"While CMOs, media, creative and brand marketers know the vital importance of engaging consumers with beloved creative campaigns, they are hindered by a profound lack of social competitive intelligence & brand analytics tools that can measure and optimize the top and middle of the funnel, just as current MarTech offerings allow them to for the bottom of the funnel," said Alon Leibovich, Co-Founder & CEO, BrandTotal. "With over 85% of social ads and content being dark posts that are hyper targeted to only specific audiences, brands end up seeing less than 15%, so it's hard to have visibility into what your brand competitors are doing on social media."
Narrow visibility and fragmented social data are two huge gray areas, according to Leibovich, because not seeing a holistic picture of competitors' campaigns makes it impossible for a marketer to make an informed decision on increasing marketing spend or changing up campaign creative.
"Brands are left with big digital advertising questions unanswered: What campaigns are they running (dark, organic) and how are consumers reacting and interacting with these campaigns? Brand decision makers require a 360-degree visibility into their competitive category, but they need the brand and social advertising metrics with contextual intelligence so they can make digital advertising decisions based on data, not feelings," said Leibovich.
He believes brands should begin investing now in social competitive intelligence tools that will cover both dark ads and organic ads, giving that bigger picture.
"Focus groups and panel surveys are important, but they provide only a snapshot-in-time picture and they are not qualitative. It's hard to optimize several ad campaigns in flight based on qualitative data. In a social commerce world, brands need to make rapid decisions in real time and see authentic consumer reactions and interactions on real social media ad campaigns and posts, with both their brand and their competitive brands' campaigns," said Leibovich.
More data from the BrandTotal study can be found here.
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