Targeting against context. What to choose in pursuit of sales?

Targeted advertising in the social network, it would seem, what could be more effective? Everybody knows everything and knows how. However, questions still remain: why are performance better than context for performance results, why do we need tests, what target format should we choose? Andrei Kudryashov, head of mobile and targeted advertising for Adventum, answers them at once.
SMM and Social Media Marketing, what’s the difference?
Modern marketers often joke about the difference between SMM and Social Media Marketing. The first is usually associated with posts about sales and mass contests, and the second is called a powerful channel for promotion and sales, and its main tool is targeted advertising.

SMM is more about content creation, working with a loyal audience.
Targeted advertising is attracting new customers and increasing sales.
In targeted advertising, all communication with users is personalized: the audience is clearly segmented, and individual messages are prepared for each segment. This tool can be called an effective performance channel. At the same time, campaign effectiveness is evaluated in specific figures, and depending on the results, you can (and should) quickly and flexibly change settings.

Now users do not need to go beyond the social network to find and buy goods. And they are actively using this advantage: I was convinced of this thanks to the successful results of our recent advertising campaigns.

Where is more performance – in context or target?
At the moment, contextual advertising is still the most popular performance channel. True, in my opinion, his popularity is just a habit: a stable channel that brings results from year to year, despite the fact that competition and rates are constantly growing.

What happens to the social media audience? The activity and number of users of social networks is also constantly growing. According to Aitarget, the number of active users of the social network Facebook in Russia in 2017 reached 15 million people per month, of which 6 million go to Facebook daily. The monthly active Instagram audience is even more – 30 million people. Audience classmates in 2017 – 28 million people per month. Vkontakte currently uses more than 97 million every month. According to TNS, Russians spend about a third of their time on the Internet on the social network.

Therefore, I believe that targeted advertising begins to outperform the context for a number of reasons:

Low competition and cost per click. For example, in the project of one of our clients from the real estate sector, we received 981 initial messages using targeted advertising and paid 1.3 times less for it than if we had paid for it in context.
A variety of ad formats. Target is aimed at both the satisfaction of demand and its creation. That is, it solves the primary tasks for conversion / sales, returns users by retargeting and at the same time carries the media component – it works on brand knowledge. As an example, you can mention the Canvas format from myTarget. We managed to test it at the beta stage. Canvas works for a brand, allows you to bring the essence of the proposal and at the same time receive a request from the user, without forcing him to leave the social network to the site.

Sample ad formats for one of our clients.
Contextual advertising is limited in the toolkit and to a greater extent satisfies the already existing user requests. However, often an effective result can be achieved by combining both tools: targeted advertising and contextual advertising, constantly optimizing the campaign.

How to start if you have chosen to work with target?
I would reformulate the words of a famous song like this: “On the face are simple, complex inside”. Despite outward ease of use, targeted advertising is a complex channel with a large number of functions, formats and settings. You should not consider this a minus, rather, it is a feature of the target, which must always be remembered. In addition, almost every month there are new opportunities for the use of such advertising. The clear leader in the number of innovations among the sites is Facebook.

Therefore, my advice is that for a successful launch of an advertising campaign, you need to study in depth the tools of targeted advertising, and then concentrate on the three stages:

Select the target audience for a particular campaign. It is necessary to fine-tune the campaign for each of the segments and select suitable social networks for them, since for each product promoted the same networks work differently. For example, if we are talking about children’s entertainment and holidays, then myTarget will work more effectively for promotion, where we will look for different segments of moms / parents.
Preparation of the ad, creatives. One of the key stages, since all advertising in social networks is built on successful creatives. Ads must clearly reflect the CTP of the product.