Internet is today the most important advertising medium in terms of global investment, having recently broken the long reign of television as the supreme advertising medium [1]. In this context, social media represents one of the main components of online advertising investment, surpassed in absolute value only by search.
What makes social media interesting?
Reach, precise targeting, speed of dissemination, and users' willingness to view and share content make social media advertising campaigns with over a billion impressions in a single day and a high degree of target market engagement possible (e.g. CatchDrogon).
Despite the drawbacks brought about by the proliferation of fake news, the efficiency of social media advertising remains high and the prospect is that it will grow even more. The potential control of fake news should reduce the volume of information presented to each consumer. Thus, the impact of each advertising campaign will tend to increase.
In that context, it seems logical for companies to develop specific social media strategies, often with a question like this as a starting point:
"How do I create a high-impact advertising campaign for my brand on Facebook?"
This approach seems to make even more sense when we consider that Facebook is an essential advertising tool, representing, together with the leader Google, more than 60% of global investment in digital advertising [2]. Social media is thus an almost mandatory component in the communication programme of most brands.
What's wrong with social media strategies?
When we say that social media is an essential advertising tool, the key word is "tool". To make an analogy, the hammer is an essential tool for a decoration project, but you don't start the project with the question:
"How to use a hammer efficiently to decorate a house?"
Social media is a tool, so it makes no sense to be the starting point of an advertising campaign or marketing strategy.
How to plan an advertising campaign?
The starting point of an advertising campaign and, in general, of any activity in marketing, should be insight into the customer. The fundamental objective of any company is to create value for the customer and to capture some of that value for the company. In this sense, advertising campaigns create value by providing information that influences customer behaviour.
A particularly effective way to gain insight into the customer is to map their decision process [3], analyse how the company's business model works in this process, and identify opportunities for improvement that can be addressed through an advertising campaign.
Starting from an opportunity identified through insight about the client, planning should sequentially follow the six elements of an advertising campaign: objective, audience, message, media, investment and impact. For an advertising campaign to be efficient, it is fundamental that it be consistent: each element must be built upon the previous one and all must be based on insight about the client.
Depending on the stage of the client's decision process identified as an opportunity, the objective of the advertising campaign can be, for example: awareness (increase the level of brand recognition), engagement (develop a relationship with current clients or increase the pool of potential clients), performance (generate conversions through direct client action).
This is then followed by the definition of the ideal audience to reach that goal and the message, i.e. the information that must be communicated for customers to act in the planned way. Only then is it possible to identify the ideal medium, or tool, for the campaign.
When is social media effective?
Social media tends to be efficient for advertising campaigns aimed at awareness and engagement, but not necessarily performance (in which case search tends to be more efficient).
The audience influences not only whether social media makes sense (does the target market use and trust social media?), but also which specific social media tool offers greater affinity with the target market (e.g. Snapchat users tend to be younger than Facebook users) and therefore greater efficiency.
The message of a successful social media advertising campaign tends to be related to a subject that users feel comfortable sharing openly, preferably having a positive reflection on how they are perceived by the community (e.g. how many people would share content about bad breath?).
Taking all these elements into account, it is then possible to decide whether social media is the ideal medium for a particular advertising campaign. Thus, social media is an essential tool for advertising campaigns, but never their starting point. The strategy should be made at the brand level and not at the level of each tool.
[1] Recode
[2] Statista
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