Written by
Chris Chan
With emerging data and privacy landscape changes, brand owners can no longer rely on one or two platforms for customer acquisition.
Competitive brands should stay ahead of the curve by running organic and paid campaigns on emerging channels.
WITHIN partnered with Reddit, Waze, LiveIntent, and TikTok to present brands’ best ways to diversify their upper-funnel marketing strategies.
Attendees learned actionable takeaways on how to reach new audiences with higher potential engagement and less competition by testing ads on new channels.
Speakers included:
Greg Gschwend – Integrated Media Director, WITHIN
Timothy O’Keefe – Talent Development Lead, LiveIntent
Meghan Bentley – Demand Sales Director, LiveIntent
Matt Joanou – Global Agency Lead, Reddit
Julia Causey – Client Partner, Reddit
Lucy Herring – Account Manager, Waze
Max Laban – Agency Partnerships Manager, TikTok
Most consumers are wary of constant advertising bombardment on major social channels, like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Brands need to adjust their channel strategy to explore new platforms that fit business goals and initiatives.
By diversifying your media mix, you can, “Deliver the right message to the right audiences and people at the right price, all backed by data-driven insights and quality creative,” says Greg Gschwend, integrated media director at WITHIN.
But first, you and your team need to ask yourselves a series of questions.
“If the answer is no, then before even thinking about channel expansion, we will encourage all of our partners to make sure that they are getting the most out of where they’re already spending money,” says Gschwend.
Your channel spend should align with the target market that you’re targeting. Spend should be optimized across all channels accordingly.
After making full use of current channels, you should look to different platform options with your brand’s KPIs in mind.
Additionally, set aside a portion of your marketing budget to expand and test new platforms.
Creating media for new platforms helps you reach new audiences, generate more sales, and ride recent data privacy trends.
Here are four particular platforms that you should consider when diversifying your media mix.
An often overlooked channel for paid media advertising is email. Email newsletters, in particular, can create a high ROI for a pinpointed audience.
Meghan Bentley and Timothy O’Keefe of LiveIntent spoke on the power of leveraging paid premium email newsletters ads on LiveIntent.
The LiveIntent team highlighted that almost everyone regularly uses, reads, and looks at email. Email newsletter readers have already opted in to direct messaging and are more likely to engage with relevant ads.
“One-to-one partnerships with publishers gives us the ability to deliver massive scale with an audience… around 200 million active readers per month,” says Bentley.
Even better, users’ Personal Identifiable Information (PII) data remains secure. Liveintent hashes the email addresses with a DSP algorithm for security before serving the most relevant ad to the audience.
Ads are designed to blend in with the author’s content and ensure that the brand’s message is also seen.
Reddit holds a unique place on the internet as a community platform with over 130k+ niche, interest-based communities.
Users can talk, discuss, learn, and share knowledge on subjects ranging from TV shows to relationships, cars, and even larger scale communities with Ask Reddit.
Reddit flips social media on its head by highlighting “things you care about shared by people you don’t know,” says Julia Causey, client partner at Reddit.
In essence, Reddit communities are the inverse of paid social, providing brands with the opportunity to engage on the organic side with users and from the paid marketing side.
Reddit offers the ability to target people in specific interest groups to find untapped audience groups less likely to respond on social platforms.
Users on the platform tend to be incredibly committed, passionate, and vocal about what they enjoy and why they enjoy it. Users also lean on the lower age range, are more active on mobile, have a higher socio-economic background, and are slightly more male than female.
Between 2019 and 2020, Reddit experienced massive growth in daily users of 40% YoY with several vital learnings around user demographics:
Reddit gives brands access to unduplicated, high-quality audience groups and a revenue diversification opportunity.
Audiences spend an average of 34 minutes on the platform day. The quality of their usage is also different, with users spending focused time invested on a particular time, deliberately reading content.
The Reddit interface makes it easy for people to make long-form comment connections and other heavy investments into individual group threads.
People put a lot of trust into product recommendations on Reddit, since there is no influencer or affiliate-sponsored content on the platform, which builds authentic trust.
Users on Reddit tend to be very informed and confident buyers, with the average Redditor spending 4x more time in the market research section and making 9x faster-purchasing decisions with higher brand advocacy.
“It means that the consumer is a little bit different. It’s an informed consumer, and it’s a very confident buyer,” says Causey.
Reddit has also measured that its users pay 2x more attention to ads such as promoted videos, promoted posts, and engagement prompts.
Both brands and users can host discussions on any topic of interest for large and small audiences. With a massive jump in Gen Z, mobile-first users, and both paid and organic marketing opportunities, Reddit ads are a great way to diversify your media mix.
Related: How to Make User-Generated Content Work for Your Brand
One of the most under-looked, underutilized, and underdeveloped channels for advertising is the transportation channel, more specifically: in-car advertising.
Waze brings a fresh opportunity in-car advertising by pairing GPS tracking and location-based marketing. Its in-car Google Ads ecosystem allows brands to reach users in cars with several ad types on the navigation app.
Car advertising has often been known as the digital dark zone, with meaningful in-car moments and experiences potentially pivotal to purchasing decisions.
With more than 30 million monthly users and an average of more than 10 hours of engaged monthly in-car use per user, Waze paves the way for transportation ads.
Waze users tend to engage with other users on the app to beat traffic, speed up a commute, and even become aware of nearby traffic police (that’s a favorite feature!).
Brands looking to advertise on Waze have many options at their disposal, which include:
“We can serve clients’ ads to [users] and get in front of them while they’re driving to very relevant competitors,” says James Nabozna, account executive at Waze.
CPG brands like Corkcicle and Hugo Boss benefit greatly from Waze advertisement options. “One of our options is to be a guest advertiser, and this is to leverage Waze to direct drivers to where your product is sold,” says Lucy Herring, account manager at Waze.
Waze is another way to develop strong brand partnerships and diversify your media mix.
Related: Dos and Don’ts of Push Notifications
When marketing on TikTok, time is of the essence.
Recent events by TikTok have shown that TikTok is not only for upper-funnel awareness but can also be pivotal for brand ads. The hashtag #TikTokmademebuyit has over 4.6 billion followers, which is a testament to the purchasing power on the platform.
TikTok is more likely to drive sales than other social channels, with 71% of users reporting that they didn’t mind being served entertaining ads.
“Tiktok now also drives a 14% higher return on ad spend, compared to Nielsen measure digital media channels,” notes Max Laban, agency partnerships manager at TikTok.
People on TikTok have a higher propensity for shopping. The authenticity of content makes it easy for audiences to visualize how users can use products in their own lives.
Q4 of 2021 was a historical high for upper-funnel shopping on TikTok, with users bingeing nearly 2 hours of content per day.
TikTok also has a unique audience, with 45% absent from Facebook, 52% from Instagram, and 64% from Twitter.
TikTok built its ad platform with iOS 14.5 in mind. TikTok has developed its pixel 2.0, optimized for matching phone numbers and emails to users. They also have advanced matching with Alpha and serve multi-session ad functions.
As a result, brands have full-funnel behavior tracking, ad delivery optimization options, and audience retargeting capabilities.
TikTok currently has added ad types, including spark ads, lead gen ads, collection ads, and display card ads.
The launch of TikTok shopping has drawn organic interests to sales and a deeper audience engagement in paid ads to storefronts, making it an effective way of diversifying your media mix.
Related: Tips and Tricks: 6 Ways to Advertise on TikTok
If you need help staying on top of trends, leveraging any of the partners above, and diversifying your brand’s media mix, Talk to us at WITHIN. We help leading brands fuse performance media with branded content to maximize profitability in marketing campaigns.
Chris Chan is a content writer at WITHIN.
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