Why Social Ads Work

Around half of all CMOs are investing in social: between 49% and 57% of CMO’s marketing budgets involved a spend on social ads in 2017, according to Deloitte Digital. And social media advertising investments are set to increase, with a predicted compound annual growth rate of 17% from 2016 to 2021.

Why are social ads so great to invest in? Let’s find out.

People Spend 75% Of Their Time On Either Facebook or Google

You can’t get away from it: social is widely used, meaning they work for most businesses. So many, in fact, that you’re the exception if they don’t work for you. These platforms increase the likelihood of getting clicks, conversions and revenue for your business and your clients.

Prospects Who Click On Your Search And Social Ads Are More Likely To Buy

According to a research made by Marin Software, users who click on both your search and social ads are 2x more likely to convert than users who just click on your search ads. This same research showed that the figures are even better for social; users who click on both a search and a social ad may have a click-through rate approximately four and a half times higher than users who only click social ads.

Prospects Who Click Your Search And Social Ads Spend More

The research uncovers useful findings: getting attention on both means the prospect or customer will spend approximately twice as much as those who only click on your search ads. Multi-channel touchpoints boost this even further. This type of user also contributed six times more revenue per click than those who only click a social ad, according to the Internet Bureau of Advertising (AIB).

They’re Powered By Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI can meet prospect and customer desires with the exact information, product, and service they need, at the right time. And this year, we are going to be able to truly benefit, as social media platforms like Facebook roll out new predictive analytics to help us find insights faster, and leverage its enormous data resources on its users to uncover hidden patterns, inform content creation, advertising targeting and marketing strategy. This will give users information that is tailored and customized in a way that has never been seen before.

Boosting Search & Satisfying Desires

For example, when a user searches for restaurants in your city, AI will reveal personalized matches for them based on their past searches, browser history, mobile app usage, Facebook likes, Facebook check-ins, groups, and prior reservations. As these points intersect and unleash a wealth of information about the user’s desires, preferences, and behaviors, as well as provide recommendations specifically for that user, a potentially motivated prospect or customer is born.

As AdWeek contributor Abdul Muhammad puts it, “…consumers want brands that assert themselves into that human desire. Those that do so through the combination of Facebook and machine learning will be successful and grant the opportunity to connect and communicate with other people at the precise time they need, with custom content they are likely to care about.”

More Specificity Than Ever Before

Brands must personalize through data, and Facebook has positioned itself as the platform marketers can use to empower consumers through providing content that is specific to their needs and interests, increasing conversions and decreasing budget waste. 

AI also makes social ads work because it can be used to detect which products a user searches for, pull data on when they make purchases, and let marketers know when they can hit a user at a likely purchase time. Facebook does this particularly well, using AI and machine learning to map out and skillfully intervene during the customer life journey, so your conversions go up.

Improving Experiences & Resource Management

Facebook probably knows more about your prospects than their closest friends and family. It can leverage this data to automatically deploy content for a brand to create completely unique customer experiences, then show ads that fit your prospect or your client’s prospect perfectly.

Facebook chat boxes work to maximize efficiency too, as they better manage communities. ML can dramatically decrease the manual resources that used to be needed to manage and optimize campaigns, as well as increase return on investment.

This efficiency also applies to content creation, as Facebook’s deep data pool can detect whether users prefer videos, images or written content thanks to behavioral pattern analysis and deliver content through the preferred vehicle, increasing purchase likelihood.

What does this mean for media buyers or agencies? It means more time and money to invest in creating the actual content, and fewer resources spent on the process. AI has the procedure covered, lowering cost and campaign micromanagement.

Less Risk

At the most fundamental level, AI is every innovator’s greatest ally. It can help companies turn market challenges into market opportunities, innovate and explore new channels and initiatives, without sacrificing current successful strategy.

AI reduces the risk of making leaps to new market paradigms by reducing the need to reassign expensive business talent to large initiatives, or simply test new business or product ideas and grow them if they show promise.

It allows for continual and speedy data inputs about customers on how they interact with a brand and what expectations they have. Analysis of, and adjustments to, initiatives can be performed quickly and at scale. That means you can capitalize on success more quickly. 

Scale

This is one benefit of social ads and an important reason why they work. Social advertising allows you to scale in a virtually unlimited way. You don’t have to wait for a prospect or customer to search for your keywords or read your blog. And you can reach 50,000 people tomorrow if you so desire.

For most businesses, that is a very exciting prospect: flexibility, scale, and control of your budget, so you can effectively manage costs.

Social Ads = Omnichannel

Social ads often also work because they are skillfully used as part of an omnichannel approach. It’s unusual to see a company on just one social platform, particularly initially.

With aligned messaging, campaign objectives and data across channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Google AdWords Search, Display and Remarketing, the unified search and social strategy approach can do wonders.

Adext AI, the world’s first and only audience management platform that is exclusively focused on omnichannel, reduces Cost Per Action (CPA, AKA Cost Per Conversion) and increases ad conversion performance by finding the best converting audience for any ad. In average it has increased ad efficiency by 83% as it makes around 480 daily adjustments for every ad over 20 demographic groups.

If you’d like to find out more about how Adext harnesses AI and ML to provide better results than any other tool, software or expert, this guide is for you.

Which Social Is The Best Social

Social Media Examiner claims that 95% of millennials expect to be able to engage with brands via Facebook. Remember, that now means prospects and customers from age 18 to 35, many of whom may be in managerial positions and have plenty of disposable income to invest in your product or service, or in your clients’ products, in case you’re an Agency.

And a recent survey found that 42% of brand marketers say Facebook is critical to their day-to-day business.

But, for your omnichannel approach, eMarketer suggests that Instagram may also be worth consideration, with the expectation of almost 47% of all social network users to be on Instagram by 2020.

Though Facebook and Google are the strongest contenders, challengers such as Pinterest and Twitter with baked in ad features may become stronger contenders worthy of adding to the stack in the future, though just 21% of marketers are planning to increase their investments in the two platforms any time soon, according to WSI Worldwide Network. 

Want a hands-off tool that can help you make social ads work better for you than any of your competitors? Adext AI can guarantee it, or the service will be free and no management or optimization fees will be charged.

You can connect this AdTech Artificial Intelligence to your Facebook and Google Ads today through a quick 5-minute set-up process as explained in this step by step guide (oh! and by the way, we’re offering a free trial only for a limited time). 

Here are other related articles you may want to read:

•  How You Can Leverage AdTech AI To Discover The Ideal Creative-Audience Matches For Your AdWords and Facebook Ads
• Expert Tips To Improve Your AdWords and Facebook Ads Copy And Images
• How To Make Your Facebook Ads, AdWords Campaigns More Creative With Artificial Intelligence