Emerging Social Platforms: Advertising Beyond Facebook

When marketers think of social media, they often default to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Although these platforms are important, there are other emerging platforms that may be a better fit for your target audiences. TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and Tumblr are five high potential emerging social platforms to consider in your marketing channel strategy.

TikTok Advertising

This is a key social media platform for creating, sharing, and discovering short-form videos. TikTok gained over 1 billion users since its launch in 2016 and is among the top ten most used platforms today. Despite its massive popularity, many marketers are uncertain on how to engage with its unique audience and format. TikTok is important to consider for its incredible algorithm and mass exposure opportunities.

Unlike other platforms, content is shown to users by a curated, algorithmic system known as the ‘For You’ Page. The ‘For You’ page generates a continuous feed of primarily organic content blended with sponsored content. This element grants every video the opportunity to go viral. This is beneficial for small businesses looking for low-cost awareness and for larger businesses wanting to maximize engagement. Our post The Do’s and Don’ts of TikTok Advertising offers greater insights on building effective advertising campaigns on TikTok.

Snapchat Advertising

Snapchat is a mobile messaging platform to share photos, messages and videos. Unlike most platforms, Snapchat uses disappearing content. Users connect with others by expressing themselves and living in the moment, and marketers should to do the same.

Snapchat ads are essential for brand engagement. Advertisements show up between friends’ stories and people can easily swipe up to interact. According to insider data, 319 million people use Snapchat every day and 75% of Snapchat users are Millennials or Gen Z. Snapchat ads are extremely successful for ecommerce brands as fashion, novelty items, and impulse purchases perform well. However, advertisers in all industries can find success by delivering authentic content that makes users feel connected with your brand.

Reddit Advertising

Reddit is a social news website and forum where users participate in discussion and rate content. As of 2021, the platform has over 430 million monthly active users and 130,000 active communities. The interface consists of subreddits about topics where users have the opportunity to engage in valuable conversation. Marketers can leverage the platform to reach niche audiences in these specific interest groups. Some popular subreddits to consider for your marketing strategies include college admission, agriculture, health & wellness, telecommunications, or public health. For more in-depth tips on reaching niche audiences on Reddit, check out Advertising on Reddit: Reach Your Niche Audience

It is important to consider users’ hesitancy toward having branded content in the Reddit environment. Users dislike overly promotional language and are likely to skip over it. Content with a UGC creative feel is extremely beneficial. Users are more likely to engage with content specific to the community. 

Pinterest Advertising

Pinterest is a social media platform for sharing visual content, discovering new interests, and deep diving into passions. With over 431 million monthly users, the platform allows users to share posts, also known as “pins,” with other users and find communities with similar tastes.

Although over 60% of their users are female, Pinterest appeals to an increasingly diverse audience. Male and Gen Z user categories are gaining traction with 40% year over year growth. These users have strong purchase power with 45% having a household income over $100K. Users treat the platform as a source for inspiration; therefore, creative and innovative posts tend to have high performance. Promoted posts are part of the expected user experience. This makes Pinterest a great place to drive conversions with shoppable ads, while initiating brand awareness among key interest groups. 

Tumblr Advertising

Tumblr is a microblogging platform where users can post multimedia content. It is extremely versatile with media formats including text, photo, link, chat, audio and video. Although the platform peaked in popularity in 2014, it is still ranked among the top fifteen social media platforms with over 500 million active users. Tumblr presents many unique advantages for brands. For example, Sponsored Posts are useful ads visible to users through their dashboards. They blend in with organic content and are strongly welcomed with Tumblr creators. In fact, 70% of consumers perceive a brand more favorably after seeing a Sponsored Post and over 50% research the sponsor afterward.

The platform skews slightly younger with Gen Z accounting for over 61% of new Tumblr users and 48% of active users. Ads with comedic, dramatic or informational tones typically perform best on the platform. Brands looking to resonate with these users should strategically consider their creative messaging to align with these audience preferences. 

Choosing Your Best Paid Social Media Channels

As you are considering social tactics, consider these emerging social platforms and the opportunity they can provide. Many of these channels are well established, however much of their advertising capabilities are largely untapped. This means you can capitalize on whitespace where your brand can cut through the noise and reach enthusiastic audiences. When selecting which emerging social platforms to leverage, be sure to consider the campaign objective and if the platform aligns with your goals. 

Additionally, it’s critical to have a holistic understanding of the audience demographics and their sentiment around ads on the platform. Ensure your creative strategy results in a positive experience that drives results and increases learnings. If you want to stay up to date with the newest trends on social media, be sure to check out Nine Easy Ways to Stay Up to Date Social Media.

How to Drive Job Applicants for Healthcare Recruiting Campaigns

The Brief

A hospital client tasked Coegi with developing a digital healthcare recruiting campaign to drive interest and qualified website traffic for open job positions. Using a combination of social and display tactics, we were able to generate a significant increase in website visits and drive new job applications from a niche audience. 

Highlights

1,496
LinkedIn “Apply Now” conversions


10,000
page views from Display


0.63%
Facebook CTR

Challenge

The ultimate goal was to drive maximal website traffic. But Coegi understood it was critical to ensure the visitors were qualified potential applicants. Due to restrictions on employment-based ad campaigns, the team was creative with data usage across platforms, especially Facebook. Additionally, the client was recruiting for multiple positions, each with different qualifications. This resulted in separate creatives and messaging for each job position, adding a layer of complexity to campaign execution. 

 

Solution

We identified three primary channels for this healthcare recruiting campaign: LinkedIn, Facebook, and programmatic display. 

LinkedIn:

Linkedin was chosen to reach the job-seeking audiences while they were searching. Plus, because they could use job title targeting to be confident the intended audience was being reached. This tactic led to the highest number of “apply now” conversions.

Results: 1,496 application form submissions

Display:

Display was chosen to drive site traffic. Data segments allowed the team to reach niche job titles relevant to the target audience. Using custom data segments allowed for granular job title targeting, while also reaching a larger number of likely users. We ran all job titles in one campaign. Each ad set was targeting a specific job field driving users to unique landing pages. 

Display Results: Nearly 10,000 recruitment page views

Facebook: 

With Facebook, we navigated targeting limitations since employment is a special ad category. This forced a more general targeting strategy focused more on consideration, driving scale for the campaign. Like display, this was primarily used to drive site traffic and make job seekers aware of open positions. 

Facebook Results: 0.63% CTR, 5,650 interview page views, 8,783 career page views

This cross-channel strategy allowed us to target niche job titles and drive high site traffic, despite limitations. Healthcare and pharma brands often defer to brand awareness campaigns due to restrictions in targeting sensitive audiences and compliance laws. However, this campaign showed how health-focused brands can shake that mold and achieve out of the box, lower-funnel goals, such as recruitment, using strategic digital media plans.

Advertising on Reddit to Reach Niche Audiences

Reddit is not always the first platform that comes to mind when advertisers are thinking about paid social, but it should not be overlooked. Reddit is a fast growing platform that allows advertisers to reach a very niche audience at a reasonably low cost. The Reddit platform does have some downfalls though, such as a less advanced reporting platform as compared to competitors. Here, we discuss the benefits and challenges of advertising on Reddit and some helpful tips to create a successful campaign.

What Is Reddit And Who Uses The Platform?

Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. It is a discussion-focused platform and is often referred to as “the first page of the Internet.”

There are 52 million daily active users, which represents a 44% increase from October 2019. The platform sees 430 million monthly active users.

  • The vast majority of Reddit users are in the United States. 221.98 million users are in the United States, followed by Australia with 17.55 million users and India with 13.57 million users.
  • Two-thirds of Reddit users identify as male.
  • Reddit is most popular among the 25 to 29 year old age group. 64% of Reddit users are between the ages of 18-29.
  • The majority of Reddit users have a college degree or some college education.

Benefits Of Advertising On Reddit

  • Reddit ads can reach very niche audiences. There is a community for anything you can think of on Reddit. Ex: If you are selling liquor, you may consider targeting the r/cocktails or r/Bartenders communities.
  • Because Reddit has such a large number of users, CPMs are more efficient than some other social platforms.
  • Audience targeting is not only based on interests like other platforms, but also based on communities, also known as subreddits. These communities are often made up of very engaged users, so it is important to learn about the communities you are targeting and tailor your creatives to these communities.

Challenges Of Advertising On Reddit

The Reddit platform reporting capabilities are not as advanced as some of its competitors. It offers basic metrics, but does not go into as much detail as some of the other platforms, specifically with regards to engagement.

For example, users upvote and downvote on Reddit to express their approval or disapproval on a post, but this data is not available to view on the Reddit dashboard unless you are an admin. This would be important information for hands-on keyboard execution partners to have.

The Reddit dashboard only displays six months of data, so you are unable to see spend and performance for campaigns longer than 6 months ago. Because of this, we recommend Reddit campaigns run for less than 6 months.

Best Practices For Advertising On Reddit

  • Utilize community targeting and interest targeting in each ad set. When testing interest targeting vs. community targeting, we have found that community targeting tends to perform more efficiently when it comes to CTR than interest targeting, but combining interest targeting and community targeting in one ad set outperformed both.
  • Conduct research on the communities you would like to target. Look to see if these communities have many active members and what they discuss. Use this information to tailor your creatives to these users’ interests.
  • Use creative that feels authentic to your audience. Users of Reddit appreciate advertisers to meet them where they are.
  • Utilize both placement options (conversations and feed) at the ad set level in order to diversify where your ad will be seen.

Reddit is an excellent platform for reaching niche audiences at a relatively low cost. The platform is not as sophisticated as some of the others, but the ad performance on Reddit speaks for itself. If you are looking for a new platform for paid social, do some research on subreddits that your target audience may identify with and give Reddit ads a try.

Snapchat Swipe-Up Ads for Retargeting Teens

The Brief

Coegi developed a social strategy for a higher education client using Snapchat swipe-up ads to target potential students. Despite tactical challenges of targeting restrictions, this social campaign resulted in benchmark-breaking performance.

Highlights

1.88%
Peak Swipe-Up Rate


0.91%
Avg. Swipe-Up Rate


6,345
Total Swipe-Ups

Challenge

For colleges and universities, advertising to potential students can be a tactical challenge. Most social media platforms allow targeting of individuals under the age of 18, but some severely limit advertisers’ ability to retarget to this key demographic. Potential students spend their time across several platforms. So determining where to most efficiently invest marketing dollars for this age range is not always clear.

With these challenges, higher education advertisers often pivot to target parents instead. While this can be effective, our client wanted to reach the students directly. 

Solution

After completing a strategic review of our options, we determined that Snapchat was the best option for two reasons. First, the platform allows advertisers to retarget the under 18 demographic, removing that tactical hurdle. Secondly, the target audience for our higher education clients are highly active on Snapchat. Beating out TikTok and Instagram, 35% of teens say Snapchat is their favorite social media app. With 87.3 million US monthly users, almost 30% of total internet users and 69% of teens and young adults, Snapchat quickly became the clear choice for this consideration campaign.

Snapchat swipe-up rates were the primary KPI. The benchmark for success was a swipe-up rate of 0.5%. With a budget of $3,300, the campaign generated 6,345 swipe ups, for an average rate of .91%. At its peak, the campaign generated a remarkable 1.88% swipe up rate. 

Part of this success was due to our use of lookalike audiences. This allowed us to scale and reach a broader audience and achieve a swipe-up rate of 1.05%, once again outperforming the 0.5% benchmark. 

Takeaways for Snapchat Swipe-Up Ad Success

An analysis of these high-performing campaigns leads us to believe that a significant portion of the success is attributable to the tactical strategy. The ads were being served to the right audience, at the right place, with the right technical execution. Both campaigns had different approaches to their creative design. This leads us to believe the visuals contributed less to performance than tactical execution. We hypothesize that with optimized creative strategy, similar campaigns would see even greater success.

To get started with Snapchat campaign optimizations, we recommend the following: 

  1. Focus on strong, front-loaded storytelling to hook the attention of the viewer. 
  2. Keep videos short. Snapchat recommends 0:03-0:05 seconds long. 
  3. Place your branding, offer and CTA in the first few seconds to ensure it is seen.
  4. Catch viewers’ attention with movement at the beginning of the video. 

 

Nine Easy Ways to Stay Up to Date on Social Media Trends

Social media is an ever-growing and evolving landscape with new platforms launching and new features being released on a frequent basis. Being able to reach your target audience on the right platform with the right feature or placement is crucial. It may feel overwhelming to try to keep up with the continually changing social media advertising trends without committing significant time – these nine tips will help you stay up to speed without sacrificing too much time.

Spend Time on Social Media Every Day

Try to set aside 10 minutes every day to scroll through your brand’s social media feeds. This is a great way to see what people are talking about, what’s trending today, and what changes are happening.

Social media tips to use your time efficiently:

  • Customize your feeds so that you can easily see relevant and trending content/topics.
  • Save articles to read for later so you can revisit when you have more time.  
  • Ask your team to also spend 10 minutes a day on social media and then share interesting findings regularly.
  • Familiarize yourself with new social platforms in order to understand new consumer trends

Use SEO to Find Places Where Your Business Could Fill a Market Gap

Use tools like SEMrush, Keyword Hero, Screaming Frog, or SEOquake to see what your customers are searching for in your industry and vertical, analyzing their behaviors at various stages in the funnel, and understanding nuances between various types of consumers.  Using keyword and search research will not only help you stay on top of trends, but can also help guide your brand’s content creation and create best practices.

Utilize Customer Feedback

Solicit customer feedback via surveys and customer interactions on your business’s social media pages. Surveys and feedback will help you to better understand your audience, their needs, and their interests, allowing your team to provide even better customer support and service. Additionally, feedback from your customers and social media followers helps you identify what type of content resonates with/performs best. 

Ideas of questions to ask:

  • What’s one feature/product/service you’d like us to start offering?
  • What [BRAND/COMPANY] product can you not live without?
  • What kind of [BRAND/COMPANY] content would you like to learn about?
  • What’s your struggle with _________?

Of course, once you receive feedback, you need to apply it

  • Your customers have the best pulse on your products and services and may think of things you didn’t. Listen to their suggestions of how to improve current offerings, things they’d like to see, or new ideas.
  • Don’t ignore negative feedback. Negative feedback is an opportunity to understand pain points, make improvements, and improve customer service.
  • Incorporate feedback into your product roadmap.
  • Thank your customers who provide positive feedback. These people will become positive advocates for your brand.

Keep an Eye on What Your Competitors Are Doing

Set aside 10 minutes a week to look at what your competitors are posting and promoting. Ensure you derive inspiration regarding emerging trends in your industry, or even some of your personal favorite brands, but are not copying content. Share your unique POV and showcase the expertise of your brand.

Subscribe to Trade Journals, Publications, Newsletters and Magazines

Schedule time on your calendar weekly to read through your subscriptions to keep on top of the latest trends and changes.

Some good publications that frequently share the latest and greatest on social trends include:

Join LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are a great way to network with other business owners and social media enthusiasts. You’ll be able to ask questions of your peers to learn from their experiences and discover new social media sites/trends. Some great groups to join include “Social media Marketing Group by Connect365.io”, “Digital Marketing: Social Media, Search, Mobile, & more”, and “Digital Marketing.”

Attend Conferences Monthly or Quarterly (whether in-person or virtual!) 

Get the most up-to-date and relevant information about social media trends and advice from industry experts. Conferences are a great way to network and interface with other professionals in the social media industry who have different backgrounds.

Stay Current with Twitter and TikTok Trends

Twitter and TikTok function differently in terms of the type of content and algorithms than the other social media platforms. Here are some tips to help stay on top of what’s trending in both platforms:

Twitter

  • Create a stream on Twitter with hashtags such as #socialmediamarketing, #smchat, or #TwitterTip to help understand what to expect in the coming weeks.
  • Follow social media marketing influencers on Twitter and LinkedIn (sometimes discovered through hashtags!) and spend time reading their content.

TikTok

  • The “For You” page is a great place to start to see trendy and viral videos but this should not be the only place to look for trends.
  •  Hashtags help people find relevant content (think #mentalhealth, #prank, or #taylorswift). The most-used hashtags in video captions are the best place to see what is trending on TikTok. Many users will often use hashtags relevant to their niche in addition to one or two trending hashtags to help boost their content organically.
  • Keep an eye on challenges on the platform. Users are actively creating and engaging in challenges, which can create new trends. Many challenges include lip-syncing, dancing, or skits.
  • Observe what influencers on Tik Tok are posting. Influencers and celebrity posts on the platform will be popular in addition to clueing you in to what is trending.

Commit to Learning

The world of social media is always growing and changing. By spending time daily or weekly on social media platforms and news, you’ll be able to have a firm grasp on trends and changes. 

Staying on top of social media trends can be a daunting task. Using these 10 tips can help you use your time efficiently and stay in the know.

 

Further reading:

How to Moderate Trolls on Facebook Ads

Trolling is the act of leaving frequent, offensive/negative comments on social media posts. This can be done by a single person (troll) or a group of people (trolls). Having moderate trolls on social media can be uncomfortable. Here are a few strategies to help eliminate trolls on your Facebook page. 

Utilize Facebook Filters

  • Community Standards –  Facebook automatically conducts moderation on the Facebook platform as a whole. In order to use Facebook, users agree to the Community Standards. These standards ban things like nudity, hate speech, excessive violence, and fake profiles. 
  • Profanity Filter – Any page admin can implement the Profanity Filter setting on Facebook. When using this filter, admins have the option to set the filter to either “medium” or “strong.” The difference between the two settings is the allowable offensiveness of the profanity. Facebook determines this criteria.  
  • Keyword Blocking – Facebook allows admins to block up to 1,000 keywords from appearing on their pages. This setting is not case sensitive and will block variations of the specified keywords from appearing as well. 
  • User Banning –  In the case of an individual or small group of trolls, it could make sense to simply ban the offending users from the Facebook page. The banned user(s) will still be able to share content from the page, but they will not be able to comment, like, or post on the page. The banned users are also blocked from sending messages to the page’s inbox.

Additional Considerations

While each of the aforementioned Facebook settings can be incredibly useful, those filters are typically preventative. When actively dealing with trolling, consider the following recommendations: 

  • Responding to the Troll – In general, it is best practice to respond to comments on your posts. The same applies when it is a troll commenting. If possible, address the frustration or concern of the commenter and provide a solution. This could be through encouraging the user to reach out via personal message or phone call. Other users generally react positively to a brand being responsive and helpful by commenting back. Alternatively, ignoring the troll can give credence to the troll’s complaints and even encourage other trolls to comment. 
  • Deleting Comments– If responding to the user’s comment is unsuccessful or if the user’s comment leaves no room for a solution, it is possible to delete comments from your posts. This should not be the first course of action as it can lead to frustration from the commenting user. Deleting a comment can provoke the troll to leave another, more offensive, comment. It is also important to consider the fact all comments (negative or positive) play into an ad’s engagement rate. A higher engagement rate leads to better performance. 
  • Resetting Ads– If there is one ad causing the trolling, it is possible to reset the ad. This is not ideal as every time an ad is reset, all of the data and learnings associated with the ad reset as well. After resetting an ad more than once, it is worth considering sunsetting the ad in question and replacing it with a new ad. Resetting an ad is an extremely manual process and is not something you can do for all live ads frequently. 

Ultimately, having a troll target your page be a nuisance. However, there are multiple strategies and resources to help stop a troll. Inconvenient as it may be, appropriately responding and reacting to a troll can be a positive reflection of your business.

Growing Omnichannel Retail Solutions for a Wine Brand

The Brief

Coegi helped a wine brand grow both its online and in-store sales by executing an omnichannel digital campaign. Leveraging strategic micro-targeting, paid social media, and grocery delivery app relationships, the campaign achieved impressive ROAS, along with increased purchases and store visits to retailers in the wine brand’s distribution network.

Highlights

5X
Return on Ad Spend


4,500
Direct to Consumer Purchases


9,700
Store Visits

Challenge

A “healthier-for-you” wine brand came to Coegi to expand its omnichannel retail presence. In 2020, they were facing the challenging effects of COVID-19 on shopping behaviors, as well as growing consumer demand for online alcohol sales. Our client needed to provide a convenient way for consumers to shop online while still growing brick-and-mortar sales.

Solution

Coegi helped our wine client create an omnichannel retail solution using digital media.

First, we leaned heavily into Facebook to support online sales using a social commerce ad along with a dynamic retargeting catalog ad. Throughout 2020, these two campaigns alone drove over 4,500 DTC purchases with an exceptional average ROAS of 6.76x. 

We also built a precise shopper marketing campaign on Facebook using co-branded retail carousels to target major DMAs on a national scale. The click-through URL showed consumers a list of nearby stores. We then deployed a foot traffic lift study, which attributed nearly 9,700 store visits to these campaigns.  

To build on this success, we partnered with grocery delivery providers, Drizly and Instacart. With Drizly, we ran a co-branded Facebook campaign to increase awareness of the brand’s availability on this platform. This allowed us to track delivery purchases attributed to the campaign to understand short-term ROI. Instacart in-platform ads were also a major success. In the final months of the year, the team saw an average ROAS of 5.9x with nearly $83,000 in attributable sales. 

Together, these campaigns increased overall brand equity while also driving an increase in omnichannel sales revenue. 

3 Reasons to Use Podcast Advertising

Podcasts have been around for nearly 20 years, but only recently have gained mass appeal among both audiences and advertisers. With growing audiences, loyal listeners, new targeting advances and reporting options, there has never been a better time to explore podcast advertising.

“The growth of podcasting has brought a massive opportunity for advertisers to reach highly engaged, niche audiences.” – Arica McKinnon, Vice President, Client Consulting at Nielsen.

Not sure if podcast advertising is the right tactic for you and your brand’s bottom line? Here are three reasons that may change your mind.

Reason #1: The audiences are there…and growing

An estimated 120 million Americans listened to podcasts in 2021, with a projected growth to 160 million listeners in 2023. Despite a short flatline in listenership in 2020 due to shortened or non-existant commutes (a highly-popular listening time for the avid podcaster), podcast engagement increased notably this year with no signs of slowing down. Furthermore, according to a survey done by NCS Solutions, 88% of current podcast listeners maintained or increased their listening time over the past year. This increase can be attributed to several factors. Those factors include the return of commuting, increased WOM, new shows for niche audiences, and an influx of influencers developing their own shows to flesh out revenue streams and reach their audiences in a new way.

With this growth trajectory, it is no surprise that advertisers are increasing investment in this lucrative channel. According to IAB, podcast ad revenue in the US increased by 19% in 2020 and is predicted to exceed $3B by 2023. This indicates brands are seeing success with podcast advertisinag. As follows, competition for reaching these audiences will continue to build over time. Jumping into the pool of opportunity now will allow you to expand your reach and effectiveness.

Reason #2: More options and flexibility

Podcasts have held the attention of highly-engaged, niche audiences for years. Historically, the only option for brands to advertise in this space was to purchase expensive, inflexible and hard-to-measure direct buys. In recent years, however, the growing popularity of podcasts has created a demand for an updated, more flexible and measurable system for reaching these audiences.

The industry recognized this opportunity and began developing alternative ways to monetize it. The result? A programmatic option called dynamic ad insertion (DAI) has now entered the market, making it easier and more affordable to incorporate this tactic into your media mix.

This biddable technology allows for new audience targeting options, including listening habits, geographic region and weather conditions. Due to the nature of podcasting, there are somewhat limited options for targeted demographics. However, as the technology continues to develop, there will likely be more options on the horizon. Don’t let these limits keep you from investigating this tactic as a viable option.

Reason #3: Listeners are ad-friendly

Not only are the audiences growing, they are receptive and responsive to the ads they hear while listening. A recent study on podcast “super listeners” discovered that 48% of listeners pay more attention to podcast ads than any other media and that 71% of those surveyed say they never, rarely, or only sometimes skip the ads they hear while listening. The study also found 54% of respondents are more likely to purchase a product after hearing an ad for it on a podcast, up from 46% in 2019.

There are a few surface-level reasons for this acceptance. Firstly, most podcasting platforms are free to use and audiences understand they trade the ad for the content. Then, there is the fact that most listeners tune in while doing other activities – driving, cleaning, walking, etc. Their hands are not typically free during these activities so they are more likely to listen through the ad. This is unlike many other ad formats that are easy to scroll by or tap the skip button.

The primary reason audiences are receptive and responsive to podcast advertising, however, is trust and authenticity. Listeners often feel like the host is directly speaking to them. Before the introduction of DAIs, hosts read all podcast ads. Because podcasts tend to attract highly engaged, niche audiences, the hosts became their own breed of influencer. They make trusted recommendations to their highly connected listeners. This has set the stage for advertising to natively work its way into the expected user experience. Host-read spots are still the most highly trusted advertising spot in podcasting, but they have conditioned podcast listeners in general to be more receptive to advertising.

Recommendations

With the growing audience sizes, ad-friendly listener behavior and advancing technology options, reaching your ideal audience in the podcast space has become easier than ever. However, the unique channel constraints may require different strategies than what is successful for your brand on other channels. Here are a few recommendations:

  1. Be creative with your targeting strategy. With limited out-of-box options for DAI placements, hyper-targeting will likely lead to overly expensive and minimal scale results. Instead, research the audiences that are already listening to podcasts and find a happy medium between niche and broad. What podcasts would your target audience be listening to and engaging with? Use interest and affinity-based audience insights to inform your targeting strategy.
  2. Consider the user experience when creating ad content. Like with all advertising mediums, your ad will perform better if it blends into the user experience. Podcast listeners are used to more conversational experience, so ads that are organic, informal and relatable perform best.
  3. Experiment with programmatic and traditional direct-buy placements. A podcast whose audience perfectly aligns with your target may be worth the direct ad buy. But also experiment with more flexible DAI purchases to find the most successful shows and targeting combinations for your brand.
  4. Stay on top of technology developments. Be comfortable in these platforms so you can take advantage of the high value podcast audiences before your competitors.

Further Reading:

Driving Retail Traffic and Sales for a Beauty Brand

The brief

Coegi created an omni-channel campaign to drive in-store retail traffic and attributable sales for a beauty client during a key sales period.

Highlights

$0.25
Cost Per Store Visit


4.6M
In-Store Conversions

Challenge

Your description here

Solution

Coegi used three core audiences to target this campaign – Eco Consumers, Millennial Moms and College Consumers. Additionally, we used high-intent holiday shopping audiences to maximize the time of year.

We activated these audiences across display and video campaigns, optimizing for reach and completion rate to drive in-store traffic. This was reinforced through retailer-specific creative to ensure shoppers knew where the brand was available. A foot traffic study was also implemented using mobile app ID data to correlate ad exposure with store visitation. 

We took a test and learn approach, using traffic and purchase data to determine top performing retail locations. We then reinforced those top stores in key geos, further building upon sales momentum. This campaign drove over 4.6 million store visits, with an average cost-per-store-visit of $0.25 across all media and millions in sales. This was highly efficient for driving brand consideration compared to the $3-7 product price point. 

Q4 sales reports indicated that the strong revenue numbers were directly tied with efficient cost-per-visit metrics. Analysis of foot traffic conversions also helped identify top markets for the brand. This campaign displayed the importance of combining advanced measurement studies and non-media data to determine the incremental impact of digital media on driving retail traffic and sales. 

Driving Action from a Niche B2B Audience

The Brief

Coegi helped to drive leads from a highly niche B2B audience by pairing LinkedIn’s on-platform lead generation with the clients onboarded first-party data. The results exceeded client expectations and established foundational data for future campaigns.  

Highlights

292
New Leads


$36.55
Cost Per Lead


0.41%
Click Through Rate

Challenge

Our client needed to drive leads from a niche B2B audience – but they meant niche niche. They were only interested in reaching European film, gaming, and television licensing professionals who were in-market to connect with American content owners. They hosted a magazine and website portal where global licensing professionals could make connections and discover new opportunities. The client challenged Coegi to provide a solution to drive this audience to their website, where they would be prompted to share their email address to access the portal. 

Solution

We recognized this request necessitated using an audience-first approach to inform our channel strategy. LinkedIn proved to be the channel with the widest reach of second-party data. Historically, the fewer steps to conversion asked of your audience, the higher the ROI. Knowing this, we used LinkedIn’s on-platform Lead Generation creatives to encourage our audiences to share their contact information without needing to visit the site.

Our client offered two products: an industry magazine and a website portal. The media objective was to drive 150 new email contacts over three months. 

Prioritizing budget on LinkedIn allowed Coegi to craft a strategy that balanced the need for some awareness while focusing on the lead goal. Pairing LinkedIn’s data, lead generation objective and creative, and the client’s first-party data allowed us to nearly double the goal of 150 new email contacts. 

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