11 Mar New Social Media Advertising Opportunities Outside of Facebook
In this day and age, advertising on social media is practically a must if you want your target audience to see your brand message. With just under $24 billion in ad revenue in 2018, Facebook seems to be the basket that marketers have chosen to place all their eggs. However, it’s critical for marketers to explore new social media advertising opportunities to reach new audiences and diversify their paid media mix.
If you are wondering where to spend your ad dollars outside of Facebook, look no further. We’ve broken down a few key ad units on different platforms that just might be the right fit for your brand.
LinkedIn Dynamic Ads
Best for: LinkedIn Dynamic ads are designed to build awareness and consideration among prospects.
How they work: Using data that’s already available on users’ public profiles, this ad format will automatically populate with each individual’s profile data, giving them an ad experience that feels much more personalized. When you create a Dynamic Ad on LinkedIn, there are various formats you can choose from, with objectives ranging from brand awareness to conversions to lead generation.
Throughout your ad campaign, you’ll have access to reporting metrics to help you measure and optimize your results, and you can install an insight tag on your website to get conversion data using LinkedIn Conversion Tracking.
Snapchat Location Ads
Best for: These ads are meant to help drive in-store traffic to specific retail locations.
How they work: Snapchat recently rolled out new ad tools that focus on location-based advertising, using users’ shared location data to serve them relevant ads. The Location Category filter allows advertisers to target audiences based on different types of locations. For example, a car brand could target users within a certain distance around dealerships. Another new location-based tool, radius-targeting, lets marketers target audiences based on a specific address or latitude/longitude pair. During beta tests, one retail brand leveraged radius-targeting to help drive foot traffic to a new store opening.
Snapchat continues to hone in on its location-based advertising capabilities as a key differentiator. If your brand has various brick-and-mortar locations, it may be worth investing in Snapchat Location Ads.
Pinterest Promoted Videos at Max Width
Best for: Promoted videos at max width are a fairly new ad format meant to help drive awareness with mobile-first content
How they work: While the vast majority of Pinterest content falls into one of two columns within a user’s feed, promoted video at max width takes up the entire width of an individual’s screen. This extra space is precious real estate for brands at roughly 4x the size of standard-width videos.
We know that video content is here to stay, so this ad format provides marketers with a great opportunity to leverage that content type to engage users. If promoted video at max width interests you, check out some of our best practices before getting started.
When it comes to advertising on social media, it’s important to have a diverse media mix that reaches your audience through a variety of mediums. While Facebook brings a lot of value in terms of variety, reach, and overall paid media capabilities, other social media platforms also offer advertising opportunities that may be a great fit for your brand. If you need some help discerning where to allocate your paid media dollars, see how we can help.
