THE CHANGING FACE OF SMART SPENDING
Unfortunately, Facebook ads in their current incarnation are going the way of the dinosaur, and the days of cheap fan acquisitions are coming to an end. With the substantial growth of mobile for Facebook and the increase in people abandoning their laptops, the ads on the right side of Facebook’s desktop are becoming obsolete. You could hope that consumers will think to go directly to your fan page for a steady stream of your content, but honestly, unless you’re doing research, do you go to that many fan pages just for kicks? Probably not. And we’re all going to do it even less now that we’re spending more time on Facebook’s mobile app than we do on the website itself.
There is no substitute for the real estate of a desktop on a mobile device—there’s no room. This means that until the next great technological revolution, like Google glasses or tattooed screens in the palms of our hands, all of your Facebook stories, content, and marketing must be developed for the mobile experience. This is why in January 2013, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook should now be considered a mobile company.* And just six months later, Facebook reported 41 percent of its ad revenue came from mobile, equaling $1.6 billion in the second quarter of 2013.
But if marketers are limited to smartphone screens, where are marketers supposed to put their ads? Some brands have decided that the answer is: right on top of the page the consumer is trying to read. It has surely happened to you—you head to your favorite site to check the news, and instead of seeing your content, a big intrusive box overtakes the screen, pitching electronics or software or something that you did not come to the site to see. Why do marketers think this is a great way to get people to do business with them? All is does is piss people off and elicit negative feelings toward your brand. It is the antithesis of jabbing. All impressions are not good impressions. Quality, relevance, good timing—these things matter far more than many marketers realize. Once again, we have to keep in mind why people gravitate to Facebook, or any site, for that matter. It’s not to see ads.
So what’s a marketer to do? We need to rethink what an ad looks like, and what it accomplishes. We need to go native. We need to bring value. From now on, the difference between your content and your ads on Facebook will be . . . nothing. Your content, or rather, your micro-content, has to be the ad. Fortunately, Facebook has been perfecting a tool that allows you to create ads out of content that has already been vetted by your fans, which will not only help you improve your content’s reach, but will actually protect you from putting out content that is simply a waste of your and your customer’s time. It’s called a sponsored story. And unlike a TV ad or magazine spread, this spending strategy is worth every penny.
SPONSORED STORIES
Sponsored stories were launched in early 2011, but it was in the fall of 2012 that they came into their own, mostly because Facebook announced that it was finally making an algorithmic adjustment that would purposely limit how many people would organically see a brand’s posts, even if they had already become fans by liking the brand’s page. Until recently, though the algorithm was calibrated to limit spam or uninteresting content, good content could still organically reach a large percentage of fans. As of September 2013, however, Facebook’s algorithm will only allow your content to reach about 3–5 percent of your fans. To reach more, you have to post some extremely engaging content. Or, you have to pay. In this way, Facebook is able to protect the consumer’s experience by raising the barrier to entry to the News Feed.
A lot of the marketing community didn’t see it that way. They were livid. How could Facebook force them to pay more to take advantage of its billion users? How disloyal. How conniving. How capitalist.
Did anyone really think that Facebook wasn’t going to figure out a way to make more money? Besides, what else was it supposed to do when the right-side-of-the-page real estate for Facebook ads was disappearing faster than curse words in my keynote speeches as people ditched the wide screens of their PCs for their mobile devices? I didn’t understand people’s fury. Marketers and business owners who would never get mad about paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a network to get their ad on TV, even when they’d never know whether the ad had gotten anyone’s attention, were having coronaries over having to pay for the same kind of distribution. Unlike TV, your content’s reach increases only when you’ve put out content that people actually want to see and think others do, too. The more people who interact with your content, the more you can amplify the word-of-mouth amplification it receives as their actions are shared with other people. Create great content that gets people to engage and Facebook will let you show that content to more and more people. Create content no one cares about and Facebook will make it as difficult as possible for you put more of it out on its site.
Sponsored stories is a superior ad platform because it rewards nimbleness and quick reaction. When it shows us that a piece of content is resonating, we know to spend money on it. It’s so clear. When I think of what I could have done with a service like this back when I was in email marketing, I could just cry for the amount of wine that we could have sold. Let’s say that on average about 20 percent of the people who received my emails back then actually opened them, and one day I sent out an email that saw a 21 percent open rate. Then I saw that the wine mentioned in that email was suddenly selling extremely well. Clearly something about that email had made it extra valuable to my audience. How much would that knowledge have been worth? I would have happily paid Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail a premium to make sure that the next time I sent out that email, as many people as possible saw it, whether it was by working around spam filters or finding a way for the emails to automatically open when people went to their email accounts. A service like that would have been the greatest marketing tool in the world—heck, are you listening, Google?—and it’s close to what you can achieve through Facebook sponsored stories.
Facebook is shockingly bad at explaining sponsored stories, so let me try here. There are two types. One simply extends your chosen piece of content to the news streams of a larger number of your fans than the regular 3–5 percent that would normally see it. That’s called a Page Post. The other extends your reach the same way, but it allows you to highlight the fact that a fan has engaged with your content and tell that fan’s friends about it. You can choose to create this kind of sponsored story around a check-in, a like, and several other actions such as when someone shares a story from your app or your website. For example, if a fan checked in to a hotel, or claimed an offer from a T-shirt company, the hotel or T-shirt company could pay to make sure that friends of that fan knew about it, not with an ad lingering on the periphery of the Facebook page that no one but PC users will see, but within the actual newsfeed. That’s the big breakthrough for marketers. Before, when we created ads around a post, as soon as it migrated to the right side of the page the format of the post would change. This transformation compromised the impact of the creative work because it no longer looked like an organic piece of content created by someone you knew, but like an ad created by some stranger. But now marketers can keep the creative that we already know works organically, and enhance its power simply by paying to have more people see it, offering us an unparalleled opportunity to connect with active fans as well as reinvigorate relationships with fans that might have gone dormant over time.
Sponsored stories work like this: When I sponsor the story, a higher number of people than normally follow my page will see it in their News Feed. Now they are reminded about me. If the content is actually good enough to compel them to act on that piece of content—liking, sharing, or commenting on it—they get brought back into my orbit, and Facebook believes I am relevant once again: “Facebook users like GaryVee, so I’m going to give them more GaryVee.” Now the next time I post a new piece of content, many more of those people will be likely to see it. Yet I won’t have had to pay any additional money to get those impressions. And if the engagement continues, my initial costs wil
l continue to diminish as my impressions rise. It could trigger a snowball effect that could last well into the next month, and all for the price of one small sponsored story.
It’s important to realize that when you sponsor a story, you don’t buy additional data. What you get is extended reach and an additional layer of targeting above and beyond that of an ordinary post or targeted post, both of which are free. Put money behind a well-performing targeted post and turn it into a sponsored story, and you’ll increase the specificity with which you can target your audience. You could target a post for women, but your sponsored story can target women who enjoy arts and crafts, and women who listen to country music. If you find out you’ve got a large swath of consumers in your base who love dubstep, you might want to reference Skrillex in your content and send it their way. If you’ve created a piece of content with a hip-hop theme, you can check to see which of your fans consistently listens to A$AP Rocky and other hip-hop artists, and only send your content to them. Knowing this kind of detail and using it to tailor content to match your fans’ tastes allows you to create pulverizing right hooks.
GREAT BANG FOR YOUR BUCK
The sponsored story is one of the great ad opportunities of all time because it won’t let you spend more than your content is worth. Facebook calculates the initial value of your sponsored story based on the competition you face for your targeted audience, and how much that competition is willing to pay. From there, you then tell Facebook how much you’re willing to pay for each click or impression you want. But you won’t necessarily pay that amount. If you create a great ad that compels people to engage with you, Facebook will decide that your ad deserves priority over a competitor’s ad that isn’t as engaging. Facebook will let you buy your impressions for cheaper than your competitors if it sees that your ads are performing well, that people like them and are acting on them. In addition, when Facebook sees that people are interacting with your content, it will show that content to more people, because it is obviously enhancing the quality and entertainment value of the News Feed. The second people stop clicking, though, Facebook will stop running the ad as a sponsored story. It will still be visible to a core group of people, but it will be allowed to die a natural death, fading into irrelevance. Unless, of course, you insist on throwing more money behind it. But why would you? This time around, the sponsored story will cost you a lot more, and the results will be the same. Essentially, Facebook purposely makes it cost-inefficient to distribute bad creative.
How cool is that? If you make a stupid television commercial, the network is going to run it as many times as you pay it to. No billboard owner is going to look at your art and say, “Dude, I can’t take your money. You won’t get a dime of business with that.” But Facebook will, not because it’s nice enough to protect you from yourself, but because it’s savvy enough to protect itself from you. It’s in Facebook’s best interest for you to put out great content. It wants to monetize, but if users start feeling like they’re being spammed every time they go to the site, Facebook will suffer.
If networks could show marketers data that proved that every time they showed the consumer a bad commercial, consumers turned off their TV, TV commercials would be better. That’s what Facebook, and all social media, can do for us. Ideally, when Facebook informs you that no one is interacting with your sponsored story, that’s your cue to stop and rework the piece, or chuck it altogether. Facebook can’t tell you why it’s not working—you have to use the data it gives you to figure that out for yourself. Social media gives us real-time feedback from the consumer, which forces us to be better marketers, strategists, and service providers.
And it’s still ridiculously cheap. Maybe not as cheap as it used to be, but still a hell of a lot cheaper than a TV ad. And find a television network, radio station, newspaper, magazine, or banner ad provider that lets you test-drive your content for free in the form of organic or targeted posts the way Facebook does.
Ultimately, the changes implemented to Facebook ads only changed how much it costs you to work with Facebook, not how you tell your story. If you’re a brand that understands how to jab in ways that bring value to your customers—giving them a moment of levity with a cartoon, or a game to play, or any other escapist content, which then primes them to be open to giving you business when you finally ask with a right hook—you’ll win. If you’re not, you won’t. No matter what Facebook does, ultimately, it’s the content that matters. You can sponsor crap, and it won’t do anything for your sales. But you don’t ever have to sponsor crap. Your Facebook community provides you with an automatic crap filter every time you send out your content for free. Your organic reach may only be 3–5 percent or so, but if a large percent of that organic reach is engaging with your content, you know you’ve got something good. That’s the piece you sponsor. If you put out content and it doesn’t get any attention, you know you need to rework it or try something new. Facebook gives you a risk-free method to ensure that you only invest in what’s going to improve your business.
Things could change in the future. It’s possible that the platform will decide to start using actual purchases as indicators of fan interest more than the engagement of comments, likes, or shares. Obviously, making a purchase is a huge indicator that people want to see your content. That could mean that Facebook becomes as much of a right hook platform as it is a jab platform. If that happens, I predict that Facebook will come up with a way to control right hooks as strictly as it does sponsored stories. The last thing Facebook wants to become is a right hook platform, because it will die.
My advice to marketers is to quit complaining and start creating micro-content worth the money it will take you to successfully reach the customers Facebook is now guarding so carefully. Get more entrepreneurial. Figure out how to work the system and get the most bang for your buck. You can afford to be innovative on Facebook in a way that you can’t on almost any other platform that exists.
Let’s see how. In the following pages, we’ll see some examples of perfect Facebook plays, as well as some almost comical misses.
Please note, the critiques of the following case studies are my opinion only, based on years of experience. I cannot claim any knowledge of any business’s agenda or original intent. I’m just calling it as I see it.
COLOR COMMENTARY
AIR CANADA: Ruining a Good Idea
When Air Canada’s very first flight attendant, who worked for the airline from 1938 to 1943, died at the age of 102, Air Canada paid her tribute by posting her photograph and a link to an interview their in-flight magazine conducted with her about six months before her death. It should have been a successful jab that engaged a large number of their 400,000 fans. Unfortunately, they blew it.
Here’s why:
It’s not visually compelling.
It’s burdened with too much text.
It’s a link post when it should have been a picture post.
It would have made all the difference had Air Canada just taken a little extra time to make this post more visually compelling. Most of us would be thrilled to look as good at 102 as Mrs. Lucile Garner Grant does in her head shot. Yet the two big blocks of text surrounding it water down the impact of the photo. It’s too much to expect people to read all that when they’re scrolling through their mobile devices at warp speed. By uploading the photograph as a picture post instead of a link post, however, and overlaying the lines announcing Mrs. Garner Grant’s death onto the picture itself, Air Canada could have emphasized the photo and simultaneously explained why it was relevant. Next to the photo, they should have included nothing but the subhead of the interview (and maybe a mention of the dogsled), along with a link to the article.
Like this:
That’s micro-content right there—compact, intriguing, of-the-moment, and native to the platform. The layout is big and eye-catching enough to make a person scrolling through her Facebook News Feed stop and say, “Damn, 102? Their very first flight attendant? What?” and maybe click
through to read the whole interview, which really does offer a fascinating glimpse back in time and would be something many people would be compelled to share with friends. Had Air Canada simply made a few small visual and textual adjustments, they would have had more time to honor one of their employees, and also more time to tell a compelling story about their brand.
JEEP: Evoking the Right Emotions
This picture perfectly encapsulates the Jeep brand. Jeep could not have chosen a better model than the pretty young woman in this photo, with her shades, her flying hair, and her huge smile evoking summer, fun, and freedom. What’s cool is that she’s not a model—she’s someone a fan named Megan Bryant photographed and posted on Facebook. The movement and mood of this picture are striking enough to be worth checking out more closely. One look, and you start to wish you had a Jeep, too.
The only thing that could slightly improve this piece would have been to make sure that the copy, “It’s a Jeep Thing,” was more visible, perhaps by placing it onto the photo itself. With that small adjustment, Jeep would have delivered a powerful image, its logo, and its terrific tagline all in one shot. Otherwise, kudos to Jeep for such a beautiful, humanizing, and well-executed jab.
MERCEDES-BENZ: A Great Product Deserved Better
Another car company took a more traditional route than Jeep by posting a photo of their product. And what a product—that is one beautiful, luxurious car. The picture says it all, which is why it’s too bad that Mercedes-Benz turned what should have been a solid jab, bordering on a right hook, into a limp poke. Here’s how:
Too much text: It’s a shame Mercedes-Benz thought it needed to bog their stylish photo down with a load of description that few people will to read. All they had to do was include one line of text about the car’s sumptuous interior, and then link out to the excellent Forbes article that told readers everything else they needed to know.
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook Page 6