Category: Insights

With everybody and their mother using social media these days to advertise, it’s necessary for brands to create effective marketing messages that reach and resonate with their consumer base. Enter collaborative social advertising. Through a symbiotic process, brands empower their channel-partners with resources and templatized branding materials while channel partners offer brands their knowledge of their local markets. This enables brands to build and distribute meaningful, relatable social advertising that successfully identifies different audiences’ needs, wants, and purchase patterns. 

Collaborative advertising addresses the crucial need to connect a brand’s power with their channel partners uniqueness. Furthermore, when brands and their channel partners collaborate in advertising, they realize results greater than either entity could achieve on their own. Think of it like 1+1 = 3.

Benefits For All 

    What’s in it for the Brand

• Accelerate customer acquisition through advertising that resonates locally 
• Increase down-funnel product sales/consumption
• Deliver greater advertising spend efficiency through micro-budget campaigns 
• Improve partner performance, brand preference, and loyalty
• Maintain brand quality and control 

     What’s in it for the Partner 

• Receive powerful brand-level tools that would otherwise be out of reach
• Save time and avoid costly mistakes
• Utilize high quality brand creative that elevates their local presence 
• Gain access to brand funded programs and/or co-op options
• Receive direct access to performance reporting and leads

This should be a no-brainer. Neither party has anything to lose, only everything to gain. 

So Why Isn’t Everybody Doing It? 

Using Facebook’s native tools to build hundreds or thousands of ads from scratch for each location is like trying to build a sand castle with tweezers. It’s just too hard and time-consuming to be worth the effort. To achieve this level of localization in social advertising requires advanced automation tools. 

Enter Tiger Pistol

In a post-pandemic world, the modern shopper values convenience and local shopping. Tiger Pistol’s Collaborative Advertising Platform™ marries the recognizable creative of the brand with the locality of the channel partner to facilitate immediate action and a path to purchase without friction. Here’s how it looks in practice: 

Still not convinced that collaborative advertising is the best move for your brand? Here are some performance metrics from our clients to illustrate the positive results: 

• A Global beauty brand collaborated with its salons to achieve a 22% Increase in its professional product sales 
• A Global Fortune 500 beverage company realized 8x ROAS through local campaigns published across their independent network of bars and restaurants. 
• A skin care company partnered with its dermatologist network to recognize 190% higher lead acquisition than national benchmark campaign 
• A nutritional supplement company collaborated with its grocery network to achieve a 36% incremental uplift in sales quantity over the campaign period.
• A beverage giant partnered with a national liquor store chain to recognize a 710% YoY increase in sales quantity. 
• The leading U.S. fabric and craft retailer applied advanced attribution to ads run from their locations to discover that localization drove store visits in 80% of ads that were clicked. 

Tiger Pistol is the only advertising platform that brings true collaboration between brands and channel partners into the digital space. Our platform makes collaborative social advertising stress-free and accessible while delivering unparalleled sales and acquisition results for your brand and channel partners. 

Ready to bring true collaboration between your brands and your channel partners into the digital space? Contact us today. https://www.tigerpistol.com/contact-us/

Facebook CPMs are rising once again, and it’s no surprise that as parts of the world begin to approach a more real sense of normalcy, brands are returning to the platform after many months of holding or reducing spend. While there has always been some seasonality to Facebook CPMs, both COVID’s upheaval and the social justice related black outs on Facebook posting in 2020 likely caused more dips and valleys than normal with ad delivery costs. Even still, AdExchanger is predicting that CPMs are going to continue to rise (and then some more once the holiday season hits). While it may seem like an unavoidable increase in cost due to increasing demand for digital advertising space, in truth, marketers still have much more control than one might assume to manage CPMs. 

Higher CPMs are nothing if not a signifier for increased competition, but in an ad auction system that factors ad quality and relevancy in its bids, you have everything you need to win – regardless of the competition. Facebook lays it out nicely, 

“People prefer to see ads that are relevant to them, and when businesses show their ads to relevant audiences, they see better business outcomes. That’s why we consider how relevant each ad is to a person before delivering an ad to that person. Ads that are more relevant cost less and see more results.”

While all bidding systems have an element of variability, Facebook itself even warns against relying too heavily on relevance diagnostics alone. They do note “an ad that’s relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids.” As marketers, we need to consider our direct control over the inputs to our advertising campaigns. With increased competition on Facebook, it’s a race towards building the most clickable, relevant ads that consumers want to engage with. 

Tiger Pistol’s own data actually shows a different trend, from Q3 2020 to Q4 2020 our aggregate CPM did rise in the holiday period, but has been on a steady downward trend since, carrying into Q1 2021 as well.

In many ways, it is a story of the types of campaigns published through Tiger Pistol, which all tend to be brand focused micro-campaigns – hyper-local, highly-relevant ad campaigns that focus on specific consumers, products, and communities. The effect is a highly-focused ad unit, with a clear call to action and singular focus on driving a transaction at a point of sale.

Tiger Pistol campaigns, whether cross-channel or collaborative, are tightly focused on three key components: proximity, applicability, and transaction optimization – all of which contribute to better performing ads, as they are always constructed in a way that is most relevant for a consumer.

• Proximity: Even under COVID, geo-proximity remains an important component of digital advertising. Tiger Pistol campaigns always work to deliver consumers ad units that feature the point of sale that is closest to them, whether that is a vending machine or convenience store for a CPG brand or a local insurance agent who serves their town.

• Applicability: What’s more, a consumer living in a small town in Ohio, might have two or three grocery stores in town to choose from. A cross channel Tiger Pistol campaign ensures they are shown an ad from their preferred store, the one they actually shop at. If their neighbor prefers the other store? That same campaign delivers them a focused ad unit from that store.
  
• Transaction Optimization: Brand campaign performance is often judged on ROAs, which is why transaction optimization is so important to driving ad relevance and performance. Our campaigns often feature 1-click or fully-contained transactions that allow consumers to interact with ads quickly and purchase products or services.

It is when all these are factored together that a campaign ran through Tiger Pistol is able to show a BOPIS (Buy Online Pick-up In Store) ad unit to the customer that always likes to buy online and pick-up from the store, and a home delivery ad unit for the consumer who prefers to remain at home. Send a campaign like this to Facebook, and you never worry about being irrelevant. 

Taken together, they become more than the sum of their parts. Put simply, it’s all about showing captive consumers where to buy products – capturing micro-moments with an easy path to conversion. It’s a recipe with many different flavors yet with the common denominator of data. If your CPMs are still rising, consider taking a hard look at your creative, your target audience, and the buying paths you ask customers to take. If it’s not imminently obvious where and how they can buy your product or service when delivered your ad, then you very well might be losing out. Advertising is just as much about being inspiring and captivating in the high-minded sense as it is about making it easy for your customers to purchase from you.

Ready to collapse your funnel with Tiger Pistol’s Collaborative Advertising?  See how it works. 

People may be moving physically less, but proximity still matters. Even when transacting digitally, consumers prefer to purchase from businesses that are closest to them. Whether for love of local businesses, the fastest shipping time, or their own familiarity with their neighborhood.

With COVID continuing to force businesses and consumers to evolve their habits, brands are at peak desire to reach consumers in new and innovative ways. While some brands have begun to adjust their purchase path to be more direct-to-consumer, consumers still demand the flexibility to purchase when, where, and how they choose. Even though COVID fast-forwarded eCommerce adoption and usage, the four-year predicted path of this growth shows 4 out of 5 consumers will still shop brick and mortar stores.

Proximity matters. According to a survey from ZypMedia addressing consumer habits during COVID-19, 53% of consumers said they would rather shop from a local business than a national chain. The two main reasons the consumers had for shopping locally was so they could support their community and their economy. 68% of consumers who said they have preferred local shopping during the pandemic, said they would continue to shop from community shops once the pandemic is over. 

Consumers want to shop locally so they can support their brick and mortar neighborhood shops now and in the future, yet consumers still need a place to buy recognizable, brand-name products. 

It’s important for local businesses to capitalize on proximity-based marketing strategies to show how their business is dynamic and able to meet consumers’ pandemic needs and post-pandemic needs. Consumers appreciated the shops and restaurants offering free delivery (57%) and contactless/curbside pick-up (56%) to accommodate different shelter-in-place orders. 

Consumers Want Trusted Brands, but Want to Shop Close to Home

Clearly shopping locally is not going to stop once the pandemic is over, so how can brands support small businesses, while still driving sales and awareness for their products? Collaborative social advertising is your answer.

Collaborative social advertising works because it addresses the crucial need to connect a brand’s capabilities and creative quality to their channel partners. By pairing brands with their channel partners, they can build scaled advertising campaigns that use brand quality creative to highlight their products alongside relevant local details like curbside pick-up options to drive foot traffic for channel partners, with campaigns run straight from the channel partner’s Facebook Business Page. Collaborative advertising provides the ability to deliver better performing, cost-effective scaled social campaigns that will increase consumer awareness of the brand, encourage product consumption, and drive more sales for the local channel partner. Collaborative social ads are also more cost effective than national branding campaigns because they offer a lower cost of advertising, drive sales, and foster consumer engagement. 

Here’s an example of a consumer products campaign that uses Tiger Pistol’s technology to create high-performing collaborative social advertising ads that benefit the brand, the channel partner and the consumers.

Yes, this collaborative approach is a new way of thinking about extending a brand through social channels. Perhaps it’s best we look to our own lives. When was the last time you bought something without consulting peers or reviews? Or considered buying a new product without initially knowing where you can buy it? It’s in our nature to prefer businesses within our community and personal networks. These are all questions that social was built to answer for brands, and by extension, consumers.

Learn more about collaborative social advertising and how it can drive preference for your brand. Contact us today.