5 actionable news from our day in Facebook

We are bringing you insights and news directly from the source as we went to Facebook, Dublin for a special day full of workshops and sharing knowledge. Nikol Chmelíčková brings you the 5 most important news in a brand new article. Read about an interesting typology of customers based on the length of attention and why you should focus your attention on the right attribution and video content.

1) Think long-term 

As a business owner you can get easily caught up in short term sales success and forget about the sustainability when the peak is over and the customers’ buying behaviour changes. For every business it is necessary to have a long term strategy in order to survive within the competition and strengthen your brand awareness. When applied to your Facebook advertising, this theory basically means you are advised to run a continuous brand awareness campaign along with your performance campaigns. 

The ideal strategy is to have these two approaches in mind when creating your Facebook marketing strategy: 

  • Direct response message 
  • Brand message 

Direct response campaigns are performance oriented campaigns aimed at bringing you sales and communicating new products and special offers that encourage your customers to convert instantly. However, it is in fact the brand narrative that brings you the growth and volume in the long term. Facebook can then provide you with a Brand Lift study measurement solution to have a better understanding of how your brand is perceived. 

2) Think about the types of your customers 

People are fast consumers, our brain needs just 13mil sec to recognize an image. Therefore, it is important to make sure you are relevant with your visuals to deliver the image recognition and message fast. Based on the length of attention we can divide the consumers into 3 categories: 

  • On-the-go consumer who is generally a user who sees your ad when waiting for a bus or scrolling the newsfeed briefly on a lunch break. For this occasion, single images or gifs with quick and comprehensive message should be used.
  • Lean forward consumer who is typically commuting to work and have more time to engage with your ad. A user in this kind of situation will have more space to engage with carousel or collection ads showing your products.
  • Lean back consumer who is surfing Facebook before going to sleep or after dinner and has the most space to engage with your ads and consume more complex content. In this scenario it is advised to use the FB campaign timing to display longer brand videos to customers who already engaged with your business previously and have a general idea of your business.

Based on this consumer typology, your advertising efforts should be divided by 70% for on-the-go and then 20% and 10% for lean forward and lean back consumers. 

3) Attribution and incrementality 

Facebook now more than ever focuses on the right measurement of your advertising efforts. You might know from your experience that analyzing and reporting your campaigns’ performance is sometimes challenging. It is important to analyze your customers journey in detail and not only look at the final amount of purchases for instance in Google Analytics without any context. For a better understanding of this, Facebook advises you to really utilize the functions of the Facebook Attribution tool. There you can visualize results in up to 90 days after view or click. This enables you to see what role Facebook plays in your customers journey. The major difference in comparison to Google Analytics is that Facebook is a view based social platform and therefore takes into consideration not only post click but also post view conversions which is something you will not see in Google Analytics where only click based conversions are measured. 

Let’s move on to the new buzzword in marketing – incrementality. This is an important indicator that reveals quantitatively, how much your Facebook advertising impacts your sales and can tell you how many sales were placed as a result of your Facebook advertising. This focus on incremental conversions can answer the question on how many of the conversions from Facebook advertising were placed as a result of your ads and how many users would have converted anyway. For being able to identify quantifically how much your advertising strategy on Facebook contributes to you overall sales, Facebook provides a solution called Conversion Lift

4) Leverage the expansion of your business with new FB features 

When thinking about expanding your business to different countries, there are 3 areas that should be taken into consideration: 

  • Look into the markets properly
  • Have a test & learn approach
  • Automate as much as possible

Before diving straight into Facebook advertising, the most important business question is which market to expand to. For more general information about different markets, take advantage of Facebook IQ insights here and see the different opportunities for you on Facebook across different markets. The next steps for you should be modelling the Facebook strategy on the new market and adopt the test & learn approach, meaning always testing creatives and messaging before going all in. For this the Facebook split testing feature is advised to be used to clearly identify which kind of visuals are the most appealing for each country or region you intend to expand to. Once you identify the best performing creatives and the most relevant copy, your focus should be on automation. Facebook now offers features like Dynamic Language Optimization or multilanguage catalogue to really leverage the performance on new markets, save time a boost performance.   

5) Focus on mobile and video

Users in general spend 5x more time on engaging with video ads content than on static images. This does not mean you need to invest a huge part of your advertising budget to a video production but rather to look for opportunities to incorporate a simple motion elements into your ad to create a more immersive experience for your customers and ensure people will engage more with your ads. 

In the last part of our Facebook workshop, Stories were mentioned as a massively growing placement in terms of number of active users and engagement generated. The ideal link of all the recommendations above would be to incorporate a brand campaign for your business with placement Stories and vertical video visuals to drive more brand awareness and support your business long-term.  

Related Posts