Facebook Reach Got You Down? Make the Most of Your Paid Efforts

Pulled from eMarketer article Are You Seeing A Change In Your Organic Reach on Facebook:  http://www.emarketer.com/Article/You-Seeing-Change-Your-Organic-Reach-on-Facebook/1010755/1

As many have heard by now, Facebook is reducing the amount of reach your posts receive ongoing. Our friends over at Convince and Convert in fact have a great graph showing why this may not change (see reachpocalypse) and if you read the top 4 things you can do, this post plans on covering the second one, paying.

Lets step back for a minute and ask: is this a bad thing? How many brands started hoarding collecting fans? Think about this from an email perspective. At some point I'm interested in a brand and I sign up for email. Overtime, for some reason or another, I start to lose interest and either Gmail starts to move this email to junk folder or I unsubscribe. For Facebook though, when was the last time you cleaned out or unsubscribed from the brands and pages that you 'liked?' Most likely the answer is never, so Facebook is trying to do some clean up. This is where the Facebook news feed ads can help. 

With this change, the news feed ad space becomes an important channel, but only valuable if you can make the most of those advertisements. Enter Facebook's Custom Audiences. The best way to reach current customers and prospects. Facebook wins because smart marketers will not waste money trying to get in front of everyone and their Facebook's customers are happy because the ads they will see should be more inline with their interests.

The other advantage with these ads, you can now start to connect the dots from social to actual revenue driven offline and/or online as a result of these efforts. We'll save this for another post, but here are some opportunities to start thinking about as it relates to managed custom audiences today:

• Customers (Your CRM file)
  • Lapsed (13+ month buyers)
  • Active (0-12 month buyers)
  • Email Inactive (customers you are suppressing from your email program)
  • Un-promotable (customers you can't reach in email channel maybe as a result of unsubscribing, spam complaint, etc)
• Prospecting (All net new customers)
  • Facebook interest based look-a-likes
  • Retail based partner categories (basically lifestyle segments)
  • Spend-a-like model based on customers (this is one of the highest performing prospecting tactics at driving revenue for your business)

With the ability to connect the dots from social efforts back to real world dollars, you can continue to fine tune and optimize these audiences and prove their value to the business. Clients of mine are doing this today and seeing incredible results. It's early, but proving to be a very valuable effort nonetheless. Are you using Managed Custom Audiences today? How are your results?

Relevancy of the Post-Click Experience - A Quick Windows 7 Banner Ad Review

While checking out what College Football has to offer me on this glorious desert morning, I came across the following banner on ESPN:

It caught my eye for 2 reasons:

1 - I was just at a conference, ExactTarget's Connections 09, where a speaker talked about testing and how Microsoft found that green buttons convert especially well in their campaigns

2 - I'm intrigued by all things Microsoft v. Apple

Back to the matter at hand, the main banner message implies that the young woman pictured provided input for Windows 7, in-line with the recent campaign which I think is actually well done.  A smaller and potentially competing message (software v. computer purchase) on the right talks about finding a PC, but it's clearly secondary and I frankly didn't see it prior to clicking on the banner, but only later when trying to connect the dots to my post-click experience.

Upon banner click you arrive at the following page:

Had I clicked on the "Find the Right PC" portion, or noticed it pre-click, this landing page would have made more sense though I'm not sure PC=laptop.  But that's not the banner's main message, and therefore, the user experience created is less than optimal.  I expected some back-up to the campaign - videos from the advertisements, a way to interact or put my $.02 in, etc.  Backing that up with a pick a PC secondary message could have made my experience more relevant, but straight to pick a PC is confusing-bounce.

Windows 7, I didn't provide any input that contributed to your product's features and functionality, but here's a little something that may help improve the relevancy of your online advertising campaign.

[caption id="attachment_105" align="alignleft" width="56" caption="Mike Corak"][/caption]

Mike Corak leads the strategic planning practice and account management efforts at Off Madison Ave, and is co-founder of www.digitalmarketingstrategy.com.  An active member of the digital marketing community and frequent blogger and speaker, Mike's passion is interactive marketing. Mike's developed and implemented winning digital and integrated strategies for hundreds of companies over his 12 year career including the likes of Coca Cola, ConAgra Foods, ConocoPhillips, FedEx, Fujitsu, Nike, Office Depot, and Walt Disney. Contact Mike at mikecorak@gmail.com, or interact with Mike here: twitter, LinkedIn.