Top of funnel, brand awareness or creating demand; whatever you call it, it must be part of your paid media strategy or demand will simply dry up leaving you a little bit screwed. Heads up: If you're not willing to see your ROAS drop for long-term sustainable growth, then I wouldn’t read on.
As I’ve mentioned before, no one is investing enough in creating demand. They focus too heavily on selling in a world where everyone is selling, so it’s easy to see how your message will be lost. You need a balance where you are investing more in creating new demand than harvesting existing demand.
I created my own split of 60% creating/nurturing demand (TOF/MOF), 30% capturing demand (BOF) and 10% retaining demand.
For those of you who are new to this, then the above split probably makes you a little nervous. Therefore, try gradually moving to this and reframe how you’re measuring success through your Meta ads.
With the ever-increasing privacy restrictions, it is getting harder and harder for marketers to measure their performance. Pushing many to focus even more on conversion-driven tactics, as at least you can understand success here. This is why I rebuilt how we manage our brand awareness ads (TOF).
This simple three tiered structure provides measurable results that you can actually work with and trust. Remember: The sole purpose of TOF ads is to create demand for your brand or product through brand awareness activities and grow your remarketable audience pools.
Now, it doesn’t take a genius to know that Meta’s algorithms love video, but so do marketers. The most important TOF campaign you can run is a brand awareness video campaign. Using both 9x16 and 1x1 video creative at 15 & 6 seconds in length, you can begin to build a remarketing audience of people who have watched 25% + of your video. The beauty here is that rather than your standard Reach or BA campaign where Reach and Ad Recall Lift basically mean F all, you can actually see who watched your video for a decent amount of time. These people have actively been engaged by your video and therefore fall nicely into a video views audience for you to nurture at the middle of the funnel.
Destination: Landing page
Objective: Video views
KPIs: views 25%, views, 50%, views 100%, Clicks, CPC, CPM
We all love traffic, it is the lifeforce to growing your eCom brand, but sometimes Meta can send a tonne of useless traffic to your site that just burns cash. This is why the second part of this structure is also a test. Here you will run both an engagement campaign and a Traffic campaign. You will use onsite KPIs such as Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and Pages/Session to quantify if this traffic is quality or not. If not, pause this campaign and focus on post engagement.
Ad creative: Static images and stories
Destination: Landing page
Objective: Sessions (quality)
KPIs: CPC, CPM, Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and Pages/Session
Ad creative: post, IX or poll ad
Destination: Instagram account
Objective: Engagement
KPIs: Likes, shares, comments, clicks, CPC, CPM
Some brands lack the resource to run video campaigns so running traffic and Engagement campaigns are the next best thing. As stated above, the main objective is quality traffic. This will build a remarketable audience to target filled with people who have visited your site. However, if this audience is of poor quality, we have a backup as the engagement campaign is designed to encourage anyone who is interested to take a trackable action. This could be liking, sharing or commenting on an ad, opening an Instant Experience or responding to a Poll ad. The point is all the actions are trackable, so there is no guessing about the quality, this user has shown some form of interest.
Another no-brainer. You need as much first-party data as possible. I don’t need to go into much detail here as if you’re reading this blog, you know how to run a lead gen ad. The only thing I will mention is the two audiences you will pull from this activity, not one!
Destination: Landing page
Objective: Leads
KPIs: Leads
If you run the three/four campaigns above, you’ll be left with some sweet-arse remarketing audiences to play with at the MOF, where you nurture this initial interest and get them poised to purchase.
