Social marketing programs are often dominated by Meta advertising. Despite Facebook and Instagram occupying a little less than 42% of social media usage time, these platforms draw around 75% of all social media advertising dollars.
Those platforms are highly-effective, but they clearly aren’t the be-all-end-all of social media. At ADM, we encourage clients to pursue social omnipresence by investing in other popular social platforms in addition to Meta.
In this blog, we’ll discuss a recent example where a client came to us looking for ideas to grow their social presence. We’ll explain the platforms we recommended (Pinterest and TikTok), why we recommended them, and how the client’s decision to pursue those opportunities paid off for their bottom line.
Recommending Pinterest and TikTok Ads to an Apparel Brand
One of ADM’s clients, an eCommerce-focused apparel brand, was seeing success with its Facebook and Instagram ads, but wanted to reach more potential customers and increase overall share of voice. The client had been previously running organic content across additional social platforms, but was looking to test paid investment in new areas.
While organic content is effective at driving top-funnel metrics, like views and brand awareness, ADM’s priority for our clients is to drive bottom-of-funnel movement, from clicks to conversions. The goal was to establish a new paid presence, and then scale up while maintaining efficiency.
With this in mind, our team set about researching which additional platforms could provide the largest growth opportunities for the client, even with modest initial budgets. We looked at demographics, common creative approaches, and eCommerce apparel success stories, and settled on Pinterest and TikTok, for the following reasons:
Pinterest advertising can be a natural fit for apparel brands, for a number of reasons. It’s a highly-visual platform with a huge library of lifestyle and fashion content, and we knew our apparel client’s products were a natural fit for the platform and that they’d be able to find an audience there. Pinterest has a user base of about 400 million people, but significantly less advertising competition than most social platforms, meaning ad dollars can be spent very efficiently there.
While Pinterest might be a niche platform, TikTok is an upstart with wide appeal and enormous continual growth. Its fast-paced, frenetic video feeds give advertisers the opportunity to stand out with different content and messaging that what they’d use on, say, Facebook. While its demographics aren’t limited to teenagers and early twenty-somethings, like some may believe, it is more popular among younger audiences than a platform like Facebook. We find it can be a good fit for many clients whose products are highly-visual and targeted at younger-to-middle-aged audiences (like an eCommerce apparel brand).
Expanding Apparel Advertising on New Platforms
We pitched two platform expansion plans to the client, complete with specific targeting and creative recommendations, and were given the green light. For both TikTok and Pinterest, we were given the go-ahead to start with a $5000 budget for each.
Because the client was focused on reaching new audiences and obtaining new customers, our approach was to focus on testing from the moment we launched in order to scale effectively within a modest budget.
When launching on a new social platform, don’t just try to repurpose creative that’s had success on other platforms. Even if that creative has performed well, there are no guarantees that it will match the tone and feel of the next social media environment. We worked closely with our apparel client to develop unique, platform-optimized creative for both Pinterest and TikTok that had the best chance to succeed on these new platforms.
From a technical standpoint, it’s also vital to have your ducks in a row. Before launch, ADM’s Data and Analytics team set up appropriate pixels and tracking, so that we could make data-driven decisions regarding our campaigns and their success. This was key, because we devoted our initial budgets to prospecting and remarketing, continually optimizing to maintain and build upon strong early ROAS results.
Scaling Up New Platform Campaigns for Growth
As our clients grow as a brand, it’s important they have a presence on all relevant social media platforms. The sooner a brand has an established presence, the more quickly it can leverage that presence to increase revenue and expand its customer base.
For our apparel client, early results were impressive—and encouraged them to further scale their investment. Over a two-month period following launch:
- TikTok initial ROAS was 56% higher than goal
- CVR increased by 50% MoM on TikTok following launch
- Combined ROAS increased by 72% MoM in the first two months following
In the months that followed, the client scaled investment on both platforms due to the results they were able to achieve. They are now reaching a much larger audience, have an increased share of voice across multiple social platforms, and have multiple revenue streams from paid social instead of just Meta.
If you’re interested in finding new ways to expand and scale your social advertising efforts, don’t hesitate to reach out to ADM today. Our expert team offers an array of creative solutions and a wealth of social expertise across all major social media platforms to ensure you’re reaching new customers and generating the new revenue you need to fuel your growth.
