Her best advice for women in tech? “Have a male name.”
Consumers are interested in longer form content. Examples include the broadway plays “Angels in America” and “Harry Potter,” both of which are 7 hours+ over 2 nights. Andrea’s thoughts: Consumers have limited attention and want to devote it exclusively to quality content. Shortness isn’t the goal, but high quality per time spent is.
There is a resurgence in LIVE content. (Randi was the brains behind Facebook LIVE). Live content creates content scarcity because people want to be part of a shared experience.
There is interest in experiences. Example: one gym’s restaurant lets you pay with a workout.
There is interest in instagrammable photo opportunities. Example: Instagram museum pop ups. For $50, you can go to the ice cream museum, which has pretty rooms themed after ice cream with selfie stations. Wing art on walls allow consumers to stand for photos.
Thought starter: How do we create content scarcity?
Susan Wenograd/Aimclear/”Meh” to “Marvelous”: How to market on Facebook Ads in the Era of Killer competition
Everyone is doing lookalike campaigns and focusing on buyers (people who Facebook has identified as tending to spend). The bottom of the Facebook funnel is squeezed. Facebook is looking for new ad space to sell, but with limited spots, prices are rising while ROI is going down.
Instead, build retargeting pools by optimizing to higher funnel activity (Add to cart, website visits, and “&gclid” aka google click ID in external tracking codes) to create custom audience lookalikes. &gclid is good for products used by a diverse audience that can be hard to find otherwise (Andrea: like AED).
Customers don’t buy right away, yet optimizing to purchase assumes otherwise. Spend less by targeting higher funnel activity, and then retargeting active engagers (like people with 100% video view through). Overall, this strategy is more cost effective and has better ROI. Facebook doesn’t know who will buy, so you’ll get a bigger, better, cheaper audience if you create it yourself. Determine how long to retarget for by looking at analytics for % of people who continue to engage for many days. Remember to exclude date ranges from each other if you are retargeting several date ranges. Use utm_source and utm_campaign in targeting.
Think about the order of videos you present to the customer for an optimal experience. First aspirational, then features.
Use Facebook remarketing to drive email newsletter signups.
Michelle Ross/Apogee Results/Digital Advertising and Data: Fulfilling the Mad Men Creative Promise
Vintage ads stand out on Facebook.
Create several interest groups and target folks high in
the funnel who meet all interest criteria (e.g. golf, expensive brands, and
travel).
Take advantage of Facebook’s Dynamic Creative tool to
put in several pictures/copy/CTAs and let FB optimize to the most effective.
Quinn Tempest/Consultant/How Brands can Harness the Power of Instagram Stories
⅓ of the most viewed stories come from business accounts. 20% of stories get a DM reply. Her personal survey showed that 75% of people said they spent more time on stories versus newsfeed. (Andrea: I’m in the 25%). Stories are viewed as more authentic and content needs to fit that expectation.
Use vertical storytelling with 3 screens that users can
thumb up through. A beginning, middle and end.
Analytics: You want to see forward and backward taps. Don’t be scared by that kind of engagement, because people won’t care about every piece of content in your story.
Use tools for your visual strategy. Clipomatic adds subtitles – useful since most folks view on silent. Use a dedicated content planning tool (not hootsuite). “Later” is her favorite as it’s built for Instagram. It has a free trial.
Use stickers to create engagement (polls, questions,
sliders, customer research)
Be discoverable (use hashtags and location tags)
Highlight the most useful/evergreen stories on your
profile. (Andrea: it’s those circles at the bottom).
Use the guides. Don’t put text under overlays.
Zukerberg owns your social contacts, so you could lose
access to your audience. Move people towards email or leads.
John Triplett/Vertical Measures/Should you fire your Chief Marketing Officer
Know what the CMO job description is at your company. Some companies focus on Commercial, some Strategy, some blended. Sometimes the expanding skills needed make it seem like CMOs have to be able to walk on water.
Check your budget against industry numbers to make a
case for more budget.
Rand Fishkin/SparkToro/The Four Horsemen of the Web Marketing Apocalypse
Now that platforms have proven their value to marketers, they are cutting clicks to your site any way they can. Facebook organic reach has been throttled to nearly zero, Instagram has always prevented outlinking, Twitter and LinkedIn algorithms now bias to on-site content (that has no links), Youtube automatically cuts off your video description just before your link. Platforms’ strategy is to keep consumers content binging on site – and seeing the ads that make the site money.
Even google is not immune. While google does send 10x the organic web traffic of the next best platform (Facebook), for the first time in 2017 even google has started sending less organic traffic overall despite increased consumer use.
Google scrapes your website content and displays it on their results page. Therefore, today 34.4% of desktop searches result in no clicks. On mobile it’s 61%.
Marketers are trying to optimize their sites for this new type of google results display by optimizing their site’s crawlability and organizing their website content into lists. But in some cases even these instant answers no longer come with a link credit to the sites scraped. In this example, it just lists 2 sources in grey un-hyperlinked text.
Since you can no longer trust any platform to send you your audience, your campaigns need to focus on building your retargetable list of site visitors and email contact lists. Focus on low volume high CTR keywords, not high volume keywords.
On the left, an example of a high volume search: steaks. On the right, an example of a high click volume search: buy steak online.
Since social platforms are so hungry for bingeable/addictive content that engages people, use that algorithm in your favor. Social platforms reward the post following a high engagement post, and makes accounts with low engagement invisible. Give them high engagement streaks followed by an ad.
More budget does not equal top ranked ads. If you are a
known and loved brand with a good quality score, top billing may be the
cheapest. Focus on brand exposure first, then retarget to those who know you.
Marketers target influencers in just Youtube and Instagram. Think more broadly. 20% of Americans listen to podcasts yet most podcasts don’t even even have an ad model set up. Offer an expert to come talk on podcasts for free marketing.
Don’t target the most followed influencers in your field, target those who influence your field. That data can be hard to find, but you can ask/survey your customers.
Betwixt & Between 