As marketers evolve to an omnichannel approach, they may find themselves rethinking their individual channel strategies. For example, chasing the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) on each channel may actually limit total program performance. This is because each channel has different strengths to impact and influence consumers which get deprioritized as channel practitioners chase the ROAS row on their weekly reports. 

Channel-specific marketing practitioners limit their upper-funnel media because they historically show lower ROAS than bottom-funnel media. They’ve been trained to optimize to the highest ROAS as possible, so budget allocation starts with bottom-funnel media first, and then the rest goes to upper-funnel media. Even in cases where brands spend more on the upper funnel, budget prioritization begins at the bottom and builds up. But focusing on people who already know you can stunt growth. For a brand to thrive and grow in the long term, it needs a continuous commitment to feeding the funnel. 

Marketers who believe in the potential for omnichannel to revolutionize marketing have faith that a more integrated media plan maximizes each channel’s unique advantages across the customer journey. By orchestrating these channels correctly, they hope to drive more total marketing budget ROI than a siloed approach—even if individual channel ROAS suffers. 

Before the holiday rush, think about how your paid social program works best within the customer journey

Paid social is a unique channel in the marketer’s toolbox because of how good it is at the top of the funnel. While certainly solid at the bottom of the funnel—and social commerce is growing— paid social can reach people who haven’t been aware of a brand’s products or services. This feeds your funnel and is an important part of the marketing mix.

Paid social ability to push ads to users is in contrast to pull media channels such as paid search and search-triggered retail media that require a user to search within a search engine or retailer website to display ads. And communication channels like email, text messages, and chat need users to opt-in to reach them. With paid social, you can target audiences based on various interests, behaviors, and demographics without them having to search for you or opt-in.

Paid social is the ultimate upper/mid-funnel channel because it generates interest in people who may not have previously been interested in you. It also has engaging ad formats—video, carousels, collection ads—that can tell a story to hook users and get them on the journey to become your customers.

Knowing this…how might you think a bit differently about your final paid social Q4 strategy to be more connected and integrated into the entire media plan?

Omnichannel paid social budgets: Not getting enough searches on Google or online retailers? Fill the funnel with paid social to drive up that search volume. It doesn’t mean you have to spend 100% on awareness, but maybe a higher percentage goes to upper-funnel media. 

Omnichannel paid social bids: If you decide to leverage paid social for awareness driving, you’re looking for efficient eyeballs. Try a bid strategy that gets you the very lowest CPC or CPMs so that you get the most reach and scale for your budget. Use frequency capping to make sure you don’t waste too much money on the same people seeing your ads over and over.

Omnichannel paid social ads: Deciding that more of your paid social should be used for awareness provides a very clear path for the kinds of ads you should be using. While bottom-funnel ads are best with discounts & promotions, upper-funnel ones should be focused on storytelling. Leverage the host of powerful audio/visual ad formats that paid social offers to tell your story and create new customers.

Five Skai Q4 Tips for Paid Social Marketers

Having the right marketing platform is key for any time of the year, but Q4 is a different beast with aggressive timelines, higher conversion rates, and more ad clutter. Marketers need workflow efficiencies, time-saving tools, and performance-driving functionality to keep up with the rush.

The following are five ways Skai’s social marketing clients can use our platform to gain a competitive advantage this Q4. 

Skai Q4 Tips for Paid Social Marketers #1 –  Try creating lookalikes at each funnel stage

Lookalike targeting has become one of the most popular forms of audience segmentation for social advertisers. This is because social publishers have so much data on their users that they have become masters at grouping like-minded people based on customer lists provided by marketers. Use Skai’s Audience Manager to streamline audience creation, automate CRM refreshes, and analyze audience insights to optimize and scale your audiences across relevant platforms.

Take this tactic one step further this holiday season by building lookalike lists at every step of your funnel. For example, people who browse, cart abandoners, and purchasers. This way, you can better message those three groups to push them further down the funnel.

Skai Q4 Tips for Paid Social Marketers #2 –  Fight holiday ad fatigue

Advertising is not a static experience. To reach a specific audience on Meta or Instagram, you must give it time to learn what works. 

Skai’s Creative Manager makes it easier to change ads frequently and consistently, so feed readers of your Meta business page don’t automatically skip over your ads because they’ve seen them before. It’s also possible to use these tools to organize the order in which the stories about your brand are told. While maintaining ads that do not get tiring is crucial, making sure the information in these stories is presented in a logical order can help you create a campaign that reaches users with a clear message.

Skai Q4 Tips for Paid Social Marketers #3 –  Ad sequencing keeps social users engaged

Also, with Skai Social’s Creative Manager, you can organize visual assets into Albums and arrange the images and videos in order. The Builder has a drag-and-drop interface that will allow you to arrange the images and videos into a sequence. 

A performance goal can be set for each visual asset based on various metrics. If the goal is not met, the ad is paused, and a new image or video in the Album is used. This will continue until the goals are met or until the message is finished and paused.

Skai Q4 Tips for Paid Social Marketers #4  –  Let Skai notify you of critical issues and automate tasks

When you run social advertising, you don’t want to be surprised that your ads aren’t tracking or that you have the wrong creative in place. With Skai’s Automated Alerts, you can be notified when your ads are missing this tracking. This is important for your January post-holiday analysis and mid-flight optimization.

Skai’s Automated Actions can trigger changes to bids, budgets, statuses, etc. It can also send alerts based on weather conditions, performance trends, ROI changes, live TV airings, and much more!

Skai Q4 Tips for Paid Social Marketers #5 –  Know what customers think of you

It’s a constant challenge to stay on top of customer reactions to your creative—especially when you’re advertising on a large scale. But one of the unique aspects of social advertising is that marketers can quickly learn how their audience feels about their advertising based on likes, comments, shares, etc.

Skai’s Creative Sentiment tag solves this challenge by scoring each ad for positive or negative sentiment. Using powerful AI, Skai analyzes reactions and comments to your ads so you can make more informed decisions, improve your creative strategy, and protect your brand.

Skai helps paid social marketers win the omnichannel future

As part of Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform, our Paid Social solution has unique, best-in-class capabilities to automate, optimize, and scale your ads at an enterprise level. In a privacy-first world, Skai offers integrated solutions to reach consumers on all the platforms that matter and drive powerful growth no other independent social platforms can achieve. 

Client results include:

• 135% increase in Facebook leads for BYJU’s Future School
• 600% increase in Facebook leads for Inova
• 60% decrease in cost per conversion for Mercedes-Benz Vans Turkey

For more information about how Skai’s Paid Social solution can help you in Q4 and beyond, why not schedule a quick demo to see our cutting-edge social innovation firsthand?

We hope you enjoyed these Q4 tips for paid social. Happy Holidays!

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