Back to Basics: How to Stop the Scroll for Social Media Advertising

Sudipto Ghosh

April 10, 2018

Social Media Advertising That Brings a Mix of Entertainment and Education with Discounts, Resonates with the Audience

Ineffective social media advertising practices could prove to be detrimental to brand health and demotivate the best influencer marketing agencies. According to a recent Sprout Social report¹ on the best practices in social media advertising, a significant percentage of social media consumers are disinterested in social media ads. In fact, the social media marketing software company found that there is a collective perception about social media ads – Too many ads overall; and, nothing to stop users scrolling past the ads!

It looks like the time is ripe for marketers to focus on the basics of advertising without losing their grip on creating and delivering hyper-personalized ads. Sprout Social suggests that marketers could break the mould by diving into data and letting consumers act on social ads.

Here’s what Sprout Social found when they asked 1,000+ respondents about the ‘most engaging social ad content’:

SproutSocial_Stop the Scrolling — via Sprout Social

Clearly, online audiences are interested in content that engages and entertains them and strikes a ‘friendly’ conversation that is brand-to-person and not influencer-to-person. Also, video content remains the most powerful engagement tool for social media ads to perform well.

83% of the respondents found video as the most engaging ad content format. GIFs and emotion-stirring content also resonated well, especially with Millennials.

Click to Learn More: Ads that Educate and Embrace Call-to-Education (CTE) Signify Welcome Disruption

An informative social advertising campaign does much better when compared to ones that let consumers buy directly from the ad and let them to reply their opinions and feedback on the ads. In short, brands that offer informative ads fire up the social experience with a CTE.

Discounts: Still the Eye Candy for Social Ads to do Well

Across generations, ads that promote a ‘Save Money, Buy Now’ message invariably remain popular. Social media advertisers that bring a mix of entertainment with discount themes resonated with the audience. CTE remains an important element in this engagement model.

Relevant Ads – Plug the “Stop Scrolling” Tendencies

Your social media advertising campaigns could still fail if you deliver entertaining educative content and discounts, sans relevance! Sprout Social recommends that the best way to ensure relevance in your advertising is to understand the audience that you intend to reach. Testing the message and analyzing the performance of could save brands millions of dollars, even as they try to align their social media advertising budgets with consumer expectations. A consumer is very much driven by “me-me-me”, and brands that demonstrate the ability to be diligent and read consumer’s minds are best poised to prevent users from scrolling past their ads on social media.

¹The Sprout Social survey was conducted by a SF-based brand intelligence platform, Survata, which interviewed 1,004 online respondents between 5 March and 6 March 2018.