The millennial generation today consumes a lot of information channelized to them via social media platforms.

Rather than hoping from one website to another, they would rather make a comprehensive list of what they wish to follow and consume news stories, updates about civic bodies, give their opinion on current issues and procure information about favorite brands on these platforms.

Today social media channels have emerged as a strong contender existing traditional means of communication for brands – which includes television,print and billboards.

Platforms like Twitter drives engagement via retweets and hash tags, Instagram boosts engagement by using interesting and well-captioned pictures

Likewise, Facebook’s strength lies in its unparalleled reach of 184 Million consumers who access the platform every month, and the fact that it gives brands the ability to curate stories, experiment with videos and content and motion pictures. Facebook’s creative ad formats like PockeTVC, carousels and others help brands to tell a story in a unique and impactful manner. Facebook’s ad formats including image, video, and carousel can generate instant awareness of the nearest business location and provide information the customer needs to get there and even helps large established brands drive in-store sales.

Understanding your audience

Facebook helps brand reach the right set of target audience covering demographic interest & behaviour segments. A native store locator is available for carousel. The store locator makes ads more useful for consumers by putting contact information and openings hours of nearby stores only one tap away. Using these tools, Facebook has the capacity to successfully encourage the customer to visit the nearby store of the particular brand. Even for ad formats like Carousel, Photo and Video Ads that are aimed at driving awareness, 3rd parties like Nielsen have measured and proven that the awareness impact translates to lift in sales from actual physical stores.

Over the last year, Facebook for business has extensively worked with traditional brick and mortar brands and helped them bridge the online to offline gap. Using features like slideshow, carousal ads and more, these brands have been able to reach out to their target audience who are active users of Facebook on mobile and desktop.

Campaigns that have worked for traditional brands

Driving footfall was important for jewelry brand Tanishq, which has 160 stores in 80 cities across India. Most of us still like to touch and feel the jewelry before making a final decision but that doesn’t mean that does not stop the brand to entice its customers to visit their stores.

The brand chose to showcase its designs with stunning close-up shots using carousel ads to catch people’s attention. Crucially, it led them to its offline stores by including a “Shop Now” call-to-action button that brought people to its website, where they could get a discount voucher to be redeemed in-store. The incentive paid off, and Tanishq saw a 30% increase in in-store sales among 25- to 44-year olds during its campaign as well as an increase in in-store footfall, as measured by actual sales data from the client.

Taking a multi-screen approach to driving sales, popular women’s hair removing cream Veet used Facebook to bolster its TV ads and strengthen its campaign with the aim of encouraging women to buy its hair removal cream. The brand partnered with creative agency iContract and Facebook’s Creative Shop to devise an integrated campaign and adapt its existing TV ad into snappier video ads. To ramp things up, it powered the ads with reach and frequency buying to reach 18- to 55-year old women in India on a massive scale. This robust multi-screen strategy made an impact on Veet’s target audience, resulting in 11% incremental lift in in-store sales in a market where Facebook ads were implemented vs. a market where they were not. This was proven by Nielsen’s Matched Market Methodology on not just Veet but for other FMCG brands like Garnier too.

In an era of emerging e-commerce stores and innovative marketing technologies, it has become imperative for brick and mortar brands to opt for modern techniques to keep their consumers engaged. The affordability and feasibility of tools, makes Facebook an obvious choice for brands trying to rework their advertising campaigns and garner more millennial interest for their products.