Where to Spend your Facebook Budget During the Boycott
The social and political repercussions of Facebook’s data and advertising practices have been a topic of discussion among digital marketers for years and they seem to be reaching a breaking point. Recent events have many brands deciding that enough is enough and during the month of July they will be boycotting facebook entirely. This has left many advertisers wondering just where exactly they can allocate their budget to make up for the lost awareness level marketing on Facebook. As we covered in last week’s blog post, there are many options brands have to achieve awareness-level marketing that don’t involve Facebook, but today we’ll focus on how to spend on the FieldTest platform to achieve maximum results.
Diversify content
One of the best ways to reallocate your awareness spend is to invest in new content for your website and promote it with awareness level ads on FieldTest. What kind of content you pick should be chosen based on its appropriateness for your brand but generally speaking we find what works best are blog posts and specialized landing pages.
The easiest of these to produce is blog content. Branded blog content is one of the most powerful tools available to promote your brand and create positive interactions with new customers. We’ve discussed how to choose what blog content works best for your brand in the past, so put a few of your newly freed marketing dollars into producing some new blog entries.
Another good piece of content to produce are custom landing pages. We have seen brands achieve incredible success by creating landing pages designed exclusively to sell one product or answer one particular question about their brand. This creates a memorable experience for new intenders and is among the best ways to promote your brand with content amplification ads.
Try new audiences
Once you have your new content created and your ad units built it’s time to reach new intenders by expanding your audience targeting with awareness-level ads. If you've ever used the Facebook boost function you’ll likely already be familiar with how FieldTest handles this, but in case you haven’t, check out our blog post on just how to choose new audience segments in the FieldTest platform. In that post we discuss how to target strategically, but it’s important to remember to think creatively as well. We often get clients who are unsure of where to look for new segments because they are sure that nobody outside of their current customer base would be interested in their product. This is rarely true! You just have to think outside the box and use the tools at your disposal properly.
For example, imagine you have a CBD topical brand with marketing that focuses primarily on sports intenders, try to expand to a segment of sports intenders you haven’t reached before. In the past we’ve seen brands like this expand their customer base by reaching out to yoga audiences, health food audiences, and other wellness intender groups. Sure, more generalized wellness might not exactly fit the sports-themed mold, but it is tangentially related enough that those audiences will still likely feel a connection to your brand through specialized ads. Feel free to use your awareness budget to experiment here, your new customers are just waiting for you to reach out to them.
Follow through
If you follow these first two steps you’ll likely start to see your new awareness content and ads building up some traffic to your website, but this is not the end of the road for your customers. We like to view our campaigns through a multiphase process known as the Sales Funnel, and you’ve just boosted the top phase. Now you need to turn that new traffic into new customers by following through with strong mid and lower-funnel conversion campaigns. Effectively, you need to make sure that your new creatives and new intenders have ads that not only draw attention to your brand (awareness) inform them about your brand (consideration) but also give them a reason to pull out their credit cards and buy your product (action). This means following up on your upper funnel clickers with additional content that shows them why you’re better than the competition, or what sets you apart then driving home the deal in action with sales or discount offers. This will ensure that you are making the absolute most out of your newly discovered audiences and getting the absolute best bang for your newly freed awareness marketing buck.
We know that with the world is in flux and ever progressing, and sometimes progress requires making some tough decisions. FieldTest has always been devoted to providing top of the line professional advertising tools to absolutely everybody on the internet, no matter how big or small their brand. We hope that you're able to achieve success and scale with or without facebook buys, and with the FieldTest platform and some creative content we’re confident that it is possible.