Spoke at a summit recently to discuss digital and social media marketing and the best way for local business owners to take advantage of these channels.
Social Content • Marketing • Brand Strategy
Red is a former journalist turned marketer with 15+ years of experience both on the agency side working with entrepreneurs to public companies, as well as in-house working with brands on marketing strategy and hands-on content creation that supercharges brands, builds community, and drives customer acquisition.
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Coming Soon to Facebook Brand Awareness: Attention Impressions
A new metric coming soon to Facebook Brand Awareness campaigns called Attention Impressions will be a huge update for the ad campaign type.
Still not totally sold on #Facebook #BrandAwareness campaigns? Well a new metric coming soon called Attention Impressions is a huge update! pic.twitter.com/FgoNMxvPDY
— Red Zmudzien (@RedZmudzien) December 13, 2016
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#Facebook said Attention Impressions as a metric will be available “later this year” as they continue to test. #SocialMediaMarketing
— Red Zmudzien (@RedZmudzien) December 13, 2016
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Attention Impressions as a metric is aimed at measuring that “thumb stopping” moment as a user scrolls through their #Facebook newsfeed.
— Red Zmudzien (@RedZmudzien) December 13, 2016
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Snapchat Mobile App Install Ads: Swiping Over Tapping
In an effort to expand its slice of the social media marketing pie, Snapchat is expanding into mobile app install ads. The theory behind lots of Snapchat advertising is that the user is more engaged on Snapchat as opposed to passively scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed thus more likely to remember and respond to an ad.
Something that Snapchat has done that is a fresh new take on the app install ads is eliminating the need to *sigh* actually click the screen. With a simple swipe up, you’re already on the app download screen, which sounds small but in early tests is showing a huge return for advertisers. According to this Ad Age article, the micro investing app Acorns started running these Snapchat mobile app install ads and is seeing a 40% higher install rate than Facebook.
Say what you will, but Snapchat has lowered the barrier of entry with these ad types. As small as it may appear, requiring a swipe vs a click, it is faster and requires no new screen to load. This is something that Facebook itself already knows, evidenced by ad types like Lead Ads and Canvas Ads that remove the need to click out of Facebook. Or even Instant Articles which are pre-cached to remove any unwanted load times.
What may have started as a self-serving agenda by Facebook and others of keeping users on the social channels rather than clicking out to a website, is also seemingly having a huge positive impact on advertisers as it makes it even easier for users to respond and engage.
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Facebook One Step Closer to Seamlessly Integrating Mobile Payments
Facebook Messenger recently added PayPal integration and it was just announced that MasterCard account management is coming soon. So it seems Facebook is getting closer by the day to adding the feature digital marketers everywhere should be absolutely giddy about; the ability to seamlessly make purchases within Facebook.
Courtesy of TechCrunch The more we as marketers can reduce friction and lower the barrier of entry, the easier it is to sell products and services. It may not seem like much asking customers to visit your website, add an item to a cart and then enter in all their Credit Card info to make a purchase. But, People. Are. Lazy. The easier you make things for them, the more likely they are to purchase. Just take Amazon for example. They’ve made huge leaps over competitors by simplifying the checkout process. You can see a product on Amazon and within two taps its already confirmed and on its way to your house. Now that is a frictionless experience.
It will start with MasterCard, but when more Credit Card providers get involved and as users get more comfortable sharing their CC info, as well as their Bank Account info for Debit Cards, the easier it will be to sell on Facebook.
This gets back to not being romantic about what works and what doesn’t. Say what you want about websites and website design, but Facebook is slowly making them less and less important. Do you think its a coincidence that more and more of the Facebook products keep you on their platform rather than direct users to your website? Take Instant Articles, Canvas Ads, Lead Ads as just a few quick examples of that. If you make money by selling ad space based on impressions to your website this is an issue, but for everyone else who cares? Don’t be romantic. Take advantage of what works. And what usually works is what captures the customer’s attention and makes it easy for them to buy. Don’t get in the way of a sale because there is nothing more frustrating than shopping cart abandonment.
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Google Specialist Challenge Completed
Google threw down the gauntlet recently with its Specialist Challenge to earn the certifications for Advertising Fundamentals, Search, Remarketing, Video, Mobile and Shopping.
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Split Testing is Now Available on Facebook
Facebook is now starting to roll out Split Testing in Ads Manager, which is essentially an easier way to test different variables in ad campaigns to see which ones perform the best. In the past you would have to run separate ad sets to perform tests like this, but wasn’t necessarily a pure A/B test. This is something that Google AdWords has offered for some time, allowing campaigns to experiment and split test. It’s a much welcomed addition to the Ads Manager as one strategy, targeting method, or ad objective that works great for one campaign doesn’t necessarily work the same for others.
So if you’re still having internal debates over whether this ad campaign should optimize for Website Clicks or Conversions, now you can run a split test and see which actually does the best. Learn what works the best for different campaigns and maybe you’ll unearth something totally unexpected.
Have you ever wanted to easily test the same ad on two different audiences to see which performed better? Or maybe you’d like to figure out which optimization type yields the best results, optimizing for Conversions or Link Clicks? Advertisers run tests to identify the best ad performance on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network and to understand how changes in different aspects of their ad can impact ad performance. Tests like this need to be set up fairly so that advertisers can understand the true impact of their ad strategies on the performance of their ads.
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Snapchat Updates to Stories and Discover Will Massively Effect Advertisers
Snapchat just made some huge changes that users may not initially notice, but advertisers definitely will. The Discover tiles have been moved down from their previous perch at the top of the Stories screen to somewhere much lower down the feed. Discover is where most big name advertisers buttered their bread with everything from ESPN and NFL updates, MTV hyping new artists or TMZ talking about the latest Kardashians news.They were attractive and they were prominent. I found myself perusing Discover much more when it moved over to the tiles within Stories rather than when it was on its own tab originally. Now with the tiles moved much further down the screen it has many advertisers worried.
Oh well, these things happen. Remember how infuriated brands were when Facebook significantly pared down organic reach? Well then Promoted Posts came out and they became the biggest arbitrage advertising had seen in a long time. Then those got paired down and out came the massively underpriced Facebook Video and so on and so on.
Fear not though, Snapchat isn’t going to just abandon one of its best ad products without any kind of new features or improvements. And it seems like that may be coming as a result of Snapchat’s other update – Snapchat Playlist. Previously users could go to their Stories and just go through all their friends automatically, as soon as one story ended, Snapchat would automatically go to the next one. Now with Playlist, Snapchat is having users select which stories they want to see, rather than play them all at once. Does this make for a better user experience so you aren’t watching every person’s story, many of which you don’t care about? Maybe. But it also provides potential opportunities for advertising in between these selected stories. Now without the automatic jump to the next story, Snapchat has created an avenue to sell ad space like a commercial in between stories.
Expect more tweaks to the UI and UX as Evan Spiegel and team continue to grow the Snapchat ad platform and its potential. Especially now with competitors like Instagram Stories gunning for them.
Red Zmudzien 