As businesses invest more in social advertising platforms like Reddit and Instagram, a recent poll of social advertisers found that targeting the right audiences is their number one challenge and biggest barrier to growing social ROAS.
It makes sense — Reddit, Instagram, and other social ad platforms aren’t like advertising with Google. You don’t get the benefit of knowing a user’s keyword search to infer their real-time intent and interest in your products or services.
Instead, social advertisers must define personas likely to convert and guess at the right combination of demographic data to reach them, hopefully at a moment when they are actually in the market. Advertisers also retarget website visitors without any real idea if those consumers are still interested in their business, or if they ever were.
However, there is a readily available first-party data source you can use to determine a consumer’s interest in your business. It’s something many businesses today use to get ads on Reddit, Instagram, and other platforms in front of the right audience, and, just as importantly, away from the wrong ones.
Read on to learn about why businesses say the most valuable first-party data for targeting users on social media is what they say when they call you.
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Reddit and Instagram Ad Spend Are on the Rise
Businesses continue to increase their investment in social advertising. In the US, advertisers spent over $125 billion on social media platforms last year, up 16% from 2024. By 2027, social is expected to grow to 33% of all digital ad spend.
And while businesses are spreading their ad spend across many social platforms, the two growing the fastest are Reddit and Instagram. Instagram is on pace to be the dominant platform for social advertising, surpassing even Facebook. Reddit is smaller, but spend there is growing at the highest rate of any social platform in the US.
If you’re increasing your spend on Instagram, Reddit, and other social platforms, you’re likely facing increased scrutiny from your leadership — or your clients, if you’re at an agency — to prove and improve your return on ad spend and impact on the business. To do it, you not only need to create the right ads, but also get them in front of the right audiences at the right time to convert them.
When Consumers Call Businesses, What They Say Is Ad Targeting Gold
For businesses across many industries, the majority of leads and conversions come in over the phone. From automotive to healthcare, and from home services to insurance, a significant percentage of customers and patients call to get quotes, book appointments, and make purchase decisions.
Those phone calls are arguably your richest sources of first-party marketing data. Each conversation contains a wealth of data on the caller’s intent, product or service interest, and whether they converted. They also contain detailed insights into the caller’s pain points, needs, preferences, concerns, qualifications, eligibility, and more.
This data comes straight from the consumer’s mouth, so it’s accurate. Plus, it comes from conversations they have directly with your business, so it’s proprietary. Your competitors don’t have access to that data, giving you a significant competitive advantage. It’s also first-party data, so it works in our privacy-focused world where third-party data is getting phased out. You just need to capture it and transform it from unstructured data to actionable insights.
Invoca AI Captures the Most Valuable First-Party Data for Audience Targeting
That’s where Invoca comes in. Invoca’s AI transcribes and summarises every call to your business, whether those calls go to contact centres, business locations, or remote agents. The AI also unlocks a wealth of actionable insights from conversations. It automatically detects based on what’s said on the call if the caller is a lead, what product or service they are calling about, and if the call resulted in a conversion.
Invoca has pre-built integrations with virtually every major digital advertising and marketing platform, so it can activate that first-party conversation data in real time across the tools you use to build audiences, including:
- Social ad platforms like Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, and LinkedIn
- Analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics
- CDPs like Adobe Audience Manager, Tealium, and Segment
- CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot
For consumers who called you, you now know if they are actually leads and still in the market for your products or services. You can use that data from Invoca to inform and improve audience targeting across Reddit, Instagram, and other social platforms:
- For phone leads who didn’t convert on the call: Increase conversion rates by retargeting them with ads for the product/service they called about.
- For callers that aren’t leads or already converted over the phone: Reduce costs by suppressing them from seeing ads so you aren’t wasting budget on consumers who aren’t in the market.
- For callers who converted: Extend your reach and grow revenue by adding them to lookalike campaigns to target new consumers who resemble your most valuable audience.
When you start retargeting phone leads, shift the focus of your social ad messaging from “awareness” to “conversion”. You know these people are in the market, so consider showing them ads with a special offer to incentivise action, along with a CTA to buy or book now. You might also consider testing messaging and CTAs around “calling now.” You know these leads already called once, so asking them to call again might be the way to convert them.
Get Started Using First-Party Call Data to Power Social Advertising Success
Targeting the right audiences on Reddit, Instagram, and other social advertising platforms can feel like a guessing game. First-party data from calls to your business can take the mystery out of each consumer’s intent and help you get the right ads in front of the right audiences, and away from the wrong ones. Invoca’s AI makes it easy to unlock that data from calls and activate it in the tools you use to build audiences.
To learn more, watch Invoca’s on-demand Social Advertising Masterclass: From Click to Call to Conversion for a deep dive into strategies to increase ROAS and revenue from social campaigns.
You can also request a demo of the Invoca platform, and our experts will show you how to use Invoca to prove and improve the impact of your social advertising on business outcomes.
