Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - July 23rd, 2013

Massive increases in Facebook ad spending, why social loyalty matters and who are the ‘Digital Elite’?

Understanding the Digital Elite

Corporations know that social media is now a critical component of their businesses. Since the inception of these networks, a new breed of consumer has been evolving. A new report from Turn has dubbed them the ‘Digital Elite’ and revealed their propensity to use multiple sales channels and their buying power.

This global premium audience segment, the Digital Elite, are most likely to earn above $76,900 a year, to be aged 21-34, and to be white-collar professionals. Turn has discovered that they are the world’s most cross-channel consumers, and this new report explores the Digital Elite with an unprecedented level of actionable deep data insights about who they are, and when and where they engage with brands.

Findings in the Q2 2013 Turn Digital Audience Report about the Digital Elite, the world’s most cross-channel audience, include:

• They are 32-times more likely than other consumers to engage with brands across three or more channels.
• Eighty-three percent of digital elites live in the U.S. This is down 2% from Q1. As expected, the explosive development of markets in the E.U., Asia-Pacific and South America are making this a truly global group.
• British digital elite like documentaries and comedy, and prefer running to golf.

“Marketers are beginning to understand the benefit of engaging the ‘digital elite’ audience for their own brands and having a conversation with them across channels,” says, Paul Alfieri, vice president of marketing, Turn. “In 2013, there’s been a 200% increase in our customers’ use of paid data to target campaigns across mobile, display, video and social, and the payoff is clear in the lift in results when they reach consumers through all the media they touch.”

Facebook ad spend to increase over the next year

Successful advertising on Facebook has been difficult to quantity in the past. The very public withdrawal and limited return of GM was well publicised. New research by The Creative Group that asked 400 industry professionals: “Do you anticipate companies will increase or decrease their advertising/marketing investment in the following social media sites in the next 12 months?" referring to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram, the results show that over 60% will increase their ad spend on Facebook over the next 12 months.

Conversely, even with the increase in popularity of image and video site sharing, few ad executives will increase their ad spend on these platforms. But Google+ will see an increase of 50%

Commenting Donna Farrugia, Executive Director of The Creative Group said: "Today, there is a social media component to nearly every marketing campaign. The challenge is determining which channels make the most sense for the brand and how to truly engage with customers via social media,"

"As organisations increase their social media investment, they seek professionals with experience planning, executing and measuring the success of social media activities. In fact, social media positions ranked among the top roles advertising and marketing executives said they plan to hire during the second half of the year."

Clearly social media is now gathering more of the ad spend that corporations are allocating. However, businesses are being careful to place their ads where high levels of ROI are expected. And with Facebook revealing that 22% of Britons visit the site via mobile platforms, with users checking their Facebook pages using the mobile app between 10 and 15 times on average per day.

Social loyalty matters

With so many social media platforms all attempting to gain the attention of consumers, a new infographic from Social Annex makes for interesting reading if your corporation is trying to understand how loyalty works in this space.

With Facebook boasting over a billion accounts and Twitter half that number, these groups of consumers have not gone un-noticed by brands. With 80% of consumers now connecting with brands through Facebook, and the fact that it can be ten times more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, developing loyalty across social media networks is vital.

Further research by Social Annex reveals that loyalty has a clear commercial advantage with over half of consumers likely to buy from a brand they have a pre-existing social connection with. Social login and of course making it easy to share brand content are the keys to social loyalty.

New interface for mobile and tablet users of Adobe Social

Adobe has announced it has upgraded the user interface of its Adobe Marketing Cloud platform to focused on interpreting and presenting social data in a more digestible format that helps social marketers prove the ROI they are expecting from their campaigns. Also introduced is new ways for social marketers to work and collaborate better with their partners across the organisation, and debuted Adobe Social for mobile phones and tablets. Social marketers now have a marketing tool that’s as mobile as they are.

Key features include:

• New UI – A totally reimagined user experience, which is much more visual and lets marketers easily see which campaigns are driving business results and then drill down into any campaign to discover specifically what assets, including posts, apps, and keywords, are performing best.
• Mobility – Manage social channels on-the-go via tablets and smartphones (iOS and Android supported).
•  Cross-team collaboration – Seamless collaboration tools now let stakeholders across the organization share feedback on campaigns, content and data.
• Content calendar – Improved ability to create, schedule and track social campaigns across platforms and properties.
• Social buzz monitoring – Improved dashboard gives better insight into geographical trends and brand buzz data that helps social marketers act quickly when brand conversations are trending.
• Campaign attribution – Automatically attribute social activity to the metrics that matter most, and break down performance by post and content, giving marketers more insight into the types of content that are driving the best results.

“Nothing moves faster in digital marketing than social, so we have redesigned Adobe Social to get to insight and action more quickly,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Marketing Business, Adobe. “We’re seeing incredible momentum with Adobe Social as more and more brands see the value of connecting social activity to business results.”

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.