facebook zero - denim® · 2018-05-17 · denim | facebook zero: how to survive and thrive 3...

FACEBOOK ZEROHOW TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE

Denim®

Navigating a new era for Facebook Business Pages

Denim | Facebook Zero: How to Survive and Thrive 2

In early 2018, Facebook announced major changes that will continue to shift what is shown in News Feeds toward posts from family and friends. With these changes, Facebook’s algorithm will prioritize posts that spark back-and-forth

discussion or inspire people to share and interact with other people using the world’s most popular social network.

While it’s too early to say exactly what these changes will mean for businesses — including insurance and financial services advisors and agents — it’s clear Facebook is heading toward what many call “Facebook Zero.” This refers to when Facebook will no longer show a business’s posts or articles for free. We believe this change signals a new era for Facebook Business Pages, where businesses are required to pay for the placement of content in consumers’ News Feeds.

“Folks, this is a pretty HUGE update,” posted Premier Facebook Marketing Expert Mari Smith following Facebook’s announcement. “To see solid ROI on Facebook, businesses must invest in ads. The good news, though, is advertising done properly on Facebook and Instagram can dramatically grow your business.”

And here’s more good news: The Denim platform makes it easy for companies to optimize, launch, and scale social media and mobile ads.

“News Feed equals Main Street, and businesses must learn how to advertise there,” said Michael Stelzner, Founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner, in a BOSS Magazine article.

In the pages that follow, we provide insights, tips, and best practices for advertising on mobile and social media and thriving in Facebook Zero.


Spending on mobile advertising is expected to increase 92 percent from $53 billion in 2017 to $102 billion in 2021. And by 2021, mobile advertising will represent nearly 80 percent of total digital ad spending.1

In case you’re still questioning the need to allocate budget dollars to mobile and, more specifically, social media advertising, take a look at these stats:

• The average U.S. consumer spends five hours a day on mobile devices.2

• About half of that time is spent in social, messaging, media, and entertainment apps.2

• Mobile shoppers are two times more likely to perform finance activities using their mobile device.3

But why pay when organic is free?

Many insurance and financial services companies are pouring lots of time and money into sharing content on mobile and social media channels in an organic, or unpaid,

ESTABLISHING A MOBILE AND SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING BUDGET

1. eMarketer, Mobile Ad Spending, 20182. Flurry Analytics, State of Mobile Report, 20173. comScore, The Global Mobile Report, 2017


way. However, organic reach for businesses has been declining across social media for years. Facebook’s recent announcement is simply the nail in the coffin.

What are the benefits of mobile and social media advertising?

Here are five reasons to invest in mobile and social media advertising:

Meet consumers where they are. As pointed out above, consumers spend a lot of time consuming social media and performing other activities on their mobile devices. And paid advertising provides businesses the best opportunity to meet them there.

Micro-target. Consumers’ social media and mobile behaviors are chock-full of information about their preferences, life stages, location, and more. All this data can be used to target ads and marketing messages to consumers most likely to engage. The Denim platform has aggregated more than 1 billion data points on consumer engagement with hyper-local mobile and social media ads powered for insurance and financial services companies. The data contains rich stories about consumer behavior that we’re using to help our customers and users make smarter marketing decisions.

Scale. Social media advertising is a great fit for companies operating with an agent model because it allows corporate marketers to launch local campaigns on behalf of individual agents or advisors. But here’s the challenge: To do that through a platform like Facebook Ads Manager requires the corporate marketer to set up a separate campaign for each agent or advisor — a tedious and time-consuming task. The Denim platform solves that by enabling the marketer to scale hyper-local ads for thousands of agents and advisors across Facebook News Feed, Instant Messenger, mobile websites, mobile apps, and more in just two minutes.


Improve ROI. Advertising dollars can go a lot farther on mobile and social media than on other more traditional channels. Social media advertising follows a pay-per-click model, meaning you pay when users take the action you want them to take (such as clicking through to a web page or filling out a lead form).

Track results. Social media engagement — such as likes, comments, Tweets, retweets, downloads, shares, and posts — is easier than ever to track and is effective in measuring the success of a brand’s reach. With the Denim platform, easy-to-understand analytics allow marketers to access real-time campaign data and share local insights with participating agents and advisors in just two clicks. These insights provide valuable information about the impact and ROI of campaigns and lead to smarter decisions.

Advertising on mobile and social media is one of the best ways to connect with today’s digital consumers — and it’s only getting better. Many companies recognize this and are adjusting their marketing budgets accordingly. If you’re considering adjusting your marketing budget to include mobile and social media advertising, we should talk.


USING DATA TO OPTIMIZE MOBILE AND SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISINGWe’ve already established that advertising on mobile and social channels is a highly effective yet often underutilized way for companies to engage consumers and grow their business. However, taking a “spray-and-pray” approach — blasting your message out to everyone and hoping it will reach someone likely to respond — no longer cuts it. Today’s digital consumers expect the companies they do business with to anticipate their needs and deliver highly relevant and personalized experiences. That’s where data comes in.

Every time a consumer takes an action — a page visit, click, like, comment, share, post — he or she leaves a data trail. Following that trail tells a rich story about the consumer and what makes him or her tick.

Here are three ways to activate that data trail to optimize your mobile and social media advertising.

1. Develop personas.

Personas, or detailed representations of audience segments, are much more effective than broad demographic descriptors because they humanize target audiences. Fueled by data-driven research that maps out the who behind buying decisions, customer personas can help inform everything from marketing messages to product development efforts.

For insurance and financial services companies, a great way to start developing personas is by analyzing data around life events. We know consumers make insurance purchases during major life events, such as buying a home or car,


getting married, or having a child. Beyond reaching the right consumer with the right message at the right time, life-event marketing puts it in the right context. Understanding the context of a consumer’s behavior is incredibly valuable and can help you adjust your marketing message to inspire action.

Social media provides marketers access to global conversations, bringing together droves of data to better understand consumer behavior, trends, and opinions. And the more a brand advertises on mobile and social media channels, the more data it has access to and the more it can test and refine its personas to achieve even better results in the future.

2. Track the entire conversion journey.

In today’s multi-channel world, data on cross-channel behaviors allow you to track a customer’s entire journey to conversion. As that journey increasingly involves multiple devices, browsers, and mobile apps, it cannot be accurately measured using only cookies. While cookies may provide insight into the last touchpoint before the conversion, a cookies-only approach overlooks what happens earlier in the customer journey.

A recent study by Facebook and Datalicious found marketers who only measure campaign success via cookies


overlook nearly 40 percent of all digital touchpoints in the customer journey to conversion. And because people use multiple devices, each person has an average of three unique cookie identifiers. In other words, one individual is seen as three different people through the lens of cookie-only measurement. Because only one of those cookie identifiers will actually convert (and the other two appear to go cold), the data on engagement with your content becomes skewed.

According to a Facebook IQ article, cookies force marketers to rely on guesswork to justify media investment, leading to wasted ad dollars: “So how do we tackle this complex reality? By understanding consumers as people rather than cookies… To help drive results and sustainable business growth, more accurate methods based on people insights can give marketers the ability to measure campaigns on and off Facebook, on both desktop and mobile devices. When looking at attribution and reach, this approach offers a more holistic look at the ad performance — something not possible before.”

Implementing Facebook Pixels to track conversions across devices is a great way to start building a cross-channel, people-based campaign measurement model. If you’re not sure how to do that, we’re here to help.

3. Find the right partners.

One way to greatly enhance the value of your own consumer engagement data is to combine it with complementary datasets. The easiest way to do that is to partner with organizations that have access to large amounts of data.

With our more than 1 billion data points, Denim is proud to have more data on consumer engagement with insurance- and financial services-related mobile and social media ads than anyone. At the same time, we recognize Denim’s dataset is not the only dataset the industry will ever need, nor is anyone else’s dataset the only dataset the industry will ever need. Denim’s database is a contributory database. In other words, it’s the contribution of Denim’s data along with a variety of other datasets that will ultimately paint a vivid picture of today’s consumer market and target it in a way that’s never been done before.

Denim has partnered with a variety of organizations, including a global actuarial consulting firm, to perform extensive analyses of Denim’s data in contribution with other datasets. The results will be used to help our customers make even smarter mobile and social media marketing decisions in the future.


CREATING THUMB-STOPPING VIDEO ADSIf there’s one type of content that stands out on mobile and social channels, it’s video. Video’s ability to grab consumers’ attention, create immersive experiences, and spark engagement makes it a powerful means of communication between brands and their target audiences. And, importantly for businesses, helpful, educational, and entertaining video content drives interaction and discussion through likes, comments, and shares — key to Facebook’s revamped News Feed algorithm.

Many businesses have recognized the power of video and are adjusting their marketing budgets accordingly. eMarketer predicts video ad spending in the U.S. will reach $15.42 billion this year, and will grow to $22.18 billion by 2021.

However, in today’s multi-channel world, any old video won’t do. A recent study by artificial intelligence-powered video creation service Wibbitz indicates only about 10 percent of respondents engaged with nearly every video they viewed on social media by sharing, commenting, or liking. Meanwhile, more than half said they would only engage with videos they deemed relevant, underscoring how


important market segmentation and targeting tools are for advertisers looking to advertise on social video platforms.

It’s also important that videos are optimized for the channels on which they are most likely to be viewed. Increasingly, that’s becoming mobile. According to the Wibbitz study, mobile devices are the preferred platform for consuming video content (31 percent) over desktop (26 percent) and streaming devices (25 percent).

“There is no singular video ad experience on mobile,” writes Mark Rabkin, vice president, ads & business platform for Facebook. “Instead, there is a variety of unique experiences, each requiring a different approach. This complexity poses a big challenge for advertisers.” Adding to that challenge, Rabkin points out, is the fact that an ad is one piece of content among many in a consumer’s feed, making the bar for capturing attention high.

At the same time, feeds have unprecedented scale and reach. “The vast majority of consumption is fast, but feeds also give you a shot at a deeper connection, like getting someone to take an action or watch a longer video,” Rabkin writes.

The trick is in creating videos that make a consumer’s thumb stop when scrolling by your ad. Here are five tips for creating thumb-stopping videos.


Design for mobile. Be sure both the format and content of your video are effective when viewed on mobile devices. Most people hold their phones vertically, so horizontal videos don’t maximize the screen space. When testing the impact of vertical video ads against horizontal and square ones, Facebook found vertical video ads drove an increase in brand lift and up to a nine-point increase in ad recall in seven of 10 tests. Also, to optimize content for small screens, avoid using too many words and small text or graphics. See more video design recommendations from Facebook here.

Engage quickly. Consumers scroll through their feeds quickly (41 percent faster on mobile News Feed than desktop News Feed, according to Facebook), not leaving you much time to catch their attention. Try to hook them within the first couple seconds of the video with something unique that catches their eye. The Wibbitz study found 38 percent of respondents prefer short-form videos — defined as under one minute in length — emphasizing the importance for businesses to create shorter, more engaging videos. Facebook recommends delivering your entire message in 15 seconds or less, incorporating your brand message and identity early, and strengthening your visuals with funny, provocative, or surprising copy.

Design for sound off. Because 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, it’s important that videos are understood when played silently. Using subtitles or briefly overlaid phrases will help. Tests conducted by Facebook found adding captions to video ads increases video view duration by an average of 12 percent.


Tell engaging stories. Use video ads to bring out the human or personal element of your business. Tell stories, spotlight real people, and share behind the scenes. The more you come across to your audience as a person instead of a company, the more they’ll connect and engage with you. Also, be sure your video ad is supported with effective copy. Ask questions that engage users and help them understand the value of your offer. A potential customer doesn’t want to be constantly told to buy your product, but rather how it will help him or her.

Test, iterate, and learn. Measure the results of your video on a per-creative, per-platform, and per-audience basis. An advertiser’s ability to use data to measure the right things properly will be the biggest predictor of its mobile advertising success. Align measurement, creative, and social media teams to be able to test, iterate, learn, and re-test quickly. The more you know about your audiences and how they’re engaging, the better the videos you’ll create.

The data we’re collecting on consumer engagement with video-based ads will help our customers further optimize their videos for engagement by their target audiences.


OPTIMIZING AD IMAGES AND COPYWhile adding more video to your mobile and social media content mix is important to Facebook’s revamped News Feed algorithm, you shouldn’t neglect the need for effective images and copy.

Below are five tips for selecting images and five tips for writing effective copy.

Choose Eye-Catching Imagery

As the competition to catch consumers’ attention in the News Feed continues to heat up, businesses need to work even harder to stand out. Use these tips to choose images for your mobile and social media ad campaigns that will stop consumers as they scroll.

Make images contextually relevant. Images should be relevant not only to the product or service you are offering, but also to the audience you’re offering it to. Think about the targeting criteria (gender, age, behaviors, interests, etc.) you used when building your audience. Then find images that tell a story that will resonate with that audience.


Select the right format. Single-image ads should have a single focal point. If you try to cram too much in, your ad won’t be optimized for all devices and will lose visual appeal. If you have more things to communicate through your images, consider opting for a multi-image ad. (The Denim platform supports our enterprise customers in launching single-image, multi-image, and video ad creatives.)

Be consistent. For maximum impact, ensure all the images used within a campaign tie together visually. Before landing on a theme, test a few variations of images to see which ones perform the best.

Build for mobile. Nearly 80 percent of social networking is done on a mobile device, so make sure the images you choose work well on small screens. Be sure to preview the ad creative on your phone before launching the campaign.

Integrate your brand. Facebook recommends businesses incorporate elements of their brand — such as their logo, products, or location — in the image in a natural and authentic way. (Multi-image ads launched through the Denim platform now include the option to enable a local map feature. When enabled, another image is added to the end of each ad containing a map and address of the individual agent or advisor’s office location.)


Write Action-Oriented Copy

Once you’ve caught a consumer’s attention with an eye-catching image, it’s time to inspire action through an effective message. Here’s how:

Front-load your message. People scroll through feeds quickly. Once you’ve caught their eye, you have a limited number of words to inspire them to act. Make sure your headline is compelling. Get the good stuff in before the text is truncated, and look for unnecessary words you can take out. Be sure to preview your ad to see how your message is displayed across different devices.

Communicate the value. Clearly tell the viewers of your ad why they should take your desired action and what’s in it for them if they do. Consider using a call-to-action button to further emphasize the action you want them to take.

Be authentic. Be sure your copy matches your brand’s voice and personality and is consistent across different ads and ad campaigns. Also consider your target audience and how they like to be communicated with.

Put yourself in their shoes. Think about your ad from your target audience’s perspective. What’s important to them? What appeals to them emotionally? What will inspire them to act?

Be clear and concise. Opt for clarity over creativity. Don’t make your audience work to figure out what you do, what you’re offering, and what action they should take.

While advertising on mobile and social media is an extremely effective way to engage today’s digital consumers, the channel doesn’t provide a whole lot of real estate to catch their attention and inspire them to act. Be sure to put thought into your images and copy to make your ads as effective as possible.


CONCLUSION

While Facebook’s announcement earlier this year does signal the end of organic reach for businesses, it doesn’t mean businesses should put less effort into their mobile and social media engagement strategies. In fact, they should take the opposite approach. By establishing a social media and mobile advertising budget, leveraging data, and optimizing videos, images, and copy to create effective ads, businesses won’t only survive Facebook Zero — they’ll thrive.

To learn more about how Denim will work for your unique business case, schedule a demo today!

ABOUT DENIM®

Denim® is reimagining marketing and distribution with intelligent, data-driven technology. Designed with today’s mobile and social consumers in mind, Denim’s patent-pending platform saves time and money by changing the way insurance and financial services companies market, engage, and sell. With a focus on delivering a simple and intuitive platform, Denim not only delivers results, it’s enjoyable to use. To learn more, visit denimlabs.com.

© 2018 Denim Labs, Inc. All rights reserved. Patent pending. Denim® and the Denim drive logo are trademarks of Denim Labs, Inc.

CONTACT US SCHEDULE A [email protected] denimlabs.com/demo

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facebook zero - denim® · 2018-05-17 · denim | facebook zero: how to survive and thrive 3...

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