08
Q3 • 2023
COVER STORY
Q: It’s easy to scroll past ads on Facebook because we see so many of them. Any tips on how a company can improve its customer acquisition on Facebook?
MS: One of the most important aspects of effective ad campaigns is to craft your content to seamlessly fit into posts we see from friends so that your ads do not feel interruptive to users. In fact, Facebook Cofounder and CEO Mark
I recommend testing the lead-generation ads through the prepopulated form and/or via responses on Messenger, Instagram Direct, or WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg and Former COO Sheryl Sandberg stated back in 2014 that their goal was not so much to increase the quantity of ads on Facebook, but to improve the quality of ads so they felt as relevant and as timely as the content your friends shared. This idea is still very much on point for advertisers today. I recommend testing the lead-generation ads through the prepopulated form and/or via responses on Messenger, Instagram Direct, or WhatsApp. This approach works very well for customer acquisition with well-targeted campaigns and compelling creative, because nearly 70 percent of Facebook users in the United States access the platform via their mobile devices.
Q: The beauty of social media is that a brand’s owned channels are measurable. What should marketers be measuring to gauge the ROI of their social media marketing?
MS: I put social media metrics into two categories. The first is proxy metrics (growth in followers, reach, and all engagement, such as reactions, shares, comments, video views,
Reel plays, and more). Brands do need to keep a watchful eye on this set of numbers, but the second category—what I call your business metrics—is even more important. These are traffic, leads, conversions, and sales. These metrics demonstrably move the needle to grow your business. The CEO and CFO of any company needs to know both sets of metrics, but with a heavy emphasis on translating exactly how the proxy metrics are actually helping grow the business. Some businesses and brands may not have impressive public-facing engagement metrics, and that’s okay, because we never know what they might be doing behind the scenes with paid campaigns to drive significant traffic, leads, and sales. It’s true that anyone can look at any Facebook business Page and see what ads they’re running, but you can’t see the results of the ads or all the parameters.
Q: Regarding ad spend, how can novice Facebook marketers know that their money is being used smartly and that they are not being “duped” by the Facebook ad machine?
MS: First, knowing your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) is critical, whether spending money on Facebook ads or not. Then, with this knowledge, one of the primary objectives of testing and refining your ad campaigns is to get the cost per lead as low as possible whilst maintaining a high-quality lead whenever possible. To do this, test the lead-generation ad unit but include, say, two to three qualifying questions. This way, you’re not just collecting first names and emails. If your offer is for B2B, you could also gather pertinent information related to the size of their business, the person’s role, the number of employees, or any relevant information that will “force” the prospect to jump through just a couple of hoops to get the desired complimentary offer in exchange for filling out the form. In general, whenever running ad campaigns on the Meta platforms, keep a very watchful eye on your metrics. Set spending limits; don’t just set and forget—as much as Meta would love you to do that!
Q: Facebook and other social platforms seem to constantly evolve their algorithms to manipulate what we see. How do you advise companies to keep up with them?
MS: When Facebook invented the concept of the news feed in September 2006, users revolted at the idea of the platform picking content for them to see. But all these years later, the feed concept has been emulated across nearly every social platform, and we’ve become used to it. Depending on how many friends a user has, groups they’ve joined, and Pages they follow, there could be as much as 1,500 possible posts to see in the feed. So it’s a good thing that these algorithms whittle down the choices and have come to know us so well as to select content that we might be interested in. What changed dramatically in the past year or so is something that Meta, yet again, blatantly copied from TikTok—the concept of the “discovery” or “recommendation” engine, where the AI- powered algorithms have gathered so many data points on each user that they can very accurately suggest content that Meta calls
Knowing your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) is critical.
“unconnected.” Connected content is from people, groups, and Pages we have proactively chosen to follow, but unconnected content is from all manner of random sources that you’ve never heard of. However, it’s actually not so random. These algorithms are very good at predicting what you might like.
Q: Is this good news for marketers?
MS: Yes, because now you have an increased chance of your content potentially being seen
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20
