Today’s Top Marketing Recommendation
Monthly reporting can be repetitive and mundane, especially when you spend all month trying to optimize on social platforms. You get to the end of the month and ask - what next? What now? For most of us, the client doesn’t need to sign off on the daily changes we are making, like adjusted audience targeting, moving ads into new audiences, and shifting budget between campaigns. That is why it is key to try to provide action items that are useful to the client that will, in turn benefit you (the agency).
Here is what we are recommending our clients do this month to improve their websites, SEO, engagement, and paid media.
Activate Triple Beam, North Whale, or another third-party tracking platform. I think we are all aware of Facebook’s ever changing ecosystem. With all of the data and privacy changes and restrictions, reporting has become less and less accurate. These third-party softwares have their own pixels and separate platforms and do not have to follow the same tracking rules in Facebook. They can easily also show overlap from customers who may have been hit by multiple platforms and messages on their purchase journey, providing a more holistic view.
Answer/engage with ad comments. We all appreciate when a brand recognizes, responds, and engages with us. Especially when it comes to comments on ads, we want a purchaser’s journey to be pleasant and undisrupted. Ensure that any questions are answered, negative comments are addressed, and inappropriate messages hidden or handled offline.
Maintain blog content. This is highly important to boost organic SEO and maintain a stream of new content for emails and ads. Many of our clients have blogs that have gone silent in the last year or two with the chaos of the e-commerce ecosystem. Don’t let this happen! These blogs help to drive organic traffic and improve SEO by matching to relevant keywords and helping users find what they are looking for.
Seasonal gift guides/ads. We see holidays drive huge spikes in sales for almost all of our clients. Make sure to capitalize on this whether it is Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. Create gift guides and designed creative around the holidays. Start messaging early to maximize sales and feature cutoff dates for shipping.
Monitor email and SMS flows. Email and SMS flows are an easy way to reach new, existing, and potential clients. Ensure you are reviewing your flows quarterly (at minimum) to update any seasonal content and troubleshoot for any issues like: People entering a flow when they should or shouldn't be, a flow message being skipped, or a configuration or set up not working properly. Reviewing the analytics of your email flows and responses to any messages will ensure these issues are resolved in a timely manner and you don’t lose customers due to content or technical issues.
Add press on product pages. People love hopping on a trend, a popular product, or a product backed by good press. Having press mentions on your site helps, but even better - include logos of press mentions on each product page for those products featured in popular newspapers, magazines, etc. Shoppers will more easily connect the two and it will be more likely to influence their purchase decision.
Add SMS. 55% of people use native messenger on mobile devices to send texts and 91% of consumers would opt-in for text messages from brands. So why not try to hit your potential and existing customers in one more place? Complement email promos with SMS campaigns that mimic this content to give them one more touchpoint delivered directly to their messenger inbox.
And here are a few things we are working on internally:
Broaden audiences. We have been seeing success with removing interest and lookalike targeting and letting Facebook take the wheel with broader demographic audiences. You can add some geographic, age, or gender restrictions if needed but keep it with that.
Breakout ads that are not getting spend into separate test creative campaigns. We all know that Facebook finds an ad that it thinks works well and puts all an ad sets budget behind it. We have kept existing audiences with the ads we know historically perform well but then put all new ads in a test audience first to get spend behind them to see how they perform. Otherwise, these new ads might never see the light of day.
Use these tips to help take your clients' accounts to the next level and impress them with your efforts to get ahead of the ever changing social media and e-commerce ecosystem.