Activating paid social and display channels best practices

From a strategic perspective, Paid social and display channels have the potential to reach a broad range of audiences and also the ability to target users at very early stages of their life cycle. Given this particular aspect, these will be very effective on helping us generating awareness and consideration or in other words generating demand.

Considering that your goals are generating demand and reaching out to new audiences, I will be doing an overview about the process you can follow to activate display and paid social channels.

Key aspects of a demand generation campaign

When running any marketing activity we should always have the customer at the heart of our strategy, if we are planning on using paid social and display channels to reach out to our target audience there are 2 main aspects to have in consideration:

• Messaging: This being the content/messaging, including imagery and copy that is used to communicate.
• Audience targeting: Understanding this as the ways we can use different platforms to segment users and target them.

To run a successful marketing campaign we have to make sure both are well defined. There are methods that will help us do this, being the most common identifying personas and drawing a value map.

Identifying personas and value map

When it comes to messaging and targeting, insights will be the key to develop our strategy. These can be gathered from our target audience through interviews, surveys, reports from market research.

The basis of these insights will be to inform us about the socio demographic attributes and different dimensions such as interests, frictions and needs of the individuals that are target of our campaign.

These personas can be segments or groups of people with similar traits, we will use these personas as a way to standardize the way we refer to them.

Ideally, we will be able to identify those that are of higher value or decision makers of the purchase of our product or service from influencers or users. Depending on the circumstances we might have to strategize based on just a decision maker or in a group or committee and what roles they play.

We will need to keep the balance between identifying segments that are too generic or too specific, so that we can assure that we will be able to target them.

Let’s use an example from an online B2B software company that is trying to sell a hosting service, based on our objectives and investigation, we have identified that we need to collect leads from small and medium sized business.

Based on our research we have identified different target audiences or segments that we could potentially reach out to:

• IT manager
• Entrepreneur
• Web Developer

Each one of these has specific interests, behaviours, motivations and frictions with regards the use of our products and services. We should map them out to understand well what they look. Two key elements of this persona definition are identifying interests and behaviours.

Let’s start using the example of a web developer. He is a tech savvy IT professional. He has been building some websites for SMB’s and his business is growing, he had started with cheap solution as he had very small clients. After some time working with a provider he has realised he has some needs based on:

• Motivations: The business is growing and it is crucial to be able to scale the hosting solution, he is interested in focusing more on the website development than on the hosting and is looking for a easy to use solution.

• Friction: His current provider is not offering him a scalable solution. His current provider has a bad customer service, his current provider has no reseller solutions.

Once we have identified these we can use them and match them to our product offering. The product team should come up with innovative solutions that will cover the pains and gains.

Developing a messaging framework and testing it

We will use this value map to develop a messaging framework that can be used to target and attract this kind of persona. We will test different messaging and imagery to learn and understand what works and what doesn’t.

We would usually do this working with a creative agency that we can brief with:

• Market context – competitor examples
• Objectives: Awareness, consideration, conversion. This is an example of a lead generation campaign.
• Media channels where this campaign will be announced.
• Target audience (persona definition)
• Insights (motivations / frictions)
• Detailed information about the user journey (in this case it’s a lead generation campaign, so users will see a banner, will be directed to a landing page and a form to be completed and a lead captured).

Based on this information the creative agency should respond to the brief with different creative concepts will be provided in the right formats ready to be tested.

From a media perspective we would be looking at the brief to evaluate:

What channels and media partners we will use to activate this campaign

To identify what channels are the most effective, we will use our knowledge about our target audience, it’s behaviour and interests and will leverage media partner data to identify the most effective channels to reach out. We should not forget what are the objective of the campaign and the budget we have available, based on this we will make a channel selection. Some examples of display and paid social channels we could choose are:

• Facebook
• Google display network
• Video (Youtube)
• Linkedin
• Affiliates/partnerships

Other platforms can be tested, this should be prioritised based on our objectives. If you need more guidance on how to prioritise your channel activation efforts, refer to this article for guidance.

We can further develop our targeting plan in each platform by identifying audience targeting . Each platform will have specific targeting options such as:

• Behaviour
• Socio demographic
• Contentextual
• Custom segments (industry, interests, other)

We have advanced ways of targeting users that are becoming the norm these days and are using broader sets of data integrated between media partners and advertisers. Examples of this are:

• Retargeting: Targeting segments of users that have been to your websites
• Lookalikes: Based on segments of users that are valuable, media partners can identify looking at many data points similar ones that will match the profile.
• Customer match: Based on lists of existing customers, these can be targeted through specific media platforms such as Google, Facebook or Linkedin. We can use this type of targeting to reach to the customer through the whole lifecycle.

This last targeting options will require segmentation of existing customer data and integration with media partners. It might take some time to collect and there are minimum user thresholds to be met in order to activate, but if we can do this we will notice that we can achieve much higher performance.

Some online media partners will offer the possibility to target users with very specific segmentation, example of this is LinkedIn, where we can use criteria such as: job title or industry.

Further details can be planned with the definition of the formats that we want to use, some interesting and very effective are Facebook lead ads and Linkedin lead ads.

So we’ve got to the point where we have identified the channels and ad formats that we want to use and we have the creatives ready provided by the agency.

The next step is to set up the campaign with the creatives and target audience we want to test. We will define the budget we want to associate with it.

Activation and measurement of a display and paid social campaign

If we are just activating a channel, we will be measuring its effectiveness in terms of incrementality, meaning that we will measure how effective this is in supporting us reaching our goal. If we have already run a channel and proven its effectiveness, we can also run this as a test.

Measurement methodology is key in any performance marketing activity but it is slightly more complex for display and paid social activity that it can be for other channels such as paid search, specially if we are using it as a mean to generate demand and reach out to new audiences. If this is the case, we will have to look at attribution models that go beyond last click attribution. If you are interested in knowing more about this read my article about measurement and attribution.

Other ways to measure the effectiveness of the channel are looking at incrementality.

Optimisation of paid social and display channels

• Plan ahead: Display and paid social channels require strategy and planning and are mostly used as a way to run campaigns in specific periods of time, understand your customer and any cycles or seasonality that can influence it’s behaviour. Plan ahead to have your campaigns ready and on time to maximize effectiveness.

• Maximize always on opportunities: There is one instance where we can run display and paid social as an always on channel, this is for retargeting purposes.

• Test and learn: Whenever we’re running a campaign it will always help to be able to test different hypothesis, this will help us increase our learning opportunities. A way to optimise and improve the performance of this channel is by setting up creative and audience targeting tests.

• Integrate additional sources of data and programmatic: integrate 1st, second and third party data that will enrich your abilities to create segments that will help you be more effective targeting audiences. Examples of first party data can be: CRM data or website data (retargeting lists), second party data can be considered data from partners such as other business in the same group. Third party data refers to data from external sources, there are businesses which focus on this alone and will sell it’s data sets to be integrated through a DMP. Example of this can be Bluekai or Merkle. Data can also be used to activate programmatic advertising and personalization, where you use additional data points to taylor the messaging and delivering the right message to the right user at the right time.

• Bids and frequency: Optimising your CPC’s and finding the right frequency can be optimised over time, making sure you find what is the combination that drives the best results for your campaign.

• Measurement from different angles: Display and paid social are channels that can look a bit challenging to keep up for the small business, most of the benefits will be perceived in the long run contributing to your brand awareness. Think about looking at different measurement frameworks that will provide more insights about the impact of your campaigns over time.

With all this information you should now be ready to start planning your display and paid social campaigns. Let me know what are the best results you are achieving with your creative and targeting in the comments below.