Social media ad campaigns are struggling to deliver on reach and affordability. A more balanced approach could save the day. 

“It’s part of a complete breakfast!” 

Growing up watching Saturday cartoons, that familiar tag seemed to play at the end of every cereal commercial. 

Lately, it’s exactly how I’ve been thinking about social media advertising when it comes to brand reach. Sure, social media can be an important component of a great strategy. But you may also need some fruit, protein, and dairy – ahem, display, connected TV, and email – for a balanced campaign. 

Social media initially offered something cookie-based, digital ad plays couldn’t: the ability to reach real people based on an insane number of attributes or behavioral characteristics. The business model supported just about any size budget and it could be far more effective than traditional channels. 

Google, Facebook and others like them built billion-dollar businesses on the backs of this disruptive play. 

But the times are quickly changing. In 2021, CPMs on social platforms were up a whopping 41% versus the year prior. Hardly affordable. What’s worse, consumers have grown savvy to ads in their feeds and are increasingly just glossing right over them. Not to mention the cries for many years now that social media reporting was full of faulty data. (You may remember Facebook finally throwing its hands up and completely discontinuing its analytics tool last year.)

What’s going on? The disruptors are being disrupted. Axios has gone so far as to declare the sunset of the social network as we know it. 

This means there’s never been a better time to reevaluate campaign strategies. 

Social’s advantage fading as PII data supports omnichannel powerplays

To be clear, we’re not anti-social. But as walled gardens grow higher, device makers like Apple play cat-and-mouse with their Big Tech brethren and costs soar, we do believe social strategies need to instead become part of an omnichannel approach. 

Personally identifiable information (PII)-based data is especially transformative on this front as it delivers the best of what social had to offer (precise targeting and high ROI) with the massive benefit of actually being able to see, retain and measure the data that is powering your campaigns. 

We know that people who use social are also using other mediums, be it email, the web, or connected TVs. Hitting consumers on multiple channels doesn’t just help expand your reach to more users, it helps increase your impact by surrounding customers with your message. The data speaks for itself:

• Lifetime customer values can be 30% higher for consumers who shop across multiple channels. (Zoominfo)
• Multi-channel customers spend 3-4x more than single-channel customers. (Wordstream)
• Ad recall almost doubles when consumers see ads on multiple devices. (Smart Insights)

Part of social’s success was how easy it made advertising. Upload your ad, choose your audience and go. 

We understand that omnichannel campaigns have much more of a learning curve and this has been a major hurdle for some brands to experiment with this approach. This is changing. Today, omnichannel campaigns can be bought as a managed service where experts like BRIDGE can analyze budgets, deploy messages across channels and then tune campaigns in real-time as results start to roll in. 

Importantly, PII data can be used on all channels (including popular social platforms), meaning you have control of the data. You know exactly who you’re reaching and can build on a solid foundation once campaign data becomes available. This is not possible when relying on data owned by social platforms alone. 

Controlling your own data means a better ability to measure campaign attribution and foot traffic, more purchase conversions, and a deeper understanding of which campaign elements were most powerful. This can be fed back into future campaigns for increased impact. 

We’ve seen omnichannel campaigns perform for customers time and again. In recent engagements, a niche clothing company acquired 100 new clients, an auto dealer achieved a 112% lift increase while selling 61 new cars, and a major pizza chain gained 3,400 in-store visits. 

What can omnichannel do for you? Give us a call and let’s find out.