Spending on paid media continues to increase with social media advertising expected to reach almost $57 Billion in 2022 and over half of marketers surveyed saying they’ll increase their paid social budgets. In fact, some think market factors like third-party cookie deprecation will put paid social in the limelight as they will continue to allow you to match audiences and provide insights into your social ads performance within a platform.
But social media platforms are built around these “walled gardens” that only offer you platform-specific data and insights. Marketers have the opportunity to power social advertising with customer data from across all channels that can help you deliver more relevant messages and offers to customers so you can focus on the thing that matters most — building a trusted relationship with the customer.
With BlueConic’s advertising connections, pass multi-dimensional segments built on real time, first-party data from across all channels to all of your favorite paid channels – including social. Starting with higher quality data means fewer wasted impressions, increased conversions, and no more manual uploads.
The Future of Social Advertising is First-Party Data
Social media advertising has become a staple in the modern marketing mix. But these platforms are only as powerful as you make them and CDPs that focus on customer-centricity can get the job done. Re-orienting your starting point for targeting unified profiles allows you to:
Reduce wasted impressions and increase conversions
Leverage consented, first-party behavior data collected by BlueConic to build and send segments of customers who are most likely to convert to your ad platforms. Segments in BlueConic are both multi-dimensional and dynamic. You can build a segment based on any profile property in a profile, whether it’s a calculated score like CLV or RFM, behavioral property like intensity, or demographic information. Individuals move in and out segments based on their behaviors, transactions, and more with BlueConic’s real-time segments. As soon as a person no longer fits into the criteria, for instance, if a customer or prospect makes a purchase, they are removed from the segment so they are no longer targeted. You can even suppress recently engaged individuals from being exposed to your acquisition campaign ads or set caps on the number of engagements to prevent fatigue.
By targeting only those likely to convert and suppressing ads from those unlikely to convert, your ad dollars will go further.
One retail customer, for instance, uses RFM scores to split their audience into four quartiles – the bottom quartile being their least valuable customer and their top quartile being their best. To optimize ad spend, they create and target lookalike audiences in Google and Facebook based on their top three quartiles and suppress ads for audiences that look like their bottom quartile knowing they are unlikely to convert.
Reengage cart abandoners, site visitors, and inactive customers.
For CPG and retail brands, easily build a segment of individuals that started down the path to purchase, but failed to finish. Further segment by product type or interests. Push those segments to Facebook to target abandoners with compelling, product-specific offers to come back and complete the purchase.
For media and publishing brands, build a segment of individuals that have visited your sites to view content but failed to subscribe, then segment by interest data. Pass those segments to Facebook to target potential subscribers with irresistible, interest-specific offers to come back and subscribe.
A leading rental company improved their conversion rates using BlueConic’s Facebook Advertising connection to target “shopping cart abandoners” using Custom Audiences. They built a segment of individuals that started down the path to purchase but failed to complete the purchase. They pushed a segment of “shopping cart abandoners” to Facebook, which allowed the brand to specifically target those abandoners with compelling offers to come back and complete the purchase.
Furthermore, the shopping cart abandoners were also segmented by product to ensure the offer each individual received was related to his or her specific shopping interests.
Because BlueConic segments update in real time, as soon as an individual came back and completed the purchase, she was immediately removed from the abandoner segment so no additional impressions would be targeted to her.
Suppress targeting to customers who deny consent
Because BlueConic offers consent management as a standard feature of the platform, you can rest assured that you won’t accidentally target someone in a social campaign who has explicitly denied consent to be targeted. Given the requirements that companies like Facebook have in place, the ability to update Custom Audience lists as individuals provide or deny consent is critical to your advertising programs.
Never manually upload customer lists again
Connect to your social platforms once and watch the time savings stack up. Not only do you eliminate that frustrating manual process, but segments update automatically in real time, so you’re always passing the most up-to-date audiences for activation without having to rely on an analytics or IT team to pull segments for you. That translates to major time savings.
Build smarter lookalike audiences
Use those attributes collected from across systems and sources as the basis for look-alike models to find new customers. Take it to the next level by applying predictive models in our marketer-friendly AI Workbench with just a few clicks and no coding required. Knowing your lookalike audiences are modeled off first-party data that you trust is key.
Supercharge your social ad strategy with first-party data
Connecting your unified, first-party data to your social platforms can help you see all the performance improvements we mentioned above. Our UI allows you to set up each of these social platform connections in the exact same way – and in a manner of minutes. But how do these connections really work?
Advertising: Export robust segments or profile data to reach targeted audiences more effectively with digital advertising. This connection supports batch export (server-to-server custom audience sync) and real-time export (pixel implementation).
Leads: Import data from Facebook lead forms to enrich profiles in BlueConic and deliver timely, personalized follow-up messages.
Instagram: Instagram is coordinated through Facebook so anything you can do through those connections, you can do through Instagram.
LinkedIn: Export segments to reach matched audiences more effectively with digital advertising.
Snapchat: Enrich data from BlueConic to target Audience Segments on Snapchat.
TikTok: Enrich TikTok Ads Manager with data from BlueConic to create and sync custom audiences. BlueConic’s Tiktok Connection uses email and/or phone number to identify users from your site visitors to Tiktok users instead of the standard Mobile ID, meaning you can bring in offline and online audiences to Tiktok for retargeting.
Twitter: Export BlueConic profiles to create custom audiences for better targeting using Twitter Ads.
See more of our 100+ connections here.
Conclusion
With all the recent privacy changes taking place, it’s up to you to leverage your most powerful asset: first-party data. Only BlueConic can liberate your data to power effective social advertising campaigns.
Optimizing your social advertising is just one use case for a CDP. Download our CDP use case eBook to discover real-world examples that show how companies across industries accelerate business growth with BlueConic today.