agencies can get (and stay) ahead in advertising
How can social media agencies stand out from the competition? Here are some ideas from the Future of Advertising Panel.
1. Learn new analytical tools
On July 1, 2023, the transition from Universal Analytics GA4 will be completed. Brands will likely need help managing the transition for several months. Your agency will be able to help brands with any issues they may have and make sure that conversions are tracked and attributed correctly.
2. Discover new channels
You’re not alone if your agency only focuses on Facebook ads. Explore new channels and niches to differentiate your agency. Kristin suggests that you consider the metaverse (AR) and augmented reality. These two areas are growing rapidly and may provide new creative and advertising opportunities.
3. Reemerging tactics to be monitored
It’s possible to differentiate your agency by embracing new trends first. It’s important to also keep an eye out for tactics that have resurfaced after being in vogue.
Kristin, for example, recommends that marketers pay attention to QR codes. QR codes are now common on digital platforms such as Instagram, and have regained their popularity among print marketers.
4. Maintain brand integrity
Katelyn emphasizes that, in the face of rapidly changing consumer opinions and trends, it is more important than ever before for agencies to maintain brand integrity. Take steps to make sure that your work reflects the values and missions of clients.
5. When to Pause
It’s very easy to become carried away by trends, innovation, and the desire to stand out. Amanda suggests putting in place guardrails.
It’s important to stay on top of the changing sentiments in a fast-paced environment. You’ll then know when to stop ad campaigns, before they have negative effects.
The Future of Advertising: A Wrap-Up of What we Discussed
You’ve probably noticed the dramatic changes in digital advertising since early 2020. Your agency can provide more value to your clients, achieve better results and stay on top of the trends with the tips provided above.
Learn how Agorapulse helps you manage your social media successfully. Register for a demo today.
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