New platforms, shifting budgets, and a possible move away from PPC: How the landscape is changing this year
Meet people where they are. That adage was true back in the days of Mad Men, and it’s even more true now as advertising budgets shift to respond to where users find themselves online. Social media advertising is primed and platforms are to dominate even more of the public’s time in 2020. Generation Z, especially, is spending a lot of time on video and music sharing site TikTok, and many experts are eyeing that platform for advertising spend.
How are you as an advertiser and marketer recognizing the increasing presence of social media in people’s lives? We spoke to six marketing experts and asked them this question. Read on for their responses:
How does social media advertising fit into your 2020 strategy versus traditional Google PPC ads? How do you see budget and effort shifting regarding Facebook ads, Twitter ads, YouTube and so on? What about newer platforms like TikTok?
Business Storytelling Tips
We are definitely in the paid era for social media, with organic reach declining.
Find the content that resonates with your audience and then target the right people further paid campaigns. I think they are an essential part.
Be aware to have goals so you know whether you’re counting reach or engagement or website clicks.
Regarding TikTok, I find that the most beneficial way for most brands to participate on this network is actually by running ads. That assumes that you’re trying to reach that audience, of course.
Growth Hackers
Social media advertising is a perfect complement to Google PPC ads. For AdWords, we target buyer-intent keywords where we direct visitors mostly to landing pages and sales pages. We install a Facebook pixel on the website to be able to retarget these visitors on Facebook. We will test multiple retargeting ads with lead nurturing content: blog posts, videos, e-books, etc. To make it simple, we use Google PPC ads for lead generation and sales while we use Facebook ads for retargeting and lead nurturing campaigns.
We don’t plan to use Twitter ads in the coming months. We believe that there are still too many bots on the platform and that the CPA (Cost per Acquisition) from Twitter ads is too high compared to platforms like Facebook ads, Instagram ads or YouTube ads.
We’re having a close look to the successful platform TikTok. As per now, we don’t have any plans to create content and build a community on this platform, but things might change in the coming weeks as we can see a huge opportunity there to target 12 to 25-year-olds.
Maria Johnsen
We advertise on platforms that help us generate leads and sales. Paid social media advertising such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube along with search marketing on Google ads work for us and our clients. We don’t waste our advertising budgets on Twitter. There are a lot of online fairytales about Twitter such as seeing growth, getting more users etc. This is not true. Twitter is losing users and revenue. The online statistics show Twitter’s 3Q in 2019 compared with its own history of earning in the past. While Facebook is making several billions of dollars per year, Twitter is struggling in keeping politicians happy. Because their main revenue comes from them.
People are leaving Twitter more than before. How would anybody want to advertise on a platform that:
- It is not user-friendly with dysfunctional AI algorithmic performance
- Promoting politics and giant entertainment and sports industries
- Censorship
People hate Twitter because they feel overloaded by it. You see SEO influencers between 25 to 50+ years of age are on Twitter 24/7 tweeting all kinds of stuff just because of showing off. When do they work on their clients’ websites? If they have any clients at all! They are addicted to Twitter!
They should ask themselves one simple question: how can they be useful when they are working for Twitter 24/7 free of charge and worrying about what people comment on their tweets at night before going to bed? Is this what they dreamed of when they were a kid?
Growing SEO companies aren’t on Twitter much. They have accounts with a couple of Tweets, but they don’t really use Twitter since they are super busy with their own clients. Being on Twitter whether for advertising or marketing is truly time consuming. If you don’t use it regularly Twitter shadowbans your account. As you see this is not a reliable social network to invest on.
The same goes for those who are proud of tweeting about artificial intelligence and rehashing second and third-hand data.
Companies don’t trust any social networks. Who would pay $200K for Twitter trend that disappears within 24 hours? Those who have extra funds to get media’s attention such as politicians, presidential candidates, and sports and entertainment industries.
We have been increasing awareness and trend in the entertainment industry so filmmakers don’t waste their film marketing budget on Twitter. Currently big film studios are mainly focused on the other social channels and video channels.
Social advertising and search marketing go hand in hand in advertising and we spent/spend our marketing budgets on both.
When it comes to TikTok, we don’t use it. It is unlikely to be the best option for B2B since over 50% of its users are between 16 to 24 years old. We don’t believe TikTok is a proper advertising channel as we are focused on different demographic and age groups.
TikTok can be used organically if a company wishes to increase their brand awareness like snapchat. However, we don’t recommend it to our clients. TikTok isn’t a great advertising opportunity for B2B and the other companies, either.
Instagram has become much easier than before. Thanks to the integration of AI in their system.
Pinterest is growing by 85%, because users find new products on Pinterest and the platform has become more user-friendly and functional compared to the past. We advertise our clients’ products and services and have seen some handsome growth and revenue.
Companies only believe in numbers that their statistics and accounting departments provide. Transparency is very important on social media and search engines, because it helps with increases in sales.
Jacob McMillen
Facebook advertising, unfortunately, remains the go-to platform in our niche (writing, marketing & freelancing education), so we plan to focus there primarily in 2020. While audience expansion isn’t what it used to be, it’s still the best place for retargeting ads.
We are also planning on spending some time experimenting with LinkedIn. You typically need an LTV closer to $10k to make LinkedIn a worthwhile target, but some friends of ours in the space have been having success advertising targeted blog content at a very low cost-per-click, so we’re going to be giving that a try as well by the end of Q1.
Twitter ads have always intrigued me, but nobody else I know in our space is seeing any success with them, and our limited forays haven’t returned anything either, so for the time being, it’s not a focus. And while I think there’s a lot to be gained from both Youtube and TikTok advertising, our brand’s current strength isn’t in visual media, and we don’t feel it’s as valuable to advertise in either space without some level of organic visual content to back up the ad spend.
Skipblast
I previously spent money monthly on Google ads, but am in the process of switching 100% to social media ads. These days, there is just too much noise in the the Google SERPs with all of Google’s featured snippets, product carousels, etc.
By focusing my ad spend on social media, I’m able to better hone in on my target audience and actually reach them where they hang out. As a result, my testing is showing both a better CTR and a better CPC for some of the social platforms compared to Google ads.
So far my best results are coming from Facebook ads, with my worst results coming from Pinterest ads. I do plan on expanding into other social media ads, primarily YouTube and Instagram, because both are great places to find my audience.
I suggest that any marketers who want to spend on ads first consider where they’ll have better reach to their audience – Google ads or the social platform where the audience gathers.
JB Online Marketing
As Facebook is still known and used by all our customers, we like to use the strength of that. Most clients don’t have a lot of patience and like to see quick results.
As SEO takes time, we added Facebook and Instagram ads to generate traffic a lot quicker while we keep working on their SEO. Mostly we create a lead magnet for them to promote on social media to get awareness, and of course traffic and leads. The new TikTok hype is not something we currently use. Mostly, our clients are a bit older and don’t have much going with this new hype. Although, when we need to target a younger population, I would definitely look in to using this.
We would love to know how you are shifting your social media strategy, leave a comment below or contact us today!
