It's no secret that the social advertising landscape has changed significantly over the past year. Big players Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest have been rolling out new products at record pacing. These include new ways to target audiences (on or off platform), creative updates for driving specific advertising objectives, or enhancements to ad distribution and delivery. These changes are forcing brands to rethink social advertising strategy. Those that don't are leaving a lot of new advantages on the table, and will see their campaign performance suffer relative to those who embrace the new world.
One of the most common strategies for brands in determining how to spend their social ad dollars is the "Budget per post" model. Here brands integrate paid media into their existing content calendars, putting a specific dollar amount (usually arbitrarily) behind each post. This strategy was developed when social was a very "organic first" space. It doesn't allow brands to take advantage of creative optimization, and thus hinders a brands overall performance for each social initiative.
Changes In Hierarchy
With Facebook's October announcement moving targeting to the Ad Set level, and Twitter's similar move to Multi Ad Group hierarchy, both platforms are clearly focused on creative optimization at the audience level. (Disclosure: Twitter's move to MAG is currently only available to advertisers using API Partners. One such partner is AdParlor, the company I work for). Both of these platforms are literally telling you: pick an audience and let us optimize delivery of creative on that audience. We know which creative will resonate best with these audiences based on your advertising objectives. Let's spend the majority of your budget on the posts/tweets that perform the best.
And yet brands are ignoring this. The budget per post model doesn't allow Facebook & Twitter to optimize delivery towards top performers because the spend per creative has already been outlined. The biggest value of social advertising (over TV for example) is the ability to measure the effectiveness of your content in real time and make adjustments based on performance. The budget per post model erodes this huge potential value-add.
Budget Per Initiative
So how can you start adapting to new delivery methodology? Some forward thinking brands are moving from a "budget per post" to a "budget per initiative" model. Understanding that brands often do have a lot of different goals and advertising objectives with budgets associated, they are moving to a monthly or quarterly initiative budget. A brand could have 10-20 posts over a quarter for a specific initiative. This strategy allows brands to be flexible with their budgets allocated to each post as long as they aggregate to the total initiative budget. Posts can be grouped to target the same audience, and Facebook & Twitter algorithms can be leveraged for improved creative optimization.
Evergreen Creative
A lot of brands that have jumped into social performance advertising (campaigns with direct response goals) have quickly realized that the budget per post model does not work here. These revenue-focused campaigns often have more sensitive goals and KPI's, which require advertisers to follow best practices to back out to results. Yet for some reason the "brand focused" campaigns for these advertisers still use the old antiquated models.
One method a lot of brands have adopted for performance advertising is "evergreen creative". These are posts that are either always on or have significantly extended flights. Leveraging these give Facebook & Twitter algorithms the time and significance of data to deliver exploratory impressions to each post, and then optimize delivery towards those that resonate with a specific audience. It allows for more freedom and better A/B testing than flighted creative.
Summary
"Budget Per Post" is a strategy dating to when paid was just being integrated into organic calendars. Social advertising has evolved. So should your brand. Ditch the budget per post strategy and start delivering better results today.
See anything I missed? Have a different opinion? Let me know in the comments!