Demystifying Social Media Marketing
By Elizabeth Burnam
Lexer President and CMO David Chinn has spent his career helping retailers across North America and Asia use their customer data to drive insight and improve business performance. He talked to us about the mistakes brands make when marketing on social media and how to solve them.
What one mistake do brands make when it comes to marketing on social media?
Facebook marketing—encompasing Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network—remains a top channel for customer acquisition. But as outdoor brands and retailers pump more money into this increasingly expensive channel, maintaining great returns can be hard.
The biggest mistake marketers make is not using customer insights to inform their audience targeting. This mistake happens when marketers only use Facebook data to create an audience, or when they build lookalike audiences based on their entire customer database. If you build lookalike audiences based on every customer, including low-value and churned customers, you’ll end up sending ads to disinterested or low-quality audiences. Low engagement with ads leads to higher costs and makes it more expensive to get your ad in front of those most likely to become new customers.
Facebook advertising works well with the right knowledge and strategy. Its audience match rate and coverage, flexible bidding strategies, and ease of testing make it accessible and full of potential for companies of all sizes. For example, snow-equipment retailer Corbetts recently used Facebook ads for the first time with Lexer’s help and saw amazing results, with some audiences delivering a return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). However, before you can reap Facebook’s benefits, you need customer insights and a strategic plan for building ads that genuinely resonate with your high-value audience.
What’s the key to overcoming that challenge?
To master Facebook advertising, you need complete customer profiles. Using these profiles, known as a “single customer view,” you can segment customers by key characteristics such as lifetime value, demographics, and product interests.
How can technology help?
Using software like a Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows a brand or retailer to easily aggregate all their customer data into a single customer view or profile. Once they have that access to information about their customers’ online and offline purchases, demographics, products or areas of interest, etc., everything else can fall into place. Take lifetime value as an example. Lifetime value is the most important metric for building effective Facebook audiences. For most outdoor brands, about 80% of sales and profits come from only 20% of customers. You can drive significant improvements in paid social performance by building lookalike audiences to mirror this top 20%.
Segment your audiences by demographics too. This simple characteristic is too often overlooked, but it makes a massive difference in performance. For example, if your campaign features surf and wetsuit products, consider narrowing your audience to people located near cold-water locations to start. Likewise, a women’s brand should start by only targeting women. Men might make purchases for gifts and holidays, but gifting advertisements should feature very different creative and messaging and should be tested separately.
How do you gauge the success of a social media marketing campaign?
Frequent tests will tell you what is—and isn’t—working. To gauge the success of your social campaigns, you need external measurement and testing tools. With a test-and-learn approach, each campaign provides the opportunity to learn more about your customers. Always begin with a focused hypothesis and A/B test ad sets to understand which audiences, messaging, creative, and bidding strategies are most effective for your business. The rapid results from these easy-to-implement tests will provide you with valuable insights about how to improve future performance.
As you develop your segmentation capabilities, you may also begin segmenting and testing audiences by other characteristics like purchase history, channel preferences, email engagement, web behavior, external data enrichment, predictive analytics, and more.
CDP can help you find your high-value customer segments, accurately measure performance, and test and optimize campaigns. With our team of outdoor enthusiasts, Lexer has become the CDP of choice for outdoor brands like Black Diamond, Corbetts, Mountain Khakis, Rip Curl, and Quiksilver.
How do you see social media marketing campaigns evolving?
Ultimately, social media marketing isn’t going anywhere despite trust in the platforms taking a hit in recent years. As marketers become more conscientious about maximizing their budgets and targeting real people instead of bots, third-party tools like Lexer can help you gain greater control over your advertising performance and restore confidence in paid social.
Read The February 2021 Edition
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