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Not Your Everyday Strategy: Social Advertising Tips For CPG Brands

In 2016, consumer packaged goods and consumer products advertisers in the U.S. will spend $5.97 billion on digital marketing, an 18.2% increase over last year. And why not: market research company IRI reports that 76% of CPG shopping trips start online, and many consumers continue researching products and comparing prices on smartphones while in the shopping aisles. Consequently, brands are targeting 60% of their digital spend to mobile devices. 

An increasing part of this spend is on digital video, translating insights gleaned from television to the small screen. While companies in the sector won’t abandon TV any time soon, they are tapping into in-house and third-party data and taking advantage of digital video’s massive audience and extensive targeting capabilities to enhance their reach in the mobile environment. And what better way to reach mobile users than with social media, especially since 80% of social media time is spent on mobile devices?

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Brightcove surveyed 5,500 consumers across the UK, U.S., France, Germany and Australia and found that watching a video on social media influences 74% in their purchase decisions. Facebook now receives 8 billion video views per day, while Snapchat goes 2 billion better with 10 billion. 

The report found that nearly half (46%) of social media video viewers had made a purchase directly as a result of watching a branded video and 32% had considered making a purchase. 

As a company that runs scores of campaigns on every major social media platform, we have developed some recommendations to assure success:

Reach fragmented audiences cost-effectively and achieve scale.

      Plan campaign budgets on reach and frequency of a brand’s target audience, using a frequency level based on how much impact you want to achieve. Use Facebook’s Reach and Frequency tool to serve users a series of ads from start to finish, striving for at least one to two per week. This is where a brand’s personality can really shine with humor and character development, and try to be a part of pop culture conversations. Or tap into Placement Optimization to run ads across both Facebook and Instagram to boost reach and improve campaign performance while driving cost efficiencies.

      Optimize towards reach with highly impactful video on mobile.

      Allocate a portion of budgets to always-on content while allocating a majority of ad spend for new product launches, high-profile partnerships, and measurement studies.

Extend the reach of existing sponsorships or events and capitalize on real-time buzz.

      When activating around tentpole events like the Super Bowl or Grammys, focus on becoming part of the conversation or creating a moment in time that demonstrates brand personality and will keep people talking and interacting.

      Raise awareness and increase engagement for brand sponsorships and events using Twitter, a platform where brands can be cheekier and humorous to appeal to millennials. Providing real-time content will allow a brand to have an authentic voice shine through and connect with users. 

      Measure advertising effectiveness on Facebook with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR). This type of measurement allows audience size and impressions to be verified by a third party. Advertisers can also tap into Social Content Ratings, Nielsen’s solution for measuring aggregated conversations related to TV programs on Facebook and Twitter.

Reinforce brand messaging on TV with social ads.

      Run reach activity on Facebook alongside TV to drive incremental reach of core audiences. 85% of viewers who visit a social network while watching TV visit Facebook.

      Use TV targeting on Twitter in order to reach people on their second screen. People who use Twitter while watching a TV program are 62% more likely than people who aren’t on Twitter to recall brands that advertise.

      Snap Ads, which can be viewed similar to TV spots, offer a unique experience: brands can use the format to engage snapchatters with motion and sound through high-quality content. 

Digital video on social media is increasingly becoming a crucial part of advertisers’ marketing mixes. Initially, many CPG advertisers tried to repurpose their TV ads for online consumption, but have since learned that online video is an inherently different medium; namely that it is viewed in much shorter bits. Now that video is being customized for social distribution, brands can not only reach their primary audience, but also get the added bonus of earned media by having their content shared, thus driving down acquisition costs.

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