Social media is expected to claim a 13% share of global adspend this year and overtake print for the first time, according to Zenith’s latest Advertising Expenditure Forecasts.

Christian Polman, analysed the significance of the results saying:

Social media has been around since the early 2000s. Despite this, brands often continue to approach social media as a ‘new-shiny-thing’, leaving some of them either overinvested or not approaching this medium in a way that drives marketing effectiveness. 

Brands should pay attention to how they’re activating their brand messaging by approaching it as a unique medium in their marketing armoury. In social media, the gap between what works and what doesn’t is even wider, with creativity and content – and the approach to customer experiences – playing even bigger roles in capturing attention and driving engagement. Yet many brands are still not approaching digital in a way that’s fit-for-purpose. For example, in many digital customer experiences, consumers still have to jump through far too many hoops on average to reach their desired destination, and roughly 40% of creative running on Facebook hasn’t been optimized to work in their environment.

With brand investments in social media having reached critical scale, now is a good time for brands to step back and reflect on the role of social in their overall mix, whether it’s delivering tangible business outcomes, and how to approach it in a way that drives effectiveness and tangible results. The underlying goal should be to build experiences consumers want, activated with the right creative and brand messaging, and as Raja Rajamannar of Mastercard says, to move beyond story-telling to story-making.”

To read the article in full on Mediatel, please click here.

First featured on 08/10/2019.