From Gen Z and millennials to Generation X and even baby boomers, a large majority of individuals across all generations will have a presence on at least one social media platform. Whether they use Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other of the wide range of platforms, there’s no denying that social media is a defining characteristic of the modern landscape.

Its prevalence doesn’t only offer individuals the opportunity to interact, learn and be entertained, but it has also widened the opportunities for marketing strategies – specifically for paid advertisements.

In this article, we’ll discuss the impact social media has had on paid ad campaigns and how it can be utilised in the most effective way, looking at some of the emerging platforms, formats and trends that you can focus on in 2024 to make the most of your social advertising efforts.

The Impact of Social Media on Advertising

Social media hasn’t only fundamentally changed how people communicate with one another, but it’s also changed how they browse online and, more importantly, how they interact with brands.

Whilst this has affected traditional advertising campaigns on the web, it does offer you the unique opportunity to reach your target audience directly. Using a range of specific criteria, such as demographics, interests and behaviours, you are able to reach a highly targeted audience with your ad campaigns on social platforms. This ensures that you are delivering your message directly to the people you want to reach – ideally, these are the people who also want to see it!

There is another factor unique to social media that helps considerably with this: algorithms. In simple terms, an algorithm is a set procedure that a computer programme follows to perform a computation or solve a problem. Essentially, they are the rules, signals and data that govern how a social media platform operates.

These algorithms determine how content is filtered, ranked, selected and recommended to users. This means that what users see on their social media is heavily impacted by content that they have viewed and interacted with previously, with the algorithm working to show them content that is likely to be relevant to their interests.

When it comes to social ads, these are highly beneficial.

Algorithms can group individuals with similar characteristics, preferences and behaviours into distinct segments. You can then target your ads at specific individuals based on which user segments best match the characteristics of your target customers. The algorithm will then help further by showing your ads to the users it believes they are most relevant to.

Because social media allows you to reach the right audiences with your ads, this can work out as being more cost-effective than traditional paid advertising, with there being a higher chance of increased engagement, conversions and return on ad spend (ROAS).

The Rise of TikTok

If there’s one social media platform that’s been on everyone’s lips over the past couple of years, it’s TikTok.

Renowned for its engaging short-form and user generated content, viral challenges and incredibly fast algorithm, TikTok has captured the attention of many, having been downloaded by over four billion users worldwide.

This is an emerging platform in the ad world, with many businesses utilising it to promote their services and products. There are two predominant ways you can do this:

1. Through TikTok ads
2. By creating a TikTok profile for your business

TikTok ads work similarly to the way traditional PPC advertising works; you set your budget, targeting and bidding method, upload your photo or video, add your ad copy and CTA, then submit the ad.

As for creating your own profile on TikTok, this allows you to generate authentic content, interact with your customers and utilise popular trends to increase awareness and reach of your business organically.

The Role of Influencers

Trust and authenticity are two of the most important factors consumers value when buying a product – especially when exploring products from a business they’ve never shopped or interacted with before.

Even if you effectively establish a relationship with potential customers online, users are often still hesitant to buy a product based on content provided by the brand alone due to the level of bias involved. This is where influencers come in.

Influencers are individuals who have generated a strong following online, having garnered enough credibility or authority to affect the behaviour of others. People not only enjoy the content influencers put out, but they value and, more importantly, trust their opinions.

Many businesses have recognised this and identified the benefits of working with influencers to advertise their products.

This is done by collaborating with an influencer whose followers also meet the criteria of your target audience; you can then send them your product to test out in the form of a PR package, in hopes that they’ll like it and will share it in a post for their followers to see, or you can pay them to create a sponsored post promoting your product(s) and business.

This not only helps you to reach a wider audience and increase brand recognition, but because their followers trust the influencer’s opinion they are more likely to check your business out and even be more willing to spend their own money to buy the product(s) or service(s) you offer.

Effective Ad Formats: Emerging Trends in 2024

Video

With the rise of short-form videos on various platforms, i.e. TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts, many social media users are choosing to spend their scrolling time engaging with this type of content over heavily text and image-oriented content.

Research shows that the average attention span is a mere 8.25 seconds, meaning you don’t have a lot of time to work with to capture audiences’ attention with your ads. With that said, users tend to spend more time watching videos than they do consuming other content.

This makes videos an effective way to keep your audience’s attention – a fact that can also be applied to your ads!

Here are some key tips to remember when doing so:

• Catch audience’s attention immediately: whilst users are more likely to watch a video, their attention span still remains short, so it’s important that you catch their attention from the very first second – keep your video ads eye-catching from the start.
• Tell a story in silence: whilst you can incorporate sound into your video ads, ensure that you still visually portray everything your audience needs to know without it; not only is this inclusive of those who are hard of hearing, but many users will watch your video ads without their sound turned on.
• Incorporate a clear CTA: as with all forms of ads, you want to prompt your users to take action – remember to use a clear call to action to inform them about the next steps they can take.

Voice

It’s not only important to think about how you present your ads on social media, but think about how your target audience is searching for things on there that might lead them to your business.

One way search is changing is through the use of voice-assistants. The majority of social media users use their mobile for browsing, with the majority of modern smartphones now featuring voice assistance – such as Siri for Apple devices, Google Assistant for Pixel phones and Bixby for Samsung.

Whilst voice assist is more commonly used for general browsing or navigation of a device than on social media, some social media platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, offer the option to use speech as well as text in their search bar.

It’s likely that other platforms will follow suit, with Facebook already in the process of developing its own speech recognition software, a feature that would have the potential to be used to navigate their apps for better hands-free usage.

Many smartphone keyboards also feature an option to use speech over text, allowing users to search social media platforms in this way whenever suits them – offering a faster and more natural way to find relevant content.

So, how do you go about optimising your ads for voice search? We have two top tips in particular that are essential:

1. Research keywords for voice search: voice search queries tend to be longer and much more conversational in nature compared to text searches – consider focusing on incorporating long-tail keywords and conversational keywords into your ad copy, description and/or hashtags.
2. Optimise your site for mobile use: those who use voice search are likely doing so on their mobiles, so make sure that your website and landing pages are optimised to be mobile-friendly to avoid a high bounce rate.

Build Your Social Presence with Bigg

Are you struggling to reach the right audience? Ads not performing as well as you’d hope? If you’ve got no experience with building a business presence on social media, then worry not – we’re experts.

At Bigg, our experienced team is on hand to help you with your social and paid advertising. Creating a custom strategy that focuses on your goals, our efforts ensure that your business’ social presence grows steadily and organically whilst your ads reach the right audiences.

Get in touch with us today to take the first steps towards social success.

Can you imagine a Christmas where you see over a 100% increase in conversions and purchases on your website? What about a 170% return on ad spend? Charles Owen didn’t have to, as this is exactly what happened for them over the 2023 Christmas period thanks to our efforts here at Bigg.

Read on to learn more about their marketing success and how we helped to make that happen – it was a jolly Christmas, indeed!

Introducing Charles Owen

Operating in the equestrian industry, Charles Owen is a leading manufacturer, distributor and seller of professional horse riding helmets and accessories.

They are a family run business and every one of their riding hats is handmade in Great Britain by skilled technicians – having been operating for over 100 years, they are leading specialists in what they do and have even received a Royal Warrant of Appointment recognising as such.

Bigg’s Role

Whilst Charles Owen has already established itself as a world-leading manufacturer of premium horse riding hats in Britain, they came to us here at Bigg to further increase their reach to customers on social media through specially curated ad campaigns.

Not only did they require us to help reach a wider audience of potential customers, but they wanted this with the aim to convert these into paying customers, including both through their own website and by redirecting customers from their site to their stockists’ sites.

Our Strategy

For Charles Owen’s campaign, our strategy focused on streamlining paid ads on Facebook and Instagram. This included:

• Monitoring public comments and reactions to ads to identify the successful ads that audiences responded well to.
• Using A/B testing (showing different users the same ad in a different format) with multiple audiences on both social platforms to discern the most cost-effective use of budget.
• Creating a product-focused calendar for ad posts centred around the equestrian calendar, pushing specific products at different times of the year to avoid audiences viewing the same ad multiple times and ensuring the campaign was regularly refreshed.

Proof in the Pudding

Christmas is one of the most competitive times of year for businesses, but for Charles Owen it was undeniably a success thanks to the efforts of our team here at Bigg.

Compared to the same period in 2022, their 2023 Christmas campaign yielded the following results:

• 170% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS)*
• 191% increase in purchases
• 153% increase in conversions (including clicks to find stockists on website, clicks to the Google Shopping link on website, products added to cart and completed purchases)
• 162% increase in purchase value
• 143% increase in ad views
• 54% decrease in cost per conversion

*ROAS is the metric used to measure the amount of revenue earned for every pound spent within an advertising campaign.

What Made the Campaign Successful?

As you can see from the aforementioned statistics, the results of Charles Owens’ Christmas campaign soared as high as Santa’s sleigh, but what did we do that generated such success?

These results are down to:

• Christmas-related ad copy and creative elements, including the introduction of ‘Gift Guides’.
• Refining target audiences throughout the campaign and learning from previous ad performances to push successful ad types amongst these audiences.
• Introducing dynamic catalogue ads using specifically collated sets of Charles Owen products dependent on the copy and audience for each ad; when a user would see an ad, Facebook would select which products to display from each catalogue set based on factors such as the person’s interests, browsing history and behaviours.
• Pushed higher value items to increase purchase value.

Plans for 2024

Upon reflecting on the campaign’s achievements, we’re excited to continue working with Charles Owen throughout 2024.

As well as continuing to monitor and respond to campaign performance and implement proven strategies, we will be undertaking an exciting new venture as part of their ad campaign: branching out to TikTok!

Many businesses are expanding their advertising efforts to address target audiences on TikTok (an increasingly popular social media platform), which we are confident will be a beneficial move for Charles Owen.

As well as providing target audiences with valuable content in video format, this will also act as another platform where we can implement targeted ads and Charles Owen can sell their products through TikTok Shop – all of which are ideal for expanding reach and increasing purchases.

We’re incredibly pleased to see such envious results for Charles Owen’s Christmas campaign and they certainly were, too. Here’s looking to yet another successful year of working together ahead!

Boost Your Marketing Efforts with Bigg

Are you not seeing the results you want from your marketing campaigns? Leave it to the experts – afterall, it’s what we do!

As seen from the success of Charles Owen’s Christmas campaign, our services here at Bigg deliver tangible results. Thanks to the expertise, dedication and comprehensive efforts of our team, we can work with you to curate a bespoke strategy for your business, targeting the key areas you’re looking to improve and executing effective campaigns that will help you meet your marketing goals.

Are you ready for results? Get in touch with us today to learn more about our services or to arrange your 1:1 strategy call.

Our efforts here at Bigg provide visible results for many of our clients in the automotive industry, with The Car Buying Group being just one example. We continue to achieve remarkable results for them, generating over 16,000 enquiries and achieving 57% year-on-year growth.

Here’s our story…

Who is The Car Buying Group?

Competing against big names such as We Buy Any Car, Motorway, Carwow and Cazoo, The Car Buying Group is another company fighting for a spot in the world of online second-hand car sales.

The Car Buying Group is a platform where people can sell their cars quickly and easily. It works in three simple steps:

1. Valuation
2. Confirmation & Booking
3. Collection

Priding themselves on offering a committed customer support service, TCBG allows individuals to sell their car the very same day thanks to their efficient and easy to follow process.

With some of their USPs including free, nationwide contactless collection, no extra fees for same day payments and immediate, secure payments upon collection, it’s no wonder that they have over 50,000 customers and counting!

Our Brief

As the used-car market has grown in demand over recent years, so, too, has the popularity of car buying websites.

With customers looking for quick, easy and convenient ways to sell their cars for a good price, these sites offer a fast valuation and prompt service, with the added benefit that customers don’t have to pay advertising fees for their vehicle.

Statistics show that 57% of all car buyers claim to get at least one online valuation for their current vehicle.

The Car Buying Group approached us here at Bigg back in 2019 to help boost their visibility and growth within this fast-growing online market, so that they see more customers choosing to use their service to sell their car, rather than through their well-known competitors.

In order to help make this happen for The Car Buying Group, we needed to achieve the following goals:

• Increase the number of leads (in this case, the number of car valuations)
• Convert leads into actual car sales
• Expand prospective audiences

The Strategy

In order to achieve the growth they desired, The Car Buying Group has relied on our paid advertising services, which we agreed would be the best channel to focus their strategy on.

Focusing on various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Google Search and Display, we:

• Launched seasonal ad campaigns and utilised the most engaging ads on social platforms, ensuring ad frequency (the number of times a user sees an ad in a day) stayed low to avoid viewer fatigue.
• Paused underperforming ads, keywords and ad groups to optimise budget utilisation.
• Diversified prospecting audiences by including additional interests, such as competitor brands, to extend reach of ads and enhance the number of interactions – aka leads (reducing the cost per lead!).
• Monitored the percentage of time ads didn’t appear due to insufficient budget, allowing us to pinpoint campaigns with high potential to generate sales, directing the bulk of the budget toward these campaigns.

After speaking with The Car Buying Group, there has also been a change in their budget, with them requesting to upscale back in November. Initially, they had a budget of £20,000, but after seeing the proven effectiveness of our efforts, they increased this by 70%, with a goal to generate 15,000 leads in December.

Increasing budgets gradually (10% at the time) has helped the campaigns adjust to the budget change and optimise delivery on a daily basis. Meanwhile, boosting the Social Remarketing budget has helped capture more conversions from the audiences that had already engaged with the ads and been on the website, but hadn’t yet converted.

The Results

Following this strategy, we are extremely pleased to report that The Car Buying Group’s campaigns have yielded the following results since December:

• 16,366 leads (exceeding the 15,000 goal)
• A cost per lead of £2.20
• A performance increase of over 30% on Google and almost 60% on Facebook this month (compared to the same time in December)
• 1,180,248 impressions

Overall, these results have led to a staggering 57% year-on-year growth for The Car Buying Group.

The Car Buying Group is just as delighted with this success as we are, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with them and grow their successes further throughout 2024!

How Can Bigg Help You?

Are your ad campaigns not currently performing as well as you’d like? You can follow in the footsteps of The Car Buying Group’s significant growth with the help of us here at Bigg.

Unlike many other digital marketing agencies, we have designated teams dedicated to various channels of marketing strategy. Our experienced paid ads team is adept at formulating effective and bespoke advertising strategies for clients in various industries.

From the automotive to the e-commerce sector, whatever industry your business operates in, your ad campaigns will see steady progression with more impressions, leads and conversions when you enlist our support.

Let us do what we do best and help you to grow your business. Get in touch today to discuss how we can make your goals a reality.

In the ever changing world of digital marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) continues to be a crucial component when it comes to enhancing our online presence. As we move into 2024, we could be preparing for a change in the world of PPC advertising. 

Our blog is here to delve into the future of successful PPC campaigns and how we can utilise paid advertising insights moving forward. 

The Future Of Digital Marketing: PPC Trends & Tactics 

PPC has been a cornerstone of digital marketing, allowing businesses to reach and engage their target audiences directly. As consumer habits change and platforms develop, it’s up to marketers to keep up and adapt PPC strategies to move with the times.

AI’s Evolution In Advertising

AI has been taking the world by storm, and not just the tech world. The capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning are revolutionising paid advertising. Automated bidding strategies, keyword research, audience targeting and ad creation can all be improved using AI, allowing PPC campaigns to be more precise and effective. 

In 2024, we can only expect AI algorithms to improve, enhancing the accuracy of overall PPC campaigns. 

Visual Content 

The future of PPC can also expect to see a rise in visual and video content. Platforms such as TikTok have shown us the popularity of short form video content and how engaging this is to target audiences. Even platforms such as Instagram, with their introduction of ‘reels’, are trying to jump on the short video bandwagon, much like YouTube shorts as well. 

In the digital marketing space, these short, snappy videos could be the answer to successful campaigns and engaging audiences. It’s become apparent that PPC campaigns should include some form of video content to grab and engage a high number of consumers. 

Personalisation

Personalisation has always been a part of PPC advertising, but in 2024, we can expect this to reach new heights. As consumer expectations rise and habits change, it’s crucial to keep up so that marketing strategies can be used effectively. Using tools such as AI, we can use data analytics to personalise PPC campaigns on a much smaller scale. A key strategy for enhancing user engagement is to tailor ad content based on individual habits and preferences. 

Voice Search Optimisation 

Voice search has been around for a while, from ‘Hey Siri’ to ‘Alexa’ and now ‘Hey Google’, sometimes we’re using voice search without even realising. But, voice search has an important role to play when it comes to PPC and the developing marketing landscape. 

Conversational PPC strategies are definitely something to look out for in 2024, as marketers work out ways to craft ads that are voice search friendly. Optimising PPC for voice search is crucial to the success of targeted marketing campaigns. 

Campaign Consistency

With multi-channel marketing being so prevalent, the future of PPC campaigns could lie in cross-channel integration. Cohesive campaigns across various platforms can really drive a consistent brand message, which is why PPC efforts need to be seamlessly coordinated across platforms. 

Synchronising your efforts and campaigns across Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram and so forth, will allow businesses to look at a range of cross-channel insights, helping them optimise campaigns for maximum success. 

Understanding Insights: PPC & ROI

We’ve delved into some of the key 2024 trends to look out for with regards to improving PPC campaigns, and the year ahead is full of great opportunities. For those running PPC campaigns, you need to track and measure the performance of your campaigns, as well as your return on investment (ROI). 

The Importance Of Insights 

You may look at insights as a page of numbers and data, but insights are much more than that, and they can help us gain a much deeper understanding of user habits, trends and preferences. Gaining a better understanding of what people need and want can help us as marketers, giving us the ability to create better and more effective campaigns. 

Types Of Insights & Understanding Them

When it comes to advertising, there are a wide variety of insights that we can look at. This could include our audience, competition, cultural insights, trends and even risk insights. Understanding our audience is often useful to understand consumer habits, and using competitor insights can help businesses identify gaps in their strategy. Cultural insights refer to the differences in culture, which can influence consumer decisions and habits. Trend insights look at current trends, as well as predicting future trends in a particular market. 

Understanding these insights lets us put the data to use in a way that can benefit our marketing strategy. We need to understand what it is we want to know, or the problem we want to fix, before gathering any information. Once we’ve understood our problem, we can go and search for data in a range of ways: 

• Talking to people 
• Looking at insight data 
• Watching events 

Once we have our data, we can observe patterns, trends and gaps. Hopefully, our problem or question can be answered with our information, and we can use our data to improve our strategies.

Getting The Most Out Of PPC & Making A ROI 

When we’re talking about PPC and ROI, regular checks and updates should be carried out. This is so that you can assess campaigns, identify trends and room for optimisation as well as looking at your budget allocation. But, how can we track and measure PPC performance and ROI? 

Set Clear Goals & KPIs

Defining your goals before launching your PPC campaign is essential for evaluating how your campaign performs. Your goals and KPIs may vary, but some key objectives to focus on are: 

• CTR (click through rate) – The number of clicks your ads receive, divided by the number of times your ad is shown. 

• CPC (cost per click) – How much advertisers pay for their ads, based on the number of clicks their ad receives. 

• ROAS (return on ad spend) – The amount of revenue earned for every dollar or pound spent on a campaign. 

• ROI (return on investment) – The overall return on investment that a campaign delivers. 

Make sure you set reasonable goals for your campaign, and that these goals align with your budget, target audience and strategy. 

Use Tracking Tools & Platforms 

Measuring and tracking your campaign can be done effectively through different tools and platforms. Google Analytics is essential for analysing website traffic and revenue. There are other platforms you can use like Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook and Google Data Studio. 

Account Structure

Your account structure is the way that you organise your landing pages, keywords, campaigns, ads and so on. A well structured account can help with your PPC campaign and ROI. Well structured accounts will help to segment and target specific audiences more easily, helping your campaign run more successfully. You can test various structures for your account, to find a variation that works in line with your goals and KPIs. 

Monitoring Your Results 

The final thing you can do to measure your PPC performance is to monitor your results. You should compare your KPIs over time, across campaigns, keywords, ads and landing pages. This way you can clearly identify what is working well, and what isn’t working. Regular monitoring of these results will help you to optimise your campaigns and make informed decisions. 

PPC Campaigns & More: How Can Bigg Help?

Bigg is a digital marketing agency based in Bristol, focused on results-driven campaigns and strategies for a wide range of clients. From PPC  and SEO to quality content writing, we offer an astute range of digital marketing services to help your business thrive.

If you want to learn more about our services, head to our website for more information. For more information regarding our PPC or Paid-Ad services, feel free to email us at hello@bigg.co.uk or contact us today.