“Unaccountable” Facebook ads are going to be all the more essential when the lockdown is over
Should Start-ups Like ads of Facebook?
This was the title of an article in The Times I was forwarded the other day, just before the Coronavirus lockdown started to bite.
It made a lot of good points. For those without a subscription/too lazy to read, here are some of the key ones:
Facebook advertising is already vital for small businesses and startups
“Advertising on Facebook can be cheaper and easier than using traditional media such as television, and allows [start-ups and SMEs] to compete with big brands for the same audience”
Small companies (typically >50 employees) spent an average of £23,000/annum on digital services from Facebook, Google and LinkedIn (source: Receipt Bank)
Amen to all of that.
Paid Social is a phenomenal tool for small businesses. It allows them to reach their target audience with messages and metrics tailored to their business goals, be that brand/product awareness or to drive sales/leads.
The article also made this point:
The ease with which businesses can advertise should not be confused with producing effective campaigns that reach the right customers
In particular, the article cites the case of Moma, a company who make instant porridge that I once had dealings with several years ago, who have brought their Facebook buying in house… and frankly aren’t sure if it’s working for them. Or, more to the point, there’s no way of knowing for sure as the data provided by Facebook has to be taken at face value — “It is a bit of a black box”, says their MD.
On the surface you get a lot of metrics back from Facebook that look really interesting and helpful in terms of reach and engagement figures, but there’s no way to validate or audit them
…he said.
And to an extent he’s right. There ultimately is no way of verifying the in-platform metrics. We can verify the click metrics by taking a look at the referrals in whatever analytics package we’re using. And, assuming these numbers tally, we advertisers are left with little other option than to take the rest of the numbers in good faith.
Once we are able to do take this step, however, we can move on from the media metrics to what’s really important. Is your social media advertising driving engaged traffic? What about enquiries? Can you attribute it to sales?
For many this will be easy. The media metrics are fine, but ultimately it boils down to cost-per-leads or cost-per-sales and ROAS.
But for a company like Moma selling FMCGs far removed from a linear online sales funnel, this is trickier. What can be done here to measure true Paid Social effectiveness?
Map sales against online ad spend. Sounds easy. And it is. Plot adspend against offline sales and see if there is correlation. Digital advertising allows us to be precise with the geographic targeting of our ads, so I would recommend knocking out a region for the duration of a campaign and seeing how this region ulifts (or flatlines) versus the others.
Segment. By segmenting our audiences, we give value to our engagement data that we can either trust or not! I recommend you do. By doing so, we can see what content resonates with WHOM. This is a huge benefit to using Paid Social that is so frequently underestimated. An FMCG brand can granularly test their content against multiple audiences and develop future content based on these learnings. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best data we as advertisers we’ll ever get…
Brand-lift surveys. …apart from what we get from Brand-lift surveys! They’re free at the spend levels most FMCGs can afford, so use them. This data is verifiable, and should be a vital tool for any Paid Social marketer. Pro tip: when choosing custom questions, think of those that can be answered on a sliding scale, i.e. questions that ask “To what extent…?”.
I talk in my lecturing about John Wannamaker and his famous quote:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
Paid Social is not perfect by any stretch, but it nonetheless brings us closer than ever before to solving this conundrum.
“And how, exactly, are you spinning Covid-19 into this piece?”, I hear you ask! Well, this kind of advertising is going to be the perfect tool with which to stimulate demand when things get back to normal or even now, if you’re able to fulfil.
It’s adjustable and instant, allowing timely tactical ads without any real commitment to lead times. Paid Social targets people wherever they are (i.e. in their homes), which sounds obvious but is nonetheless a vital point. And then there’s all the points around efficiency that I’ve outlined above.
When rebuilding awareness or reigniting a sales pipeline, we’re going to have to be looking for every efficiency win possible.
And, whilst Paid Social isn’t a perfectly transparent form of advertising, it still gets the closest to being so.