Take a minute to ask yourself, what is the state of digital advertising industry? If you are a marketing professional, it is easy to slip into autopilot and answer something along the lines of, “The digital landscape is stronger today than ever. With growing technological capabilities and decreasing costs on digital channels, there seem to be few signs of slowing down.”
While this is very true, let’s try to answer that same question from a different point of view…the view of the customer. Everything in the marketing world revolves around the end consumer. Keeping in mind end consumers are a critical part of any marketing equation, I am going to weigh-in on their perspective and say an alarming percentage would voice an opinion the advertising industry is in a bad state. Facebook’s waged war against AdBlock Plus is only the most recent piece of news in the saga of ad blocking technologies becoming more prevalent across digital platforms.
Ad blockers are on the rise because consumers are supporting and demanding them. This boils down to people being so unhappy with digital advertising and the ads that bombard their online experiences they are actively seeking out ways to avoid seeing them altogether.
And who could blame them?
With the growth of this industry, a swarm of low class of publishers have emerged with little in the way of quality content yet an overdose of bottom-feeding ad experiences. In turn, there is a growth of advertisers who take advantage of the space to deliver spam, manipulating ads and poor user experiences. While platforms such as Facebook have taken it into their own hands to weed out these type of advertisements by implementing certain ad standards, we at Just Media see this as an opportunity to continue pushing for better connected experiences within digital campaigns. When it comes down to it, 1.71 billion people worldwide use Facebook and about 66% of those users are active on a daily basis. We strongly believe that Facebook is a platform worth advertising on just as long as you have the right strategy and follow best practices going into it.
- Focus on Better Targeting: Facebook offers a wide variety of targeting options including demographics, interests, behaviors, and lookalike and retargeting tactics that marketers should take full advantage of. Utilize FB Audience Insights to dig deeper into your custom audiences and fan page followers and to understand who is exactly is viewing, engaging with, clicking on and converting from your ads.
- Start Realizing the Importance of your Creative: 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Since the Facebook newsfeed is already cluttered with images, articles and videos, your ad creative needs to be visually appealing if you aim to grab a user’s attention. Creating images for paid social doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. All it takes is a bit of creativity to tap into certain emotions we want intended users to feel as a result of viewing ads.
- Adjust Messaging According to Market Segments: A segmentation as simple as age breakouts can make an impactful difference within a campaign. Social media users have unique identities and want to be treated as such rather than lumped into broad, antiquated personas. Be sure to use messaging that addresses these unique attributes so your ad resonates with and intrigues the targeted user to take further action.
So what kind of state is the digital advertising industry currently in? An evolving state. The future of digital marketing relies on constructing better connected experiences within digital channels and social will be an instrumental part of this mix.
T E R R A B A Y K A L
Paid Social Media Manager
Sources:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-will-force-advertising-on-ad-blocking-users-1470751204
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebooks-key-conquering-world-beating-ad-blockers-173278
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-dau/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33319/10-Examples-of-Facebook-Ads-That-Actually-Work-And-Why.aspx#sm.00001v2k4ahowee7t10yu3u5ous77
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/smt-influencer/5-ways-inspire-imagination-through-simple-visual-storytelling
