Facebook is a critical marketing channel for businesses of all sizes and across industries. With nearly 2.38 billion active users (stats for the first quarter of 2019), Facebook offers great opportunities for businesses to target current and potential customers.
When done the right way, Facebook ads help businesses boost brand awareness, launch new products and services, sell more, and increase revenue. However, advertising on Facebook is not exactly what it may seem. Today, Facebook ads have grown smarter, and there’s a need for smarter paid ad strategies to meet your advertising objectives. Read on to know about what has changed and what you can do about it.
What has Changed?
There’s no denying the fact that Facebook feed has become oversaturated with ads. Similar ads are served to the same users, meaning brands lose out on their effectiveness and attention-grabbing abilities. Not to forget, the organic reach of the posts and ads on Facebook have taken a hit, thanks to recent algorithm changes.
This means, today, most marketers on Facebook are forced to invest in paid campaigns or abandon the platform altogether. Despite the declining popularity of Facebook, the social media network managed to generate a whopping $16.6 billion in advertising revenue for the last quarter of 2018, which is a 30% increase compared to the previous year.
This clearly shows that Facebook advertising is not dead as speculated. Rather what has changed is that Facebook ads have gotten smarter, and it is high time that marketers revised their advertising strategies on Facebook. In the cluttered social-media landscape of today, it’s essential that brands integrate robust paid strategies along with high-quality content generation to be successful.
Shifting Advertising Goals – The Need of the Hour for Facebook Marketers
According to Susan Wenograd, the Vice President of Marketing Strategy of Aimclear, for brands to thrive in the new era of social media advertising, there is a pressing need to revise the campaign goals. She believes that brands must re-examine their objectives and understand that conversion is just a part of the bigger picture.
Brands must shift their focus away from CPA (Cost per Acquisition – Conversion) to CPM (Cost per thousand Impressions). Marketers must concentrate on building a more engaged and more qualified audience pool, to get the best ROI from their ad spends.
It’s not just about picking the low-hanging fruit, but, brands must enhance their Facebook ad strategies to build qualified leads that improve brand awareness. Once advertisers have this data, they can use it for retargeting. Brands must build remarketing pools so that they can convert leads on all stages of the purchase funnel, helping them generate more revenue.
Brands that can measure and understand user triggers are the ones that will be sustainable in the long run. Furthermore, brands must leverage cross-channel data to improve retargeting opportunities. Utilizing UTM parameters, tagging structures are some ways to streamline and segment data across channels.
Not to Forget Quality Content
All the above-discussed strategies may not yield the desired results, if the marketers do not have a high-quality content to back it up. With the social media landscape rapidly evolving, audiences demand high-quality, optimized content. Simply put, brands need to adapt to smarter Facebook ads with efficient strategies and high-quality creative content if they want to survive in the evolving social landscape of Facebook and Instagram paid ads.
