Shop Talk Podcast Episode 4: Navigating the Nuances of Paid Social Media
Navigating the Nuances of Paid Social Media is your essential audio guide through the shifting landscape of social media advertising. Doug Campbell and Senior Paid Social Manager October Newson step into strategies for engaging and converting audiences. Whether you’re fine-tuning your brand’s digital presence or seeking to harness the full potential of social ads you’ll get practical, actionable marketing wisdom.
“We’re definitely seeing that video is king [in paid social media]. The more animation, GIFs, movement in videos that you can have, we’re seeing the higher conversion rates and higher return on ad spend.”
October Newson, Senior Paid Social Media Manager, Colling Media
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Full ‘Shop Talk’ Podcast Transcript: Navigating the Nuances of Paid Social Media
Voice Over
Colling Media ‘Shop Talk’, the marketing podcast for Marketing Geeks, made by Marketing Geeks.
Doug
Hello, and thank you for joining us for another episode of Colling Media’s ‘Shop Talk’. I’m Doug Campbell, president of Colling Media, and joining me today is October Newson. She’s a Senior Paid Social Manager here at Colling Media. Thank you for joining us.
October
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Doug
Yeah. Yeah. I’m excited for this one too, actually, when I think about some of the topics we talk about here, whether it’s paid search or OTT or something like that, there’s often just one sort of thing at play, but paid social spans such a wide gamut. There are so many different platforms and, and tactics and channels and things that you can do in there. So I guess, let, let’s start there. What are some of the different advertising platforms that can count as paid social?
October
Yeah, it is a really vast landscape. And I would say arguably the largest platform is Meta, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera. But there are also emerging platforms like TikTok. There’s Snapchat, there’s LinkedIn, which is great for B2B. So there are many, many platforms that we can advertise on Pinterest, Reddit, the list goes on and on.
Doug
Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, the list goes on and on. I mean, at one point, even when Google was trying to figure out what the heck YouTube was, they claimed that it went from being the second largest search engine to being the second largest social media platform because it has likes and shares. Right? And there’s so many different interactions there. So with all these different platforms, you mentioned, you know, LinkedIn, good for B2B, are there, are there other ones that are good for specific types of customers or specific types of things?
October
Yeah, so really, each individual platform is gonna appeal to a different audience. So Meta is, again, probably the broadest breach. Most people have a Facebook or Instagram account, but there’s also TikTok and Snapchat for a younger demographic. And each person goes to these different platforms in a different mindset. So we really wanna keep that in mind when coming up with different campaigns and different initiatives for each platform.
Doug
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, right? I mean, you mentioned that they go there for different reasons, they’re doing different things. You can, you can picture how on Facebook you might just be scrolling through a feed and looking at family photos and, and you’re sort of just killing time. And you could also kill time by going to a link to another website, whereas something like TikTok, right? You’re there for entertainment, right? You’re there for the next video. Yeah. You’re not there for the exit out of the platform. And so that can have a real big impact, I imagine, on the different strategies. But I think it also can affect where in the customer journey we can reach people. How broadly across the customer journey can social media reach?
October
So really, the possibilities are endless. We can reach people at the top of the funnel with awareness and reach campaigns all the way down to the bottom of the funnel with conversion campaigns that direct people to a website to take a specific action.
Doug
Okay. So if I’m running a reach campaign on social media, what is that gonna look like? Like how am I, how can I target people? How would I measure that?
October
Yeah, so the targeting capabilities, again, are gonna be different on each platform. But we can get as niche as interest categories, age, gender, geos, and on specific platforms we can even target things like hashtag usage or creators that they’re following. There are also a lot of capabilities for different creatives on different platforms. So, for reach and frequency, for example, you might want to consider more branding initiatives. That’s gonna be just blown out to as many people as possible, so they’re gonna get more familiar with your brand, whereas with a conversion campaign, we wanna target people who are most likely to take that convert or most likely to take an action on that specific ad.
Doug
Sure. So that makes a lot of sense. And you sort of also hinted that there’s different creative and different messaging I would use at different spots. I imagine if I’m doing a brand awareness campaign and I’m just targeting geographically, right? Anybody who’s of a certain age and in a certain area, and I wanna show them a video or a display ad or whatever about my product and just let them know about my brand, whereas, I could also run campaigns that are more like website traffic campaigns, right? In that sort of demand phase, get ’em into the website, build that demand, build that interest in the product. And then the conversion tracking or conversion campaigns right at the bottom of the funnel where get that specific out of them.
October
That’s exactly, that’s exactly right. Yeah.
Doug
So I think it’s fantastic because it spans that entire gap. And I know we’ve used it in a lot of different ways, like even with offline conversion tracking, which we talked about in another episode of how we can take and track these things through a CRM and pass them back and even just track things that are and optimized for things that are happening offline where it’s not even just that online, they saw the ad or they went to my website, or they actually interacted or made a purchase, but we can actually track them through to something else that happened down the road.
October
Yes. And another really great usage for social media ads is lead generation so that we can get people’s information and reach out to them rather than them taking an action, on the website, for example.
Doug
Sure. And then we, if we plug that into a CRM and then we can track it back and say, Hey, that was a good lead, that was a not-so-great lead. Let’s get more of these and fewer of those.
October
That’s exactly right. There are many ways that we can optimize on these platforms as well.
Doug
Well, and the other thing that I think has been really interesting for me, and something I’d like us to dive into a little more is the growth of video. So obviously Facebook started and it was just pictures and words. Twitter was just words. And, now with Instagram and reels and a lot of it being TikTok, right? Video has really come to the forefront. Wanna talk more about the evolution of video on social?
October
Yeah, absolutely. We’re definitely seeing that video is king. The more animation GIFs movement in videos that you can have. We’re seeing higher conversion rates and higher returns on ad spend.
Doug
Yeah. And it’s such an interesting topic because when I think of video campaigns versus just a picture and some words, I immediately go to production cost, right? That sounds expensive, right? You need cameras, you need lights, you need scripts, you need storyboards. There’s so much that goes into producing like a traditional 30-second spot that you would run on television. But that doesn’t appear to be the case with social.
October
No, not at all. Actually, we’re seeing that the more native, the more organic, the more, kind of, you know, filmed on an iPhone, selfie-style videos, especially on platforms like TikTok. But even in reels on Instagram, we’re seeing that those actually perform better than the more highly produced, you know, spots that you would see on TV.
Doug
Yeah. And it feels kind of counterintuitive in the sense that I want a strong representation of my brand, and people like shiny things, right? If I put more into it, I’ll get more out of it. But you made the point of it feeling native, it feeling natural. And I think that’s such a key concept, right? We used to talk a lot about stopping the thumb, right? And you mentioned earlier motion and GIFs and video, for a long time it was like, just put eyeballs in in the ad, right? Yeah. Put an image, have a face, people will stop and look at faces. And now to interrupt their scrolling, that video, that motion, that’s what, that’s what draws them in. That’s what’s necessary in that moment, but there’s also a sense that people don’t want to be advertised to.
October
Absolutely.
Doug
And I think that’s what gives us that sense of that organic natural feel of the video that it matches what other creators are naturally doing on the platform. So you sort of sneak ’em, sneak attack a little bit.
October
Exactly. Yeah. That’s, that’s the plan. And to really have that call to action or, you know, something kind of stimulating that, that talks about your brand right up front, that kind of packs a punch, in that organic feel is really where you’re gonna see the most impact.
Doug
Sure. Yeah. And now I’m sort of curious, ’cause I know this is a topic we’ve discussed recently, with TikTok in particular, with the concept of Spark ads and it’s very similar to what we’ve seen on Facebook in the past with boosting of organic posts. But it sort of does a little bit of both, right? It’s paid organic, so it gets that natural feel. Can you tell us more about Spark Ads and what we’re seeing there? Yeah.
October
Spark ads are really amazing. It’s a way that you can communicate through influencers, through organic posting, but put a little bit of money behind it and drive that impact. So, user-generated content is great for Spark Ads where an influencer or a client of ours will post something organically and then they’ll send us a code and we can put money behind it, we can put targeting behind it, and we can really drive that organic video to have a lasting impact and to have a greater return on ad spend as well.
Doug
Got it. So what I think I’m hearing is social media can impact us all across the funnel, but you’ve gotta think a lot about the creative and what you’re trying to do at that moment. And these days it’s video. Yes. Right? But cost doesn’t have to be the prohibitive factor, right? We can go out there, we can grab an iPhone, we can shoot there, get that raw organic feel. and even if you don’t have an agency or a partner who’s helping you come up with what that 10- or 15-second ad looks like, you can just do what you’re normally doing on posting organically. right? And just tie some dollars to it. Right? You mentioned that it gives us the targeting capabilities and also brings the tracking into play. Right now I can track it just like a normal ad.
October
Exactly. Yep. There are so many capabilities you can have, across all of the different platforms with video. A video is really a way that you can pack a punch and, you know, get more information across, more content across than just an image and words.
Doug
So yeah, I think it’s so great. Like obviously there are lots of different platforms. We’ve talked about some targeting options, we’ve talked about some tracking options with offline conversion tracking and the importance of video. I did wanna circle back on one other topic that I’ve always found really intriguing within social, which is targeting not just first-party, but lookalikes. Can you talk a little more about what we can do with first-party audiences and lookalike audiences?
October
Yeah, absolutely. So, the capabilities with first-party audiences are really broad and vast. And one of the great things that we can do that you just touched on is lookalike audiences, which is we feed the algorithm a list, for example, a customer list of people who have taken a certain action, who fit a certain profile, and then we tell the platform to go find people who look similar, who have similar behaviors, as that list of people so that we can find lookalikes and, deliver our ads to those people who are more likely to take a certain action.
Doug
Yeah, I always think it’s such a great use of the machine-learning algorithms that are available to us. Obviously, you could take a list of your customers and just say, oh, it looks like they’re mostly guys, right? And, you can make a marketing hypothesis that we should be marketing more male-heavy or something like that. But there are other connections, right? There are things that you won’t see at the surface level that these algorithms will see, right? Oh, it turns out that they all like cats, right? You won’t know that from your customer list, but Meta will.
October
That’s right. Yeah. And that’s, that’s kind of a fun way, you know, people always say, oh, social media ads are following me, or they know exactly what I like, they know exactly what I’ve been thinking about or talking about. And we find that lookalike audiences really help us target those niche audiences that, as you said, we wouldn’t otherwise be able to target.
Doug
Wow. So we’ve covered a lot of ground here, so lemme see if I’ve got this right. There are a whole lot of different social media platforms that not only have different audiences depending on who you’re talking to, whether B2B or B2C, they’re going there for different reasons, so we’ve gotta think about them differently and talk to them differently. There are really cool targeting and tracking capabilities so that we can really make sure that we’re being super efficient with all this. Video is massively important, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
October
That’s correct.
Doug
That’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you as well for listening in.
October
It was my pleasure. Thank you.
Doug
Yeah. For October Newson and the entire team here at Colling Media, I’m Doug Campbell.
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