Meta may be the biggest social media beast out here but it’s not always the best!
At Brighton SEO in October 2024 I (it’s James by the way, hi! 👋) revealed three case studies where going a little more niche on our social media ads has proved to be invaluable. By not just plumping for Meta and thinking more deeply and strategically about our clients’ audiences we’ve been able to achieve results and insights that we just couldn’t with Facebook and Instagram.
Let’s look at how we used Spotify to reach younger people in York, and WeAre8 to gather insights from those interested in climate resilience across the UK.
If you don’t fancy a read though, jump to the end to download my slides from Brighton SEO, we won’t even ask for your email! 😲
Reaching younger audiences with Spotify
The challenge: Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity, were reaching older audiences likely to be the carers of those with eating disorders but were finding reaching and encouraging self referrals from younger people, who are more likely to be those with an eating disorder, more difficult. Specifically, they had low brand awareness and a low number of referrals in York, UK.
The solution: After a little research and understanding of the audience we decided to test a small campaign in Spotify, specifically targeting those in York. With a large proportion of those using a free account being younger, and therefore likely to hear the ads more, Spotify made sense.
We created an audio script, which Spotify turns into an audio ad for FREE, and spent a small part of the budget (£250 is the minimum) over two weeks.
The results: While we had higher click through rates on Meta those coming from Spotify spent 66% more time on the website and 44% of all clicks came from the younger target audience at a lower cost than Meta.
Since the campaign, Beat has continued to see a:
⛹️ 20% bounce rate on the York webpage,
⏱️ 2.52 minutes spent on the page on average,
📝 Increases in self-referrals from York.
Engaging those interested in climate resilience on WeAre8
The challenge: As part of their More Than a Tree campaign, One Acre Fund, a non-profit supplying smallholder farmers with everything they need to grow more food and earn more money, wanted to reach more people in the UK who would be interested in their work with smallholder farmers planting trees to create climate reslience. They wanted to gather insights from the audience and build brand awareness.
The solution: We were reaching people on Meta but gathering the insights we wanted and encouraging higher levels of video views was more difficult. So we decided to test WeAre8, a newer social media platform with the ability to reach 1 in 3 of all UK citizens and with an ethos that matches One Acre Fund’s and a more positive way of working than all other platforms.
Research showing that WeAre8 is doing a great job at fostering more positive change in the world, combined with a different advertising model – where users / citizens are given the choice to opt in to recieve an ad, plus get paid for their attention – made WeAre8 a no brainer.
The results: WeAre8 was a resounding success for click-through rate (CTR) website traffic (with 100% of those clicking waiting for the page to load), video views (with 99% completing the campaign video) and for gathering insights from the audience. The great thing about WeAre8 is it isn’t a passive platform where we just push content at people, the ads include a quiz style survey which helps us learn more about the audience and enables us to retarget people based on their responses. And the fact that the attention is so much higher, plus we can offset 2 tonnes of carbon, was a big bonus.
Both of these examples show the impact of thinking a little differently and diversifying your adscape, especially when you have very niche audiences and can get highly targeted.
Learn more by downloading my slides from Brighton SEO.
Want to know more about these two fantastic organisations?
💜 Learn more about the great work Beat do.
🌱 Get involved with One Acre Fund’s #MoreThanATree campaign.
For more social media advice, tips and news check out The Spark, our monthly newletter jam-packed with social media goodness!
James is a strategic and analytical thinker with a creative flair and love for the psychology of social media. He's been working in marketing and communications since 2012 and specialised in social media when launching Social Firefly in 2018. He's an ever struggling piano player, a fair weather sea kayaker and a travel lover.