How marketers can extend their social media strategy to the open web

Brands are spending a good chunk of their budgets and manpower on social ads—but are they really getting the most value out of them? We don't think so.

Audiences today are diversifying their digital interactions; yes they are scrolling on social media, but they're also browsing on platforms across the open web and engaging with content in multiple formats. When you limit your ads to social platforms alone, you're no longer aligned with how consumers are actually spending their time online—plus, you're missing the opportunity to extend the shelf life of your social ads.

So what if social creative wasn’t a channel-specific tactic but a scalable, cross-channel asset?

In this blog, we'll explore how extending social-inspired creative to the open web can help brands unlock incremental reach, unify their messaging strategy across digital channels and meet people across the full decision journey.

Where attention really lives: The open web vs. social media walled gardens

There’s no question that social advertising is effective.

Social platforms are built around native formats that let brands tailor content specifically to each app while tapping into trends and current events in real time. In-app commerce features also help reduce friction, making it easier than ever for consumers to move through the purchase funnel without ever leaving the app. For these reasons, many marketers treat social platforms as the end destination for social creative.

But it shouldn't end there.

Consumers today spend ~66% of their time on the open web as opposed to walled gardens. Social media platforms are often considered walled gardens because they are powerful but closed ecosystems that only provide advertisers with the data, inventory and measurement capabilities available within each platform. Marketers that invest solely in social platforms are missing out on a huge number of valuable consumers that are simply browsing elsewhere—plus, they're missing out on key insights that walled gardens don't want to share.

The customer journey is also fragmented, and social media is only one stop along the way. Your best consumers are also:

• Browsing websites
• Streaming TV shows
• Researching products
• Reading reviews

It's is important to keep in mind that people don’t live exclusively inside feeds—social and scrolling is one moment in a much larger journey, not the journey itself.

Social creative doesn’t have to be disposable

So what happens once a campaign ends? Oftentimes that creative gets retired, budgets remain tied up in the social platform and your reach bottoms out, leading to:

• Creative fatigue and audience saturation inside walled gardens
• Limited ability to reach new people

To avoid this, savvy marketers are extending their social reach to the open web by repurposing their social creative for programmatic channels. This strategy keeps what makes social effective while pushing it into environments where people already are, like display, OLV and CTV.

This can unlock several key benefits for marketers, such as:

• Incremental reach beyond social platform limits. Brands can talk to new, qualified audiences who may have never seen their message inside their social feeds.
• Better frequency control. Activating programmatically at the person level helps to avoid over-messaging the same users.
• More efficient use of existing creative. Instead of producing net-new assets, brands can extend the lifespan of their well-performing social ads.
• Exposure to audiences not reachable on social alone. By showing up in other channels, brands can reach users in high-impact moments, and find people who aren't social media users to begin with.

An innovative way to repurpose your social media ads

This is where Epsilon Digital comes in. By taking existing social creative —everything from video to influencer-style content—and extending it across the open web, Epsilon helps brands reach people they may not encounter on social platforms alone. By pairing the speed and authenticity of social with the reach and intelligence of programmatic advertising, we help brands show up in more of the moments that actually influence decisions.

With Epsilon Digital's suite of unique social-inspired solutions, brands can:

• Extract social audiences from walled gardens and message them on the open web. Reach millions of verified social users based on the brands, influencers and interests that they interact with on major social platforms.
• Reach key demographic audiences outside of social platforms. Message Gen Z, millennial and multicultural audiences when and where they’re most receptive.
• Elevate your influencer strategy with curated audiences. Find the right creators for your brand and reach their verified followers across multiple channels

These social solutions are amplified by Epsilon Digital's broader capabilities that enable brands to:

• Reach real people, not cookies or devices. Our people-based identity solution collapses multiple touchpoints into a single ID, so you are reaching each unique customer and not just gaining impressions.
• Activate Deliver consistent messaging across display, online video and CTV. Use multiple channels to reach your target audience wherever they are in their customer journey with a unified brand experience.
• Understand the full picture with closed loop measurement. Connect your ads to real customer actions by integrating their online and offline touchpoints, something you can’t do if your social stays within walled gardens.

Epsilon Digital is also the only solution with identity rooted in real people and predictive AI that ranks each person in real-time, so you can be sure that you’re reaching the best people.

It’s not about replacing social, it’s about making it work harder.

Case Study: Soda brand maximizes reach of social campaign for new product launch

A popular soda brand worked with Epsilon Digital to transform their existing social content into programmatic ads, extending the reach of their social campaigns to online video channels on the open web. This enabled them to connect with their target audiences across the internet, which drove more views, engagement and a successful product launch.

• 2.9M unique individuals reached
• 9.7M impressions delivered
• 17% sales lift by top performing creative

Wrapping it up: The programmatic future of social media advertising

Social is incredibly important for many brands, and it’s taking up more and more budget—but it’s not sufficient on its own.

The brands that win will stop thinking in platforms and start thinking in people and moments. Where are your customers actually browsing? Are you reaching a person, rather than an account?

Want to learn more about how brands are already putting their social strategy to work across the open web? Click here.