There’s an ongoing shift in the way that brands and their marketing departments allocate and manage paid social media advertising. On one hand, brands are shifting more of their budget to social media because that’s where their audiences are. But, at the same time, gaining a clear understanding of exactly where their advertising investments are being deployed, and what results they are generating, can be challenging.

That’s because the ability to track online ads across multiple social platforms and harvest accurate metrics about their outcomes has been elusive at best. The process is often inefficient and provides little insight into multiple ad accounts that are managed across multiple regions and teams. There can also be challenges with the insecure ways in which data is stored and shared among stakeholders.

This lack of clarity, transparency and oversight of social media ad spending is costing brands their marketing budgets. If marketing teams are unable to properly secure and manage ad data, costs will rise and results will diminish. Brands today require new tools that provide greater control, security and transparency for their social media ad spending.

 

Data security has never been more critical—or more challenging

Data security is paramount to a company’s success and reputation. The myriad high-profile security breaches—and the subsequent executive departures as well as plummeting company stock prices—illustrate this point vividly. However, data security isn’t just an IT issue. It’s also an issue for marketers, who must protect against the wrong people seeing their ad data.


Access to data is not enough; you have to know how to use it, too

In the past, it simply wasn’t worth the time and expense for brands to collect all of their data, clean it and then figure out how to make sense of it. It was simply too costly and cumbersome. Today, though, the ability to transform raw data into actionable insights is a business imperative. And that is particularly true when it comes to social media advertising.

Martech steps in to save the day

The good news is that martech solutions are democratising not only marketers’ access to data, but also access to analysis. Today, the right AI solution can pull data from different systems together easily and quickly, allowing brands more time to clean the data and gain useful insights.

According to Gartner’s CMO survey, last year martech was the “single largest area of investment when it comes to marketing resources and programs”. Moreover, according to a study by Moore Stephens and WARC, brands in the UK and North America increased their martech spending by 44% during 2018. 77% of worldwide social media marketers said that they now use martech tools, with an additional 18% expected to use them in the next year.

Yet, despite the increased adoption of martech solutions, the Content Marketing Institute reports that 50% of marketers said their companies didn’t have the right technology to manage content, and 35% said that are not making full use of the technology that they do have.

So, how can martech help brands gain more control and transparency over social media ad spending? By providing these capabilities:

  • Accurate, unified view of ad spending across multiple teams, accounts and geographies
  • Reliable analysis of ad performance and ROI to help avoid wasting ad budgets
  • Collaboration among marketing stakeholders to ensure uniform objectives and priorities
  • Security for ads data that minimises the risk of data being accessed by the wrong people

Martech solutions that provide more transparent access to data and related analysis can make marketers more effective than ever before.

For brands, this is a time of transition as they reach deeper into the universe of social media advertising. But it’s also a moment of opportunity. Those who seize it by leveraging the latest martech advances for data transparency, control and protection will not only survive this moment; they’ll thrive from it.

 

Written by Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO at Socialbakers.


PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.


comments powered by Disqus