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Robyn Ackerman
In Advertising, , Instagram, , Tips

How Facebook’s Latest Change Will Significantly Impact Ad Targeting

Meta for Business and Facebook just announced that beginning Jan 19, 2022, they are removing “detailed targeting options” from the Ads Manager Tool that would be considered “sensitive topics” such as: 

  • Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”) 
  • Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBTQ+ culture”) 
  • Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”) 
  • Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures 

For clients of PDM, many of which provide services in the healthcare, education or professional service  industries, this can have a negative impact on personalized ad reach. 

Thankfully, there are still ways to reach your audience: 

5 methods your company can implement to still drive conversions through Facebook Ads in 2022 

  1. Engagement Custom Audiences: Reach people who have liked your page or people who have engaged with your posts in their News Feed. These people have already expressed a direct interest in your services or products and ads will yield a higher success rate if shown to them. 
  2. Location Targeting: If you own a brick-and-mortar or are advertising a local event, you can reach people in a specific vicinity using location targeting.  For businesses that offer services in the home, or companies that ship products, you may set your radius around serviced zip codes and your ad will be shown to people in those targeted areas. 
  3. Lookalike Audiences: Similar to Engagement Custom Audiences, Lookalike audiences can be built to target Facebook/Instagram users that fall under the same user categories as a seed audience.  Use this option if you want to broaden your reach to people who share interests, locations and have purchased products or services similar to yours.
  4. Website Custom Audiences: You can build a list on Facebook Ads that retargets anyone who has previously visited your website. Using Website Custom Audiences is a powerful remarketing tactic that will increase your conversions by 56%. 
  5. Customer Lists. If you have already built customer email lists in your own CRM tool and have permission from subscribers to use their information, you can upload your lists into Facebook’s Custom Audiences. This tool will help you target, retarget, and stay top of mind with old and new customers.   

Initially, once these changes take effect in January, you may experience a drop in conversions. However, if you set up your ads using any of the above approaches, you can avoid a big decline and keep your engagement and conversion numbers growing. 

Looking for help getting your ads set up? Reach out to a Pop Digital Marketing specialist and Get Discovered. 

Robyn Ackerman
In Advertising, Marketing, , Tips

How to use ‘Competitive Advantage First Language’ in your Marketing

The guidelines around how to develop effective messaging in your company’s ads have evolved considerably over the past 100 plus years. Fans of the TV show ‘Mad Men’ would be aware of the ad creation process in the 60s, which revolved heavily around storytelling via visual marketing collateral. And while that method is still well used, we now additionally rely on digital space advertising.

In the past, our ads drew on teasers, click-bait, and short descriptions in order to prompt prospects to click through to our product or service. As of the latest research, you have less than two seconds to grab the attention of a potential customer online – two seconds and they’re gone, they’ve already continued scrolling.

This means that the very first words a person sees on your posts, your ads and/or your website need to grab their attention immediately. One effective way to do this is by utilizing a competitive advantage first focused approach.

What is ‘competitive advantage first’ language’ marketing?

The competitive advantage first approach focuses on prioritizing your unique offerings, your differentiators in the very first copy of your ads – preferably at the beginning of the sentence.

If you’re unsure of what makes your company different, you’ll need to take a step back and do some hard research. Poll your current customers about what keeps them coming back, looks at what people are saying about your business in reviews, mentions on social, etc. What is it that comes up as the key defining feature that you want to be known for, and that others consistently refer to?

Why it works?

Very few businesses are entirely unique. There are likely hundreds or thousands of companies that do what you do, so you need to stand out to succeed. Catching the customer’s eye with your competitive advantage can be key to giving them a reason to click through.

Your secret sauce needs to be exactly what the customer needs, thinks he/she needs and/or doesn’t yet know they need yet. You are the answer to the question they’re asking.

Once you can adequately identify your competitive advantage, you can start working on the copy to place on your digital marketing campaigns. Your campaign language should visibly state how your service/product brings value.  If you only have those two initial seconds, it’s vital that the first words people see outline a value.

Remember to try and steer with positive adjectives, and to tailor each campaign to the audience you’re targeting.

Examples of Competitive Advantage First Language Ads:

Monday.com

This ad is a prime example of presenting its value to a select audience. Their Competitive Advantage? They’ve done research on their audience and know the demographics they are targeting respond to adjectives like “new generation”.  They lead with that claim.

Additionally, Monday.com claims to be the project management tool for Mac users.  Visually, they fill in their logo with the Mac brand colors to connect the two even further.

Allbirds.com

Allbirds successfully uses competitive advantage first language in this ad.  Look how they structure the ad copy under the video. Machine Washable is the biggest value and they placed that at the beginning of the sentence.  Normally it would be phrased, “When life gets dirty, you need machine washable shoes”.  But Allbirds took the value and restructured the sentence to grab the readers attention.

You can see how, by defining your key traits, you can boost your ad responsiveness. If there’s a key element you serve, it makes sense to highlight that in your copy – and with so little time to stop the scroll, you need to do so quickly.

 Need help with identifying your company’s Competitive Advantage? Let Pop Digital Marketing help you Get Discovered.

Robyn Ackerman
In , How to, Marketing,

Boosting a Facebook Post | Best Practices

Facebook offers a wonderful way to “boost” or “promote” your content by paying a bit extra money (as low as $5).  This is separate from Facebook ads, which requires a higher level of online marketing expertise to generate success.  Facebook has made it quite easy to set-up a boosted ad post which creates an attractive option to those not as skilled in online advertising to try out.  I see a lot of small and medium sized business utilizing this tool lately, yet only about 1/3 of them are doing it correctly.

What is a “Post Boost”?

When your company page writes a status, shares a picture or uploads a video you are given the option to “boost” that post.  See below for a visual on where the option is.  Boosted posts will appear higher up on the newsfeed (note: not in the right ad column) to increase viewership.

Facebook Post Boost

Why you should Boost a Post?

By promoting or boosting a post, you are reaching more people.  If you choose to have the post boosted, you can check a box to have it show up to people who like your page and their friends, or you can target it to anyone on facebook.  You can target people based on location, age, gender and interests.  This will guarantee your post is seen by those who find your business relevant.

What type of posts should be “Boosted” or “Promoted”?

First, it’s important to track your facebook insights to learn which content engages your fans.  Those types of posts will perform the best as a promoted/boosted post.

Second, you have to strategically plan the desired goals and outcomes of this campaign.  Are you trying to generate more likes on your page?  Bring about greater brand awareness?  Highlight a service or event?  Generate traffic to your website?  Knowing this in advance will ensure a higher return on the investment.

Currently, statistics show that boosting a facebook post works best for:

  • Increasing visits to your facebook business page
  • Creating awareness about events
  • Generating interest in online offers
  • Spreading updates and news
  • Contests or Sweepstakes

Best practices for boosting posts:

Make sure that the post you are paying to run has timely information.  For example, do not boost a post that states a date in it: “It’s Wednesday, and we are giving away 5 free….”.  By putting a date on it, anytime it runs after that day, people will ignore it.

Boost a post that generates “likes” and engagement.  Don’t boost a post that requires no action from the viewer.  Make sure there is a question to be answered, a page to be taken to with valuable information, or a hot topic to “like” or even disagree with.  The more action (clicks, likes, shares) the post gets- the higher up it will go with Facebook EdgeRank.

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