Presented by yellowHEAD
Newer social platforms are sexy, and the idea of gaining a new audience by targeting Snapchat or TikTok is compelling. But it means the old platforms get underserved. Consumers still spend a lot of time on the oldies like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, yet many brands won’t bother to craft new creative targeted to those audiences — just run the same ads they’re using on other platforms. But that one-size-fits-all approach means you’re losing your potential audience, says Noa Miller, marketing creative strategist at yellowHEAD.
“People are so bombarded with ads — in order to grab their attention, you have to be in the right place at the right time in the right state of mind,” she says. “When I’m on YouTube, I have a question. I want to watch reviews. I want to educate myself. When I’m on Facebook I’m there for the content. I’m reading articles. I’m seeing short clips. All sorts of different things. When I’m on Instagram I’m there for inspiration. I want to see pretty things, pretty people, creativity.”
For example, the enormous success of the show Bridgerton has folks across age cohorts consuming content around the show differently on every platform. On TikTok, you’ll find musicals inspired by the series; on YouTube you’ll see interviews with cast members. On Instagram, pictures from the set and from the show, or short clips of interviews. On Facebook you’ll find full articles about the show and what they’ve done.
Of course, ads are not the thing users are looking for when they visit those platforms. But if they’re made as native as possible, consistent with the way a user engages with that particular platform, users are more receptive to them, and actually enjoy them.
But to truly succeed with a multichannel strategy, you need to analyze where your audience is, what they require from each platform, and that requires data, Miller says. YellowHEAD’s proprietary creative analysis and ideation platform, Alison, identifies the unique elements of a creative and then analyzes the performance of each of these elements across channels to find what resonates with each audience.
“For example, if a client is running on Facebook and Instagram, I can see what ads and what elements perform best on each one of those platforms,” she says. “Did what they run on Instagram work better compared to what they ran on Facebook?”
The question is, if the same kind of audience exists on both of these platforms, why did it do great on Facebook and badly on Instagram?
Consider the feed on Facebook, and the three-second rule. The average person scrolls through 300 meters of mobile content a day – or the height of the Statue of Liberty. On the Facebook feed, a video ad starts autoplaying as a user scrolls over it and stops as soon as they scroll past. That means you need to catch that person’s attention almost immediately. How do you make someone lift their finger during those three seconds? On Instagram, most users watch stories with sound on. How can that element be used to make your ad instantaneously compelling?
When you open the TikTok app, it starts right off on a video with sound, which points to the importance of using sound and even sound-based concepts, which is something you shouldn’t create for Facebook. TikTok is significantly less serious, she says — it’s where you can be more creative about your brand, and push a lot of limits. Meanwhile, Snapchat is actually a camera company, rather than a real social platform. There you might include the camera, lenses, or filters in the creative.
“These newer platforms, if you understand the way they work, you’ll realize that any creative you do for Facebook or Instagram would never work,” she says. “They need a unique creative specifically for them and the way people consume on those platforms.”
The most critical element is starting with a strong concept, she adds.
“When you have a strong concept it can be translated in many different ways,” she says. “The concept needs to be simple, but have depth, so that you can translate it to different executions. It’s okay not to go for big productions. But you can always find a way to twist a little and make it fit.”
To learn more about what ads work on each platform, how data can help you optimize the performance of your creatives on every channel, and real-world examples of successfully adapted concepts, don’t miss this VB Live event.
You’ll learn:
- How to optimize your digital marketing strategy through creative optimization
- How to leverage user data to create content that really performs
- How to develop a successful creative strategy for all your social channels
- Best practices for creative on every platform
- How to incorporate influencer content into your assets
Speakers:
- Noa Miller, Marketing Creative Strategist, yellowHEAD
- Nicole M. Alexander, Professor of Marketing and Technology, New York University (NYU); Former SVP, Chief Innovation Expert, Ipsos (moderator)
More speakers to be announced soon!
