How to Win on Facebook in 2021 - THE CMO LETTER December 2020 - Markacy
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2 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 Scale Your Advertising Budgets on Facebook: What CMOs Need to Know to Win If you’re running a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, there’s no getting around it. Love it 3 Things You Need to Succeed or hate it, Facebook needs to be part of your marketing-tactic arsenal. When done right, however, Facebook is one of the most cost-efficient ways to acquire new customers and tell your story to potential customers. It’s also not going anywhere. It’s only getting stronger and will continue to get more expensive as more advertisers join on. Account Structure Testing Creative The biggest mistake you can make? Jumping in without a real strategy in place. Keep reading and we’ll share some of the keys we’ve learned, through our own internal efforts as well as what we’ve done for clients. Like we mentioned earlier, your strategy is the key to success. If you want to see campaign results, you’ll need to learn the ins and outs of the platform. The days of uploading a static ad and pressing “go” are over. To beat your competitors, there are three things you’ll need to focus on. How Facebook Fits In There are a few reasons why Facebook is a must-do for DTC brands, and it all comes down to the platform’s capabilities: Correct Account Structure Account structure refers to the overall way you set up ads, ad sets, and campaigns within the • In-Feed Ad Unit: Unlike other digital ad units (like banners) the in-feed Facebook and Facebook ad manager UI. Instagram ad unit allows you to reach users without being intrusive, in a way that feels native and in a place where their attention is concentrated. Good account structure should be rooted in an understanding of Facebook’s algorithm and • Reach & Targeting: Almost everyone in the US can be reached on Facebook or is important because it allows you to quickly identify what ad placements, audiences, and Instagram. The extremely large user base also means that Facebook has extensive data interests are working and which are not. on user behavior, specifically when it comes to how users respond to ads. • Real-Time Bidding & Precision Tracking: Buying ads in a real-time auction, with Without the right structure, a few things can happen. First, you may end up wasting some immediate feedback and precision tracking, allows you to effectively optimize your of your budget, as underperforming ads might receive more investment than they should. investment. Facebook truly delivers on the promise of programmatic advertising, an Second, it makes it really difficult to follow the test-and-learn process that should go into all appealing model because it allows more control (adjust budgets at any time) and of your campaigns; it’s hard to untangle bad ad performance from poor campaign structure more immediate feedback (track who purchases after seeing an ad) than traditional so you can’t confidently identify your top performers. advertising.
3 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 Here are a few do’s and don’ts to keep in mind: DO… DON’T… • Set up your campaign to prioritize the combinations of targeting and creative that are • Use multiple campaigns all with the same objective. Since budgets can’t be shared working the best. A good way to do this is to identify unique objectives for each of your across campaigns, this means you’ll have to manually determine which combinations of campaigns (e.g. one for prospecting and another for remarketing), using campaign creative and targeting should get more spend. The reality is that in 95% + of cases, you budget optimization (CBO). won’t be able to guess this correctly. With this “bottom-up” approach, you set a budget at the campaign level instead of at the ad level. Facebook will automatically allocate budget to the best-performing ad sets, leading to more efficient spend overall. Quick tips: Understanding the Differences Between • Evaluate the data you get and use it to inform your future campaigns. For example, we Prospecting and Remarketing helped one of our clients Diggs - a premium pet products company - identify the impact of video carousels on their media buying (see more details in the Creative section below). Prospecting: The right structure provides for statistical confidence in creative insights - allowing brands Ads that target users who to double down on success areas instead of getting caught up in the minutiae of FB’s ad- haven’t visited your site. buying platform. Remarketing: Ads that target users who have been to your site. You can also target users who have completed certain actions, like adding something to their cart, landing on a specific product page, etc.
4 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 A Solid Testing Plan • Performance is usually measured relative to the campaign Once your account and campaign objectives are set, it’s time average along with the general target expectations for to move into the testing phase. The idea here is simple: you core KPIs. need to get an understanding of which ads and audiences are truly working. Facebook’s Law of Small Numbers The respective buzzwords here, if you’re not familiar, are creatives and targeting. Your creative refers to what the ad How do you evaluate an ad that performed well, but looks like - images, video, motion graphics along with the didn’t get a ton of spend allocated? Remember that respective copy. Your targeting is exactly as it sounds: what when an ad or ad set doesn’t receive spend, that’s often audiences are you trying to reach? Facebook allows you to for a reason. So don’t take it as a sign to force spend get super specific, including location, age, and, if you’ve Note: This isn’t always set in stone. In some cases, it may make sense to the ad right away, because the limited sample size placed a pixel on your site, if they’ve visited a certain page or to customize ads for specific audi ences. As an example, if you’re promoting dog food and one ad set can skew your results. Instead, try pausing your low completed a certain action. performers so you can have a better comparison point. targets people interested in French Bulldogs, you may want to show them an ad with a French Bulldog image, instead of the Golden With the right testing in place, you’ll be able to confidently Retriever ad. understand things like: • Set up the right testing cadence. We recommend • Which ads are performing the best introducing new ads every week (where possible) and • Which small details in each ad led to different results quickly pausing out under-performers in order to ratchet • How many ads to run at once performance up to a higher level over time. The graphic • Which ads to pause (and when to pause them) below shows how ads that exceed performance thresholds • When to introduce new ads to your campaigns will remain live in the campaign while others will be paused out as new ads are rotated in. If your testing is too hasty or disjointed, top performers may be discarded before you can identify them. If testing is too slow, underperformers will receive more investment than necessary. Here are the do’s and don’ts when it comes to testing: DO… • Use all of your ads in every ad set. That way, you can easily see which creatives are outperforming the others.
5 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 DON’T… • Use inconsistent ad sets. Again, if you re-use an ad in more than one ad set, it will be hard to know if the performance is a result of the audience being good prospects, or the creative being better than the other ads. • Get tripped by the sheer scale of ad combinations and ad sets. If you have 2 campaigns, 6 audiences per campaign, and 5 ads per audience (our best practice) that means you have 60 ad-audience combinations active -- it’s hard to effectively evaluate performance at that level of detail. • The secret is to aggregate creative performance at the account level. This makes it • Some folks may ask… “But what if viewing ad performance at the account level ignores more than clear which ads are your best performers: you can rank them from best to nuanced differences in ad performance by audience?” worst by any KPI. See reference guide below. • In the overwhelming majority of cases, differences in creative performance by audience reflect short-term variance, not long-term underlying differences. Your audiences are not that different from each other: if users in your 1% lookalike engage with an ad, users in your 3% lookalike will too. The only exception here is if ads were tailored to specific audiences—like with the French Bulldog example earlier.
6 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 The Right Creative You want to see great results from your campaigns, of course. But you also need to build a Video carousels are ad units that pair a video as the first card with several additional brand that consumers connect with. Creative that is purely transactional won’t do that. product-focused images. Similar to instant experiences, they allow users to browse products and product features in-platform. Fortunately, with the right creative approach, you can build a brand and drive revenue all with one ad. DO... • Focus on a hybrid solution that fulfills both functions: develop your brand and convert users. • Experiment with motion graphics and video-led carousels. Videos can help introduce the brand and your unique selling propositions (USPs), which is especially helpful for newer companies (or if you just don’t have a ton of brand equity yet). Client Case Study: Video Carousels in Action We worked with dog crate innovator Diggs to create videos that touched on key brand pillars (e.g. travel and interior design). We then used those videos as the first card in video carousels (to introduce users to the brand) and product-focused images later in the carousel (to demonstrate specific product features and selling points). The result? The video carousels outperformed campaign-average ROAS while holding a 30% better conversion rate than average.
7 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 DO... • Explore seamless carousels to showcase multiple • Use bold and full-screen mosaic stories to catch the products, social proof, and a storyline that highlights scroller’s eye. In a case study from Instagram, beauty • Try “Instant Experiences” to facilitate education, product your core USPs. Note: On Instagram, ads are perfectly retailer Ulta saw a 63% higher ROAS with two-card exploration, and brand awareness. seamless, while on Facebook there will be a thin line to carousel video ads (compared to single video ads) and separate the images. a 2.6X higher click-through rate with two-card carousel video ads (compared to single photo ads). Instant experiences open a landing page within Facebook or Instagram, allowing the user to browse and learn about the product before going to the site. This can improve conversion rates significantly, especially for more premium products. Client Case Study: Instant Experiences in Action “Swipeability” triggers natural curiosity. The format pushes For Diggs, we saw that instant experiences drove a 52% the user to “find out more” and helps send signals to better ROAS than other ad units, driven by a conversion Facebook about the user’s interest. rate that was more than 300% better than the campaign average. • Try sequential Instagram stories to encourage engagement. For example, you could create a multi-card story that’s a quiz, guiding your prospective customers to • Use dynamic product catalogs to highlight specific the right products in your catalog. products. You can even target users more specifically by using product attributes based on user interests and behaviors.
8 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 Making Facebook Work for Your Brand With the right strategies in place, Facebook can be a cost-effective platform that helps you attract new users, optimize your ROAS, and improve your overall brand equity. But it’s not always easy—and that’s why we’re here to help. At Markacy, we act as your strategic partner to identify and execute the right marketing tactics that help deliver financial results. Get in touch today at info@markacy.com to learn more about how we’re helping leading brands make their mark.
9 The CMO Letter - How to Win on Facebook in 2021 www.markacy.com Tucker Matheson Chris Jones Partner Partner 781-974-9936 908-304-5732 tucker.matheson@markacy.com chris.jones@markacy.com Boston, MA New York, NY
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