Social media is an intertwined part of the majority of people's lives, so from a marketing perspective it offers unrivalled opportunities to leverage rich data sets and custom advertising solutions. It's also constantly evolving so 2019 will require a new approach to your social media strategy.
Ever since the rise of social media platforms in early 00’s, brands initially used social media to simply connect with audiences, however over the last decade, these channels developed and got more sophisticated. They now serve a wide range of different needs and advertising across social media has proven to drive very strong ROIs.
However organic reach of traditional brand social posts has declined massively over the last few years, and with more and more competition and fleeting attention there is more investment required from advertisers to deliver the same success through social media advertising. As such it is now more important than ever to have the right paid audience strategy to acquire new but also retain existing customers. All popular social media platforms are adopting their ad formats frequently to continue to deliver a good user experience but also turning interests into needs (i.e. Instagram launching the shoppable format back in March 2018).
As part of this audience first strategy it is also key to drive engagement with relevant creatives to compete for people’s attention on social media. 2019 will be visual first and there is a huge opportunity to be creative with your organic posts and turn the best performing ones into ads.
Also, we expect the consumption of video content grow in 2019, with some expecting 80% of all content we consume will be video.
Lastly it is important to work with your influencer strategy to close the social media advertising loop. And this all being focused on being customer centric.
Leike van Velthoven, Account Director, Infectious Media
This article is part of the IM programmatic trends 2019 series, read more here
