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Mar 22 2015

Facebook Ads and the Race to the Bottom

Ever watched an industry race to the bottom? It’s scary…and I’m watching it happen in the intersection of Facebook, “Social,” Search, and Integrated Marketing Communications. Here’s more:

Race to the BottomFirst, I’ll get the shameless plug out of the way; it does actually relate to today’s subject – “Facebook Ads and the Race to the Bottom” – because the sites I’m working on are petri dishes in our global marketing lab (of sorts) here at Area 224 HQ. We’re all-meta, all the time, as we started with a site called Metasip almost two years ago, and have expanded to include Metakitchen within the last few weeks. These sites are a number of things: review sites, engagement portals, and a hub where those who promote things (Metasip does alcohol, Metakitchen does all things related to food) can connect. [End of shameless plug.]

Part and parcel of the work at Area 224 is to prove the value of what we do – integrated marketing communications (not just public relations) as a discipline that, when working hand in hand with a company’s business strategy, can indeed have bottom line results. We used to talk about this as something we called “Objective-oriented marketing;” the belief that you’re barking up the wrong tree if you’re working on a tactic (usually social, often sold to you by either a shyster or an amateur or – WORSE – an amateur shyster) that isn’t in line with a business strategy.

I’ve said this often as an independent practitioner: I will turn down work if I believe it to be a waste of the company’s money. I prefer sleeping at night to cashing checks that don’t seem right, and adding value is something I pride myself in doing.

Bringing us to today’s point:

Facebook ads are precipitating a race to the bottom in social media, in search engine optimization, and in integrated marketing communications.

Firstable, the numbers

Here’s a screen shot from a recent ad campaign we conducted on behalf of Metasip.

FB Numbers

While that might look like a lot of mumbo jumbo to the outsider, it’s really rather simple in the grand scheme, and let me walk you through the numbers that are there so you have the background you need. (If you know all this already, scroll down to the subhead that says “You Need a Strategy” and pick up the article from there.)

We ran this campaign for 24 hours (under “Schedule” above) and we spent $20.00. The ad had an “Objective” of “Post Engagements,” and those are defined in this little screenshot (which we got from mousing over the question mark above the number “66.” [N.B. We chose a campaign that is typical of the dozens of campaigns we have run on Facebook throughout the past year. Your experience may vary – and, if you have more money to spend, you may get better results than we did. But let’s use this as a really good example to support our case.]

Engagement EfinedThe actions that Facebook considers Post Engagements are things like:

  • Clicking the “Like” button on the post (one we wrote about cheap red wine)
  • Clicking the Like button on the Metasip Page
  • Clicking through to read the post itself – on Facebook or on our website
  • Clicking through to comment on the post itself

The easy, quick, and “meaty” math goes like this:

$20.00 in spend, divided by 66 “post engagements” equals an average cost of $0.30 per engagement.

You Need a Strategy

I had a flashback the other day to my time running a startup and sitting down with an executive – someone who is well-regarded as having a sort of magic touch when it comes to business. I had a service I was selling, he had a business that could have used my service to promote itself, but he was hung up on one number – ONE NUMBER – that drove all of his thinking.

The number happened to be “CPM,” in case you’re wondering, and the problem for me – the one thing that kept us from working together – was that I did not play in the CPM space. At all. Couldn’t – even though my online education portal was in the business of “microtargeting” and we had a strategy to market and find students who were interested in schools that were off the beaten path, and this guy’s property fit our description of a target market, he had only ever worked in a CPM space. Spend $10, get 1,000 views of your ad and your CPM is $10.

This particular executive was blessed: he had a crazy large budget to work with and could put scads of people to work to spend that budget on a variety of marketing tactics. He was also successful at his business because of the strategy that drove these tactics. The fact that our portal didn’t fit into his way of doing business – because it was new, undefined, different, and “not the way we’ve always done things” – was fine in the grand scheme (in fact, it was one of the big learnings for me, and eventually drove me out of that particular industry and, instead, to launching Area 224).

Post Engagements are the “New CPM”

Flash forward to more recent history and my discussions with another, totally different type of executive. Different can be good, different can be bad and, in this case, different is just different. And illuminating: this executive has always done things a certain way – and that certain way involves Facebook as the sum total of her marketing strategy.

We went down the following road, and here’s what the back-and-forth looked like, in brief, with some of the specifics around price changed to protect the innocent.

Me: I understand that you’re looking for help promoting your business, and you’re looking to outsource a piece of your marketing communications strategy to an outside consultant. We can put together a rather robust proposal, but would love to talk about your business strategy first.

Her: Our strategy is already set. How much does it cost to work with you?

Me: Well, we normally don’t do one-offs without an understanding of what you want to get out of it, but a typical program gets you…[WORDS, BULLET POINTS, TACTICS THAT SOUND GOOD] and will cost you…[WORDS, NUMBERS, ETC.].

Here’s where I start to get rather afraid that this is going downhill, but I’m still interested in hearing her thoughts.

Her: That sounds like way too much for us. In fact, our last Facebook Ad campaign got us 3,000 views and a couple hundred engagements and we only spent $20! You’re exponentially more than that, and there are no guarantees of success.

Me: We’re talking more robust, actual engagement – not the BS FB engagement. Trust me, the value you’ll receive in actual content and actual time spent building community and actually engaging with your fans, followers, and friends – and not just on Facebook but on the other platforms we’ll work with you on – we’ll be able to prove that there’s way more value there when the program is done…as long as we can understand what your business strategy and your marketing strategy look like.

Her: Are you willing to go pay-for-performance with this campaign?

“Everyone’s an Armchair Marketer…”

Well before I ran the startup, I was a VP of Global PR at a Financial Services firm; before that, I spent time in a division of the same firm with a boss whose mantra was quite direct – “marketing exists to support sales.” It was great: we did everything in consultation with the sales teams, and if it wasn’t something that they could sell behind, we weren’t going to put marketing dollars toward it.

In one discussion with a line manager who, also, had a very specific charge, we were told that ours might be the most difficult job in the entire company. This is because, in this executive’s assessment, “Everyone’s an Armchair Marketer.”

Think about it: an executive in the pre-social media days is told by a friend “hey, you should write a white paper and use it as a marketing tool!” Not knowing any better, he suggests it to the marketing team; he may also control the purse strings and say that it’s a good use of money, so you might as well give it a try. Voila, the “White Paper Strategy” is born.

Now, in the Social Media Era – or, even more directly, the Facebook Ads Era – not only does the executive hear about a marketing tool that works, or that is cheap, or, WORSE, works and is cheap…this executive, like our mini-case study above, has already TRIED the marketing tool.

And guess what: Facebook doesn’t ask what your Business Strategy is. And they don’t really ask what your Marketing Strategy is, either…they just want you to buy their version of “engagement.” Whether you buy it directly or buy it from someone else who does the dirty work, you’re just aiming for the lowest cost for that engagement. Right?

The Race to the Bottom Never Ends Well…

…For anyone.

Our problem with what Facebook is doing to the entire Integrated Marketing Communications suite stems from those engagement numbers our executive above is touting. If they’re getting 30 cents per “engagement” then why wouldn’t they continue getting 30 cents an engagement and just spend a few hundred dollars, tops, in order to get over a thousand engagements and the world will beat a virtual path to their door.

The executive doesn’t need us to help them – they only need a few bucks of juice on their corporate credit card. Engagements are coming. They’re the armchair marketer.

The Danger for the Executive: Facebook is selling you “engagements” but not giving you any sense of real, true value behind those engagements. What’s a Like really worth? What’s a visit to your site worth? What about someone “liking” the post but never ever doing anything else. Ever.

The Danger for Facebook: These engagements may be valuable in the grand scheme, but they’re pretty much done in a vacuum. And as the cost gets driven downward, the engagements become less and less valuable – nut just in the true dollar sense, but in the perception as well. “A buck a like? I can get you pennies a like!”

The Danger for the Consultant (not just guys like me, but the independent consultant who dabbles in social media “without a license”): There is always going to be someone who can “do it for less.” My $10,000 proposal to align your marketing strategy with your business strategy and measure a whole host of outcomes and drive real bottom-line engagement doesn’t stand a chance when presented to an armchair marketer who can spend $20 on a bunch of page views and outsource the remainder to someone in their dining room who can do a one-off campaign on Pinterest for $150.

Facebook’s definition of “engagement”

When the real work takes time, building the strategy should be of utmost importance to the business executive. And to the marketing consultant, the desire to have those real discussions – something akin to “discovery” for the lawyer – is the thing that should drive every single engagement.

The problem, as I see it, is this awful use of “engagement” as a thing that can be measured in clicks. It’s scary, but it’s Facebook’s business and that’s why they’re successful.

I shied away from working with the executive above because it was obvious, to me, that the well had been poisoned by Facebook. In her mind, engagement is a thing that Facebook handles, and they do it inexpensively. Her strategy doesn’t need me – Facebook is giving her the impression that engagement IS the strategy, the Facebook definition of engagement is the only way to do it, and Bob’s Your Uncle. (In other words, don’t hire Dave – hire Facebook, or hire Dave’s competitor for a fraction of the cost for that component, or just whip up a faux strategy on your own and…)

My biggest concern

My biggest concern is that Facebook Ads – and their perceived effectiveness, which isn’t grounded in the real world but their version of it – leads to laziness on the part of everyone in marketing, and a Race to the Bottom. There’s no need for a strategy when you have Facebook, and there’s no need for someone to help you with the strategy when you can whip up your own.

We’re all racing to the bottom. And it won’t end well.

 

 

Written by Dave · Categorized: Facebook, Holistic Social Media, Objective Oriented Marketing · Tagged: race to the bottom

Sep 06 2014

Does Facebook Advertising Work?

Hi, Gentle Readers. We’re busy working on a couple other sites here at HQ. And, on one of them, we dig deep – really deep – on the “Should I Advertise on Facebook?” question. This originally appeared over at 10Kayear.com. We thought it might be more a propos for the readership here, so we’re sharing.

We’ve told you that we’re striving for radical transparency here – we want to show you what works and what doesn’t. And one of the things we’ve had asked of us countless times: Does Facebook Advertising Work?

Time, then, to go Behind the Curtain on Facebook Likes. Specifically, if you were to do a campaign, and do one with a limited budget, what are the expectations? And can you actually get anything other than just Facebook Likes?

79 percent quick memeThat’s actually a complex question, and the answers depend on a few factors – not just how much you’re spending on Facebook. For instance:

  1. Do you have content that you can point people to, or are you still building your audience?
  2. Is there a quid pro quo – well, as much of a quid pro quo as is allowed with this new “Like Gate” stuff going on? (Learn more over at Tabfoundry – from the ever-cool Francisco at Social Mouths.)
  3. And what does your content strategy look like in the days and weeks to come?

Again, we don’t have all the answers. But here are a couple experiments from the “test and learn” school of Facebook Marketing.

Experiment A: Metasip “Boost Post” Campaign

If you don’t know about our Metasip site, (1) where have you BEEN? and (2) you can learn more over at Metasip.co – where we’d love it if you signed up for the email list. Seriously, we’d love that.

Put simply, we’re building a tool that is “Yelp for Alcoholic Beverages.” We’ve had some success early on, at least with getting content out there and rating things in a variety of categories. (We know – there are countless wine apps, and a beer thing called Untappd, and there are whisky (and whiskey) and spirits sites and blogs and everything else. Our aim is a little of that, but a whole lot of ratings. Stay tuned.)

Without a doubt, our most successful post – to the tune of 300 visits on a Thursday in July and 600 visits the next day – was one about Buying Booze at Costco. So we thought we’d use the “Boost Post” capability and see what that would get us. Here are the results:

Metasip Boost Post Campaign
Metasip Boost Post Campaign

You’ll see that…well…$20 may not have been the best use of dollars here.

If you want to slice and dice the numbers to score a few metrics to make yourself happy, you COULD say that your paid reach divided by your budget meant a “CPM” – or “Cost Per Thousand” in the ad world – of $13.31.

Careful, Young Jedi. Using that sort of calculation this early in the game, and when you’re not dealing with a large budget, is actually a little dangerous, we think. There’s just simply not enough to go on – and, in the fullness of time, you will have a much better picture of your TRUE Marketing Cost. But we digress…

Those 57 “Actions” did not yield ONE additional email subscriber. They DID give us ONE additional Page Like, so our numbers are…a little better. Again, it’s early.

However…we didn’t set this up as a “like” campaign, we set it up to “Boost This Post.” So we did drive traffic to the page as a result – if you want to use Facebook’s “Reach” numbers (1502) and consider the actual link clicks as a “Conversion” (14), we got a conversion rate of 0.9% – less than 1/10 of one percent.

Before you ask – we micro-targeted who we were reaching out to. US-only, and those who are already interested in alcohol brands.

Stay tuned for further developments on this front.

Experiment B: 10KaYear Like Campaign

I think I liked this one best, specifically because of one number in the photo below:

Facebook Like Campaign
The 10KaYear FB Like Campaign

In case you missed it, we circled that number. It’s the Avg. Cost Per Page Like.

We were tracking this the whole time – as you’ll see up there, we ran a ten-day, $100 campaign – and that number was pretty consistent, not moving much above 60 cents, nor below 50. It netted out pretty well – and, while not in “big brand” spend territory, we think it gives us a nice little benchmark for future campaigns.

 ALSO: Do not overlook mobile. At ALL. Of the traffic referred to our site by Facebook in the past 30 days, 79% of it was mobile.

Experiment C: 10KaYear Boost Post Campaign

This one was earlier in the month of August, and we decided to share it because there’s an opportunity to learn something from it. Right?

FB Boost Post
FB Boost Post Campaign for 10KaYear

As you see, “actions” appeared lower than Experiment A above, but we’re actually going to have to study the numbers from that first experiment…they don’t add up.

Our big takeaway here is the CPM number. Math tells us that it’s $8.56 as a CPM figure ($40 divided by 4672 to give you the cost per, then multiplied by 1000 to give you the CPM).

$8.56 CPM is nothing to sneeze at. Right?

Behind the Curtain on Facebook Likes: the Takeaways…

If you’re here for Personal Financial Advice – which this site does some of – you’re starting to catch on a theme: “Track Everything.”

And if you’re here for Business Launch Advice – which this post and the “Behind the Curtain” page are both meant to help with – you might catch on a theme: “Track Everything.”

Another theme for both: “Test and Learn.”

As we keep these Side Hustles of ours moving forward, we’re keen to keep learning from these types of tests. And we haven’t even begun that “ENGAGEMENT” process that all the marketing gurus talk about. Get people on board with your cause, then get them to do something with you – talk, share, ask questions, build communities. ENGAGE.

The takeaways: None of this happens overnight. Immediate results are for the extremely lucky. You do have to spend a little to build an audience. And you need an engagement strategy, a content marketing strategy, and a communications strategy behind it all. AND DON’T IGNORE MOBILE.

More to come on the rest of that down the road.

Written by Dave · Categorized: Facebook · Tagged: 10KaYear, Facebook Advertising

Apr 17 2012

Why It’s Okay to Stop Talking About Leaving the Office at 5:30

Anyone else tired of hearing about how Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg leaves the office at 5:30 every night?

Sheryl Sandberg Works Here
little f gets big a for work-life balance

It’s all relative: Including Work-Life Balance.

You can all stop talking about it, starting now. Why?

What works for me may not work for you. What works for Ms Sandberg may not make sense for the rest of us. And so on and so forth.

Here’s a story: back in the day (code for “when I worked somewhere that isn’t at Area 224 headquarters, or for a startup”) we had a dynamite research strategist on staff. He was on the short list of quality speakers who could command a room – talking about work-life balance in his inimitable style.

And…he couldn’t stand the phrase “work-life balance.” He preferred “work-life harmony.”

Why?

One person’s 80-hour-a-week sweatshop is someone else’s dream job.

What works for you works for you. Darnit.

Face time? Bed checks? Lurkers? Annoying meetings?

Look, you still have to get your work done, you still have to prioritize. You still have to provide awesome client service – even if your clients are internal ones.

Bravo to you for leaving early. Or staying late.

It’s all relative. Commit to being excellent when you’re there, and commit to being “there” when you aren’t.

And find what works for you, whether you’re a billionaire or flat broke.

Written by Dave · Categorized: Facebook

Aug 23 2011

Do Facebook Groups Beat Facebook Fan Pages?

Join us as we discover whether or not the Facebook Fan Page is…uh…dying at the hands of the Facebook Group.

We started an experiment last night, and, even though it’s early, we are optimistic. The experiment?

What would happen if, instead of asking people to “Like” a brand page on Facebook, we started a group instead? AND, what if that group had a mission statement that didn’t try to ram things down people’s throats?

So we did it. First, the objective – increase connections between small business owners and give them access to information that can help them better market their products and services. We came up with a Mission Statement worthy of an H1 tag:

Mission: Share Small Business Marketing challenges, questions, concerns – in a non-threatening, non-salesy way.

This might seem counter to what you hear on Facebook – that it’s all about the Fan Page Numbers, and that, unless you have massive numbers of fans, you can’t do anything substantive. Like sell product. Or make connections that lead to business. Or whatever.

But what if it isn’t about that?

What if, instead of asking someone to “Like” your page (so you can try to sell them something) you, instead, invite them to join a group where they can share knowledge?

What if, instead of looking to be one of the nameless, faceless brands with 1,000,000 Fans but no engagement, you, instead, start conversations and jump in on other conversations?

What if, instead of trying to sell something, you, I don’t know, DON’T try to sell anything?

Why are we optimistic? 12 Hours in and we’re already up to 175 members of the group, and counting.

Want to join the group – and the experiment?

Here’s a link – Small Business Marketing Group on Facebook.

Written by Dave · Categorized: Facebook, Uncategorized

Mar 25 2011

Facebook Questions – Game Changer

It’s overused: “Game Changer.” But, IMHO, Facebook Questions is just that.
Facebook Questions
Status, then Questions. Huge

The biggest change to this feature is its prominence:

Status, then Questions, right above the “What’s on your mind?” Status Bar. This. Is. Huge.

Rather than go to Facebook and post something random, the ability to poll your universe is not only in your hands, it appears to be encouraged.

The relaunch of Questions, just hours ago, is beyond cool for a few reasons. (It’s quick, it’s painless, it’s low cost.) You can do meaningless polls, sure (like the one on the bottom of this page), but the real gravy here is for brand managers.

When creating your poll, you can lock down the questions – so that it’s multiple choice with no “fill in the blank” – or you can give people the option of entering their own answer.

OR, if you’re a brand manager, you can type in your brand’s page – so, instead of our asking about “snacking” we could have picked a brand of chips and had that be part of the poll.

Along with launchrock – a tool we discussed earlier this week (see our post entitled Sweet. Fancy. Moses.) – launching products, services and taking the pulse of the populace is now back in your hands.

Using this one-two punch, imagine the testing you can do – products, pricing, brand loyalty, the list could go on and on.

Game Changer? Quite possibly.

Facebook Questions

Our Game Changing Question?

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Written by Dave · Categorized: Facebook

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