5 Insights to Guide Your Next Social Media Campaign

Because social media is so ubiquitous in our everyday lives, it can be easy to overlook the more granular aspects of social media marketing tools. To run a social campaign that really moves the needle, careful planning and continuous optimizations are required. Here are 5 key insights to help fine-tune your strategy. 

Adopting a continuous testing strategy leads to deeper insights that drive stronger results during peak shopping seasons:

Whether it’s A/B testing creatives or expanding lookalike audiences, the benefits of experimenting with new targeting and creative formats are endless. Learnings that are discovered during the off-season can help better prepare brands for when they need to drive the most results. Some creative and audience tests to consider include:

• Single-shot products ads versus multiple products per creative
• Longer carousels (6 or more cards) versus shorter carousels (less than 5 cards)
• Dynamic creatives: this feature allows you to input up to 10 images or videos with multiple copy and call to action options. 
• Performance can then be evaluated based on each iteration of the ad that Facebook creates, allowing for plenty of learnings
• High versus Low AOV purchasers - i.e. targeting past purchasers based on what price point they’ve converted at
• Interest targeting versus Customer Lists 

Going beyond basic retargeting to convert users close to purchase:

The most common strategy for driving lower-funnel results usually entails some form of retargeting, whether it’s reengaging past purchasers or users who have visited your website. While this remains one of the most effective methods for driving conversions, scaling up your campaigns may become an issue based on the size of your retargeting pool. To counter this, brands should consider adding Interest and Behavioral segments to lower-funnel campaigns to increase maximum reach while maintaining revenue as the primary objective.

• Consult with your marketing agency to determine what interests and user behaviors index highest for the target audience you’re trying to reach.
• If a particular audience continuously performs well in one of your awareness or site traffic campaigns, consider testing its performance against a lower-funnel KPI.

Understanding manual vs. algorithmic optimizations:

While it’s tempting to implement an extremely segmented structure in your campaigns for maximum control, consolidating where possible and allowing Facebook’s algorithms to optimize can lead to stronger performance and increased scale. 

Campaigns that share the same objectives should be combined, allowing Facebook to more easily determine which audiences/tactics are driving the most efficient results. Likewise, overly segmented audiences can limit performance by preventing top-performing ads from delivering enough impressions to result in a conversion.

Best practices include implementing the Campaign Budget Optimizer (CBO) to allow the algorithms to optimize delivery in real time toward those ad sets that are driving the greatest results. It’s also beneficial to set a campaign daily spend limit to ensure your budgets aren’t exhausted too quickly. 

Additional control over your delivery can also be obtained by adding minimum spend requirements at the ad set level, although it’s important to remember that some budget should remain unallocated to allow Facebook to spread the remaining spend across the audiences that it deems most efficient.

The increased importance of video and brand storytelling:

It’s no surprise that video ads have become more regularly utilized over the past few years due to their ability to showcase a variety of products while complimenting a brand’s unique identity. Put simply, videos allow users to easily recognize the brand through visual cues. To achieve immediate brand recognition, be sure to follow Facebook’s best practices for video:

• The brand logo should be featured at the beginning and end of the video to increase brand-product correlation for the user.
• While including sound is optional and often recommended, videos should be created for non-audio users.
• Text overlaid onto the video as well as clear copy accompanying the ad are both ways to reach users that navigate the platform with their mute buttons on.
• Videos should remain short and sweet (0:15s is the recommended length).
• Videos should be created in different aspect ratios to optimize for certain placements depending on if the user is watching horizontally or vertically.
• Additional spec information can be found HERE

Another way to get the most out of your video units is by reengaging users that watched them to completion. Creating a custom audience of previous video viewers and serving them ads that feature products shown in the video is a great way to sequentially target those that have already expressed an interest in your brand.  

Dynamic product ads are one of the greatest retargeting tools at your disposal:

Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) allow brands to target users based on the products they viewed or interacted with on the brand’s website. This presents opportunities to segment your audiences based on which collections users were closest to purchasing by showing them the individual products that they either viewed or added to their carts. 

This is typically one of the most effective forms of retargeting as these users took one of several steps toward completing their purchase, but fell off somewhere along the way. Once a catalog or product feed is linked to your account, Facebook will personalize the ads each user sees, enticing them to return to site and complete the purchase.

DPAs have a number of other customizable features available such as:

• Displaying dynamic prices for each product: each user is different, with some preferring to be able to view the price of products and others more willing to browse on site for that information. Testing both tactics can help brands understand what price point users are most comfortable converting at.
• Custom frame units: these can range from borders surrounding the products to unique messaging overlaid alongside the creatives that callout special offers or incentives such as “Buy Now and Save 10%” or “Free Shipping & Returns on All Orders.”

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Modco Media runs “always on” social campaigns for clients like LAGOS, Brahmin, Lendly and more. We also offer social media audits for brands to help uncover areas for improvement.