There are approximately 4,000 km between the most southern part of the Benelux and the most northern part of the Nordics. In between, you'll pass anywhere from 5 to 7 borders (depending on your route).
The Benelux are composed of three different countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Within the region, there are four languages spoken: Dutch (in Belgium and the Netherlands), French (in Belgium and Luxembourg), German (in Luxembourg), and Luxembourgish (obviously, in Luxembourg).
The total population of the Benelux region is 29.3 million inhabitants. You might know Amsterdam (the Netherlands) from the famous channels (or other things we cannot mention here), Brussels (Belgium) from manneken pis (worth a Google search if not), and Luxembourg from the Schengen agreement.
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden make up the five countries that represent the Nordics. This region (also known as Scandanavia) has 27.9 million inhabitants.
The biggest country in terms of inhabitants is the Netherlands with 17.5 million inhabitants. Sweden is the biggest country if you take a look at the km2 with 528.447 km2. The smallest country is Luxembourg in terms of inhabitants and size: This country has respectively 675,000 inhabitants, and the total country size is 2,586 km2. The biggest city in the region is Stockholm (Sweden) with nearly 1.7 million inhabitants.
Why am I talking about all of this? Because both regions share an advanced digital marketing ecosystem with a clear focus on programmatic advertising and innovation. Focusing on programmatic advertising, I'd like to dive into how pairing social media posts with programmatic can be beneficial for advertisers in the Benelux and Nordics regions.
Nowadays, the potential reach of social media posts doesn't have to be limited to the users within the platforms themselves. Social Display ads make it not only possible but easy to show your social media content to an even larger audience with the desired targeting options and completely brand safe.
Users who are active on specific websites and apps across the open web may not necessarily be active on the social media channels that brands are focused on. This means that in addition to the target group being reached on social media, a larger audience can also be reached via traditional media using video and display ads, for instance. Social Display uses the creative assets (images, captions, CTAs, etc.) from social media to then make a Social Display banner that can be found on websites that fit within the set target (programmatic and direct purchases).
Using Social Display has a number of advantages. Here are some of the most important ones.
Social Display allows your brand to reach additional users outside of the walled gardens via traditional display formats. This means that you can leverage your social media assets twice, first within the walled gardens and secondly across the open web. While using programmatic buying for showing the Social Display creative, you're able to target the right audience at the right time and place.
Taking advantage of your social content and distributing it programmatically forces people to notice the ad–they’re not accustomed to seeing social content outside of the walled gardens. Typically, designers tend to focus more on the visuals for social media content than standard banner ads, making Social Display ads more compelling to the target audience.
While the majority of the advertisers see a decrease of value (mainly driven by the decrease of performance) of display advertising, Social Display assets allow you to do the opposite. With people noticing Social Display ads more so than standard banners due to the psychological disruption of seeing social content outside of the walled gardens, the performance tends to increase significantly. With a benchmark of an increase of +50% in CTR, Social Display, when compared to traditional IAB banners, really allows your brand to improve your display campaign performance easily and effectively.
Brands and agencies are putting in lots of time and investment into creating the perfect assets for social media from picking the right image and call-to-action to working on the right caption to use for the post. We've seen this effort go towards both organic and paid posts in different formats (such as static, carousel, and story) for different social media channels. With that being said, it is crucial for brands and agencies to invest in creating relevant and high-performing social media assets. Pairing this effort with Social Display is a nice and logical addition. HoneyBook, a B2B SaaS company, saved over $25K in creative production costs during its Social Display campaign.
It's fairly easy to say that Spaceback offers you a way to combine the advantages of Social Display mentioned in the above points. With Spaceback, your brand can easily create a Social Display banner and reach more people (outside of the walled gardens) with your already-existing social media posts. This leads to an improvement of your overall display campaign performance and therefore more attention and engagement from qualified users.
The process of creating Social Display ads is very simple. Spaceback allows you to easily import social posts and turn them into a Social Display banner. You can take the URL from either an organic or paid social post and instantly recreate programmatic-ready display ads. From here, a well-performing and innovative Social Display ad will be fully automated. You can create a Social Display banner in any desired format and size. It can even be manually adjusted through a relevant CTA and other options. Afterwards, you're in full control of buying media (programmatically and/or direct buys).
Are you located in the Benelux or Nordic regions and want to know more? Contact Nick Kalse at Spaceback, the leader in Social Display solutions, and let's unlock your social posts for their full potential.
