Category: Blogs

How to Drive Full Funnel Advertising Results With Amazon

Posted on by Hannah Huedepohl

As marketers and consumers, we know Amazon is an uncontested advertising powerhouse, dominating everything from e-commerce sales to search traffic to ad spend. In this article, we’ll discuss how CPG advertisers can leverage Amazon’s advertising platform to drive full-funnel marketing results.

The Amazon Advertising Platform offers multiple ways for brands to engage with Amazon’s vast audience by advertising on-site or leveraging their customer data to serve ads across the open internet. With retail media’s recent explosion in popularity, Amazon Ads is expected to exceed $32B in revenue by 2023. Although many players are entering the market, Amazon is the clear leader with approximately 76.2% of US e-commerce channel ad spending in 2021. 

Amazon is a common tool for conversion-based, point of purchase advertising. However, there are other underutilized opportunities in the platform for brands to expand their audiences through awareness and consideration tactics that will ultimately lead to sales. Let’s explore how to reach customers at all stages of the consumer journey using Amazon Ads.  

How To Establish Awareness With Amazon DSP Prospecting

Nearly 75% of product research starts with Amazon. Brands cannot ignore this and should ensure they are using the platform to serve awareness-based messaging to new audiences as well as optimizing for search within the site. The Amazon DSP allows brands to use in-market data for first touch prospecting efforts, typically with video or display channels. 

How To Build Brand Consideration With Amazon Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brand ads place products in front of users during the consideration phase. These ads appear on the search results, generating brand recognition and promoting discovery. They also help users find the information they are looking for, allowing your brand to position itself as a useful solution to their inquiry. 

How To Increase Amazon Sales With Sponsored Products

Sponsored Products are keyword-target ads promoting an advertiser’s individual listings. They appear in the search results and on product detail pages on Amazon to drive purchases.  Advertisers can select their products to advertise and choose keywords which will trigger ads to appear. Similar to Google Adwords, advertisers purchase bids on a cost-per-click auction. 

Ensure Performance With Ad Quality

Ad quality on Amazon depends on various factors. Implement these best practices to ensure your ad ranks at the top of the search results:

  • Calculate your max CPC to be profitable based on cost per sale
  • Ensure your product has a strong image and title quality
  • Monitor product reviews as they will affect ad quality

Targeting Amazon Shoppers

Amazon provides visibility into millions of consumers’ shopping behaviors as they move through the purchase  journey. We are able to collect real-time data based on browsing and purchase intent signals from customers across all channels and touchpoints including AAP, Mobile, Kindle and Fire TV. Any time a customer takes an action on Amazon.com, they can be included in targeting segments.

Brands can utilize in-market targeting to reach audiences actively searching for related products or apply lookalike targeting to reach new people with behaviors similar to their best customers. Additionally, the platform offers a number of targeting variables to layer onto campaigns, including keyword, product, and category targeting.

Incorporate Amazon Into An Omni-Channel, Full-Funnel Strategy

Despite its broad capabilities, Amazon is still a walled garden. Their data is siloed within their own DSP, which can be a challenge for brands looking to measure cross-channel results and track audiences across all commerce and marketing touchpoints.

At Coegi, we work with our CPG clients to build connected commerce strategies that connect all points of the customer journey together. For CPG brands, this often includes many factors such as DTC, offline and online sales as well as programmatic, social, traditional and even experiential marketing channels. 

Holistically managing your advertising efforts together puts Amazon activity into the context of your broader marketing strategy. Managing all efforts with one team allows you to share performance trends and learnings across tactics. Optimize different tactics and budgets in a complementary, strategic manner to improve overall performance. 

Using these tactics, your brand can leverage Amazon Advertising Platform to drive consumers through the marketing funnel and support a seamless customer journey.

For more information on how to create an omni-channel commerce strategy using Amazon, contact us at info@coegipartners.com. 

Emerging Social Platforms: Advertising Beyond Facebook

Posted on by Coegi

When marketers think of social media, they often default to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Although these platforms are important, there are other emerging platforms that may be a better fit for your target audiences. TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and Tumblr are five high potential emerging social platforms to consider in your marketing channel strategy.

TikTok Advertising

This is a key social media platform for creating, sharing, and discovering short-form videos. TikTok gained over 1 billion users since its launch in 2016 and is among the top ten most used platforms today. Despite its massive popularity, many marketers are uncertain on how to engage with its unique audience and format. TikTok is important to consider for its incredible algorithm and mass exposure opportunities.

Unlike other platforms, content is shown to users by a curated, algorithmic system known as the ‘For You’ Page. The ‘For You’ page generates a continuous feed of primarily organic content blended with sponsored content. This element grants every video the opportunity to go viral. This is beneficial for small businesses looking for low-cost awareness and for larger businesses wanting to maximize engagement. Our post The Do’s and Don’ts of TikTok Advertising offers greater insights on building effective advertising campaigns on TikTok.

Snapchat Advertising

Snapchat is a mobile messaging platform to share photos, messages and videos. Unlike most platforms, Snapchat uses disappearing content. Users connect with others by expressing themselves and living in the moment, and marketers should to do the same.

Snapchat ads are essential for brand engagement. Advertisements show up between friends’ stories and people can easily swipe up to interact. According to insider data, 319 million people use Snapchat every day and 75% of Snapchat users are Millennials or Gen Z. Snapchat ads are extremely successful for ecommerce brands as fashion, novelty items, and impulse purchases perform well. However, advertisers in all industries can find success by delivering authentic content that makes users feel connected with your brand.

Reddit Advertising

Reddit is a social news website and forum where users participate in discussion and rate content. As of 2021, the platform has over 430 million monthly active users and 130,000 active communities. The interface consists of subreddits about topics where users have the opportunity to engage in valuable conversation. Marketers can leverage the platform to reach niche audiences in these specific interest groups. Some popular subreddits to consider for your marketing strategies include college admission, agriculture, health & wellness, telecommunications, or public health. For more in-depth tips on reaching niche audiences on Reddit, check out Advertising on Reddit: Reach Your Niche Audience. 

It is important to consider users’ hesitancy toward having branded content in the Reddit environment. Users dislike overly promotional language and are likely to skip over it. Content with a UGC creative feel is extremely beneficial. Users are more likely to engage with content specific to the community. 

Pinterest Advertising

Pinterest is a social media platform for sharing visual content, discovering new interests, and deep diving into passions. With over 431 million monthly users, the platform allows users to share posts, also known as “pins,” with other users and find communities with similar tastes.

Although over 60% of their users are female, Pinterest appeals to an increasingly diverse audience. Male and Gen Z user categories are gaining traction with 40% year over year growth. These users have strong purchase power with 45% having a household income over $100K. Users treat the platform as a source for inspiration; therefore, creative and innovative posts tend to have high performance. Promoted posts are part of the expected user experience. This makes Pinterest a great place to drive conversions with shoppable ads, while initiating brand awareness among key interest groups. 

Tumblr Advertising

Tumblr is a microblogging platform where users can post multimedia content. It is extremely versatile with media formats including text, photo, link, chat, audio and video. Although the platform peaked in popularity in 2014, it is still ranked among the top fifteen social media platforms with over 500 million active users. Tumblr presents many unique advantages for brands. For example, Sponsored Posts are useful ads visible to users through their dashboards. They blend in with organic content and are strongly welcomed with Tumblr creators. In fact, 70% of consumers perceive a brand more favorably after seeing a Sponsored Post and over 50% research the sponsor afterward.

The platform skews slightly younger with Gen Z accounting for over 61% of new Tumblr users and 48% of active users. Ads with comedic, dramatic or informational tones typically perform best on the platform. Brands looking to resonate with these users should strategically consider their creative messaging to align with these audience preferences. 

Choosing Your Best Paid Social Media Channels

As you are considering social tactics, consider these emerging social platforms and the opportunity they can provide. Many of these channels are well established, however much of their advertising capabilities are largely untapped. This means you can capitalize on whitespace where your brand can cut through the noise and reach enthusiastic audiences. When selecting which emerging social platforms to leverage, be sure to consider the campaign objective and if the platform aligns with your goals. 

Additionally, it’s critical to have a holistic understanding of the audience demographics and their sentiment around ads on the platform. Ensure your creative strategy results in a positive experience that drives results and increases learnings. If you want to stay up to date with the newest trends on social media, be sure to check out Nine Easy Ways to Stay Up to Date Social Media.

How Curiosity Can Improve Your Data Analysis

Posted on by Coegi

Efficiently analyzing data and providing ongoing campaign optimization recommendations is critical for driving the best results for our clients. However, the complexity and rigidity of data sets can make the most meaningful insights difficult to accurately uncover. In order to elevate your analysis and provide better insights for your campaign performance, you must stay curious, using knowledge and creativity to bolster your approach. 

Moving from Data Analytics to Data Insights

Analytics and insights – they are closely related, but not the same. Analytics is a way we approach a problem that is standardized and repeatable. But what we’re really after is turning these numbers into insights. For instance, you might see that a lot of people clicked on your ad – analytics. But going further to ask ‘What does the high click-through rate mean? and deciding how are you changing campaigns based on that knowledge – that’s insight. 

In other words, analytics are repeatable, standardized processes to understand data and gain information. Insights are what we do based on that information. 

When running a campaign, there are often thousands, sometimes millions, of data points to analyze. Even when campaign goals and KPIs are clearly defined, it can be difficult to immediately identify the more subtle and complex insights hiding within the numbers. That is where curiosity and creativity come into play – we start looking for whatever stories the data can tell.  

The Benefits of Using Curiosity in Your Data Analysis

Asking thoughtful questions and keeping an open mind about what you see in the data helps identify unexpected opportunities and avoid pre-existing biases in your analysis. This allows patterns to appear in the data and provide beneficial insights for future campaigns. No matter what kind of data you are working with, there is always a learning to uncover.

For example, perhaps you have a channel that is unexpectedly driving better sales numbers than others. Instead of broadly accepting the success of the campaign, investigate why that channel did well so you can apply those learnings and build on that success. Stretch your mind to stretch your data and let it come alive for your brand.  

Avoiding Analysis Paralysis

Anyone deeply entrenched in data analysis will know it is all too easy to get buried, and even lost, trying to extract every bit of intel from the data. And while we want to glean as much insight as possible, it can be difficult to know where to stop once you start down a rabbit hole in an effort to get every morsel of information. At some point, the return on that time investment will diminish and you’ll start coming to the same conclusions, just from different angles. 

It’s critical to strike a balance, understanding when it’s valuable to take more time to really dive into the numbers, asking a variety of questions before taking action on the insight. Quarterly reviews, post-campaign reporting, planning phases – these are all times when deep analysis and questioning of the status quo is beneficial. 

Guide Curiosity with Measurement

When you start to dig, the data can seem like an endless hole if you don’t know what you’re searching for. But if you root yourself in your overarching measurement strategy, centering on your business goals and each channel’s role in helping achieve that success, it will become much easier to determine if your media is working or not. 

It is always best to spend more time upfront talking through the strategy as a whole before you begin analysis. Then it will all come into play and be very easy. The amount of time you spend should be way more upfront than it is actually building out final data visualizations and dashboards. 

Key Takeaways

Curiosity and data analysis – yes, they do go together. Applying creativity and allowing space for human intuition and insights is key to data storytelling. But to be an effective and productive data analyst, you need to balance the art and science. Keep in mind what is and isn’t reasonable. Live for the data. Explore it and search for the stories that it weaves together. But, avoid investing your valuable time on a dark rabbit hole that leads nowhere.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0oazN9M1wEDclax3GipHM0
Data Strategy Podcast Episode

Navigating the World of Marketing for Crypto Brands

Posted on by Coegi

The growth in cryptocurrency’s popularity is undeniable. The global value of cryptocurrency is over 2.29T, more than the GDP of Canada or Italy. And crypto users are engaging for multiple reasons. Sure, there is the appeal from an investment and transactional standpoint, but part of it is certainly novelty and curiosity.

As crypto brands begin to think about capitalizing on this upward trajectory, consider how to tackle marketing in a way that is sustainable, effective, and innovative.

Think Beyond “Crypto Enthusiasts” When Targeting Consumers

It, of course, makes sense to target those who are already involved with crypto when introducing and/or growing your brand. However, these are not the only individuals you should be seeking to influence. It’s important to do your due diligence with research. There are the crypto curious “normie” audiences who maybe haven’t taken the leap to making their first investment, but just need a little education from the right brand to move forward. There are the heavy stock investors who could be seeking to diversify in times where stock portfolios are fluctuating heavily. Also, there are individuals who don’t necessarily care to use crypto to accumulate enormous wealth. Instead, they are looking for mechanisms like crypto to enable a future of financial freedom.

Conversely, sometimes you need the niche audiences that are only interested in one specific type of cryptocurrency, such as Ethereum. Regardless of the situation, it’s important to dive deep into each unique crypto brand, understand the value propositions of their products and services, and leverage research to explore creative audiences and contextual environments.

Finally, it’s important to align creative messaging with the audience journey. You should talk to someone who is crypto-savvy much differently than someone simply looking for financial freedom. One is likely to have a quicker road to conversion while the other requires more time for awareness and education.

Lean Into Digital – But Understand The Limitations

Digital advertising offers brands the ability to reach the target consumers at scale, gathering data that allows for key brand learnings and the ability to tie exposure to action. However, with many ‘emerging’ industries, there are some platforms that either restrict or prohibit any advertising regarding cryptocurrency. Be sure to do due diligence on all platforms under consideration to understand which hoops you have to jump through.

Some programmatic channels we’ve found to be effective for marketing cryptocurrency brands include: display, Twitter, LinkedIn, Search, Facebook and Instagram. We have also seen a lot of value in endemic placements on major crypto-focused publications. There is high contextual relevance and also perceived trust running alongside other crypto-related content.

Seek Buying Efficiency – But Also Enjoy Making A Splash At The Right Time In The Right Place

Implementing an optimization strategy based on testing and learning will naturally allow cryptocurrency marketers to find ways to drive improved efficiency and effectiveness. It allows you to find the right channels, audiences, and creatives to drive increased brand lift, lower cost per action, and build overall brand growth.

Yes, you can accomplish this by combining proper campaign analysis using advanced measurement and analytics insights. However, incorporating third-party data, such as financial indicators, can be an innovative way to know when to ramp up spend and make a greater impact. Maybe a downturn in the NASDAQ means it’s time for a high value placement on Forbes? Or even a big billboard in Times Square?

The world of cryptocurrency is exciting and challenging in the best way. Marketers working with these emerging fintech brands should have a mindset of curiosity and determination to drive the strongest results.

Still curious? For more insights, view our webinar on-demand: The Metaverse, Crypto, & NFTs: What Marketers Need to Know.

Retail Media Advertising Explained: Connected Commerce

Posted on by Coegi

What Is Retail Media Advertising?

Retailers are becoming ad publishers. They’re transforming their data and online platforms to sell valuable audience data along with advertising spots. Retail media advertising buys can be executed on retailer sites or programmatically on social and display channels. This data enables consumer brands to reach online shoppers. It can be activated by targeting ads based upon keyword searches, purchase history and other data collected via SKUs, purchase scans, and loyalty programs. 

The recent growth of retail media advertising has been astronomical. Amazon Ads alone is expected to reach $32 billion in revenue by 2023. Although many players are entering the market (Best Buy, Target, Kroger, Walmart etc.), Amazon still dominates with an estimated 76.2% of US ecommerce channel ad spending in 2021. Brands are leaning into this trend with 76% of marketers planning to frequently utilize point of sale data in 2022. With the CPG clients I’ve worked with at Coegi, we recognized the emerging trend of retail media and made sure we were incorporating this must-have tactic into our connected commerce strategies.

Reach Your Customers Wherever They Are With Retail Media

Retail media advertising empowers brands to be exactly where your customers are and deliver personalized experiences on and offline. 

  • How can you reach customers in-store? 
  • Where can you reach them when shopping online? 
  • How can you reach audiences when they’re scrolling through socials? 

Retail media lets advertisers be more data-driven and provides a reliable targeting solution. Targeting these shopper audiences creates the opportunity to deliver an efficient, personalized experience. The icing on the cake (or should I say cookie?) is that most retail data is cookieless. So, we are able to utilize it not only now, but into the future. 

With the landscape becoming increasingly cluttered, most CPG brands won’t have the budget to be present on every retail media platform, nor is that in their best interest. To make the most impact, brands need to research and test where their audiences are spending time. After making your selections, it’s also important to have unique strategies for each retailer. Your messaging and execution should look different on a Best Buy audience dataset versus a Wal-Mart audience. 

Connected Commerce Strategy

Connected commerce strategy is a concept developed by Skai. It means thinking about how you can connect all points of the customer commerce journey together. As retail media networks become more sophisticated, we are seeing more full-funnel implications. The Trade Desk reported that 39% of marketers surveyed use retail media advertising to drive brand equity scores and 44% use it to track sales growth. Take advantage of ecommerce site and programmatic placements to find prospecting audiences and track them through the funnel. 

For example, you could target an upper funnel retail media audience on social and display and then serve them a retargeted ad when they are actively shopping. Or, you could use Facebook conversion ads to drive to your Amazon product page and then develop a retargeting audience. For best results, I recommend strategically flighting media together and not having a standalone retail media strategy. Having supportive media across channels improves results for our clients at Coegi compared to solely running onsite retail media buys. 

Additionally, we recommend utilizing Amazon as a point of discovery along with Google Paid Search. When people start researching products, almost 75% start with Amazon. They are exploring, reading reviews, and connecting information to make a purchase decision. It’s important to look at the whole ecosystem of commerce and make sure all those puzzle pieces are connected. Understand what channels can help each other to incorporate a true connected commerce strategy. 

“Retail media presents retailers with an opportunity to better personalize their e-commerce sites, improve discoverability of products, and better monetize their first-party data. Likewise, it offers brands an opportunity to better reach their end customer and access more granular insights into marketing performance and effectiveness..”

– Forrester Now Tech: Retail Media Solutions Q2 2021, Colin Colburn

How To Measure Retail Media Advertising Success

The primary drawback to retail media, currently, is the segmentation from publisher to publisher. Wal-Mart data lives in one silo, Target data lives in another, and so on. Marketers have to be very mindful of where to invest for maximum impact. Using a trial and error method to test and learn is necessary. This allows you to see where your customers are responding because we do not see integration across channels with retail media. 

Look to outside partners who can aggregate data sets from multiple publishers and measure the big picture impact. Coegi works with partners so we can directly tag our in-market media and measure the direct impact of media on sales. These partners feed back real-time information so we can make optimizations and improve business outcomes. 

“For marketers wanting to take full advantage of retail media’s potential for reshaping attribution, and their overarching strategies for guiding consumers through the purchase funnel — or true “closed-loop marketing” — managing across retail data environments will be key”  – The Trade Desk

A more sophisticated approach is needed to ensure every dollar is spent wisely and effectively. This advanced insight from provides the competitive edge needed to maintain efficiency in this competitive market with rising costs and influx of demand. 

Key Takeaways

Retail media allows brands to: 

  • Utilize 1st party shopper data to reach customers wherever they are
  • Consider and understand the full shopper experience from discovery to purchase
  • Be data-driven and track closed-loop measurement, prioritizing cookieless solutions whenever available
  • Clearly understand the impact of ads on consumer behavior and sales 

At the end of the day, retail media is a must-have tactic for CPG brands, especially for challenger brands looking to break through. Explore connected commerce strategies for your brand to maximize the impact of your media spend and efficiently drive customers through the purchase funnel. 

Recommended Reading:

AI Optimization – The Paperclip Theory

Posted on by Jacob Amann

Paperclip Maximizing: Machine Learning And The Problem Of Instrumental Convergence

What do paperclips have to do with digital marketing and machine learning? Admittedly, pretty much nothing. The ‘paperclip maximizer’ thought experiment comes from Nick Bostrom at Oxford University. In essence, it looks at the idea that if you tell a machine to optimize to a specific goal it will do so at all costs.

If you told a machine to maximize the number of paperclips it produces the machine would eventually start destroying things like computers, refrigerators, or really anything made of metal to make more paper clips once other sources of metal run out. This concept has been coined as instrumental convergence. 

Paperclip vs Pay-Per-Click

If you transform the idea of paperclips into the idea of paying per click this becomes very relevant to digital marketing. Nowadays, almost every platform touts some version of AI or machine learning to revolutionize campaign performance, which is a boon to everyone.

By releasing control to machines, media buyers can focus on more strategic tasks such as identifying deeper insights for reports and understanding clients’ goals while campaigns continuously improve themselves. They do this by finding and optimizing for what works while avoiding the things that are not driving performance for the brand. 

See this in action on Our Work page. 

Defining Performance

What exactly is ‘performance?’ The easy answer is whatever your KPI may be. It could be clicks, it could be video views, it could be any trackable metric. However, this is already a simplified goal. If you are running a traffic campaign, the marketing goal should not just be to “get more clicks”.

The goal should be something designed to move the needle for the business – brand affinity growth, sales lift, etc.  For instance, driving qualified users from a target audience to an advertiser’s website and increasing brand favorability is a strong goal. This is something bigger than a single metric. A KPI can be a stepping stone and an important indicator of success, but it is not the final objective.

A truly successful campaign will not simply be the campaign that drove the most clicks at the cheapest price point. Success lies in the campaigns that drive true performance towards core business objectives.

Looking for a partner to harness AI technology and drive marketing performance? Reach out to Coegi for a discovery call today.

What Machines Lack

Context. Context is something that a robot has not yet mastered.

As a marketer, I know that increasing clicks, directionally, should push me closer to my goal. The machine knows this too, but this is all the machine knows. It will endlessly optimize to a single goal.

Maximizing the number of clicks given a fixed amount of budget. This can lead to unintended consequences – think back to the paperclip example.

A machine might say only run display banners and forget about high impact formats such as video and CTV. The machine might push 100% of impressions into in-app environments. It would say never buy another out of home ad again. The machine would never know to build brand awareness, because there is no optimization point it can use. 

Machines Need Guidance

We understand the role of the media buyer is not going away, but it is morphing. There is a new symbiotic relationship between buyer and machine which empowers them to maximize your brand as a whole. Successful media buyers do not need to spend 80 hours per week finding every winning media combination.

Most of these tasks can be done through harnessing technology and freeing up time to look at the media plan from a higher level.  These benefits of using AI go directly to our clients in the form of more time dedicated to listening to client needs, smarter digital media plans, and ultimately higher performing campaigns. 

How To Incorporate Smart AI In Your Media Buying

  • Release media optimization controls to AI machines and spend time on strategic campaign elements. 
  • Define performance success beyond the metrics by establishing meaningful campaign goals 
  • Use context to avoid instrumental convergence and potentially harmful optimizations from unattended machines.

Click the button to view our full YouTube playlist on AI for Marketers.

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Advertising on Reddit to Reach Niche Audiences

Posted on by Coegi

Reddit is not always the first platform that comes to mind when advertisers are thinking about paid social, but it should not be overlooked. Reddit is a fast growing platform that allows advertisers to reach a very niche audience at a reasonably low cost. The Reddit platform does have some downfalls though, such as a less advanced reporting platform as compared to competitors. Here, we discuss the benefits and challenges of advertising on Reddit and some helpful tips to create a successful campaign.

What Is Reddit And Who Uses The Platform?

Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. It is a discussion-focused platform and is often referred to as “the first page of the Internet.”

There are 52 million daily active users, which represents a 44% increase from October 2019. The platform sees 430 million monthly active users.

  • The vast majority of Reddit users are in the United States. 221.98 million users are in the United States, followed by Australia with 17.55 million users and India with 13.57 million users.
  • Two-thirds of Reddit users identify as male.
  • Reddit is most popular among the 25 to 29 year old age group. 64% of Reddit users are between the ages of 18-29.
  • The majority of Reddit users have a college degree or some college education.

Benefits Of Advertising On Reddit

  • Reddit ads can reach very niche audiences. There is a community for anything you can think of on Reddit. Ex: If you are selling liquor, you may consider targeting the r/cocktails or r/Bartenders communities.
  • Because Reddit has such a large number of users, CPMs are more efficient than some other social platforms.
  • Audience targeting is not only based on interests like other platforms, but also based on communities, also known as subreddits. These communities are often made up of very engaged users, so it is important to learn about the communities you are targeting and tailor your creatives to these communities.

Challenges Of Advertising On Reddit

The Reddit platform reporting capabilities are not as advanced as some of its competitors. It offers basic metrics, but does not go into as much detail as some of the other platforms, specifically with regards to engagement.

For example, users upvote and downvote on Reddit to express their approval or disapproval on a post, but this data is not available to view on the Reddit dashboard unless you are an admin. This would be important information for hands-on keyboard execution partners to have.

The Reddit dashboard only displays six months of data, so you are unable to see spend and performance for campaigns longer than 6 months ago. Because of this, we recommend Reddit campaigns run for less than 6 months.

Best Practices For Advertising On Reddit

  • Utilize community targeting and interest targeting in each ad set. When testing interest targeting vs. community targeting, we have found that community targeting tends to perform more efficiently when it comes to CTR than interest targeting, but combining interest targeting and community targeting in one ad set outperformed both.
  • Conduct research on the communities you would like to target. Look to see if these communities have many active members and what they discuss. Use this information to tailor your creatives to these users’ interests.
  • Use creative that feels authentic to your audience. Users of Reddit appreciate advertisers to meet them where they are.
  • Utilize both placement options (conversations and feed) at the ad set level in order to diversify where your ad will be seen.

Reddit is an excellent platform for reaching niche audiences at a relatively low cost. The platform is not as sophisticated as some of the others, but the ad performance on Reddit speaks for itself. If you are looking for a new platform for paid social, do some research on subreddits that your target audience may identify with and give Reddit ads a try.

Nine Easy Ways to Stay Up to Date on Social Media Trends

Posted on by Coegi

Social media is an ever-growing and evolving landscape with new platforms launching and new features being released on a frequent basis. Being able to reach your target audience on the right platform with the right feature or placement is crucial. It may feel overwhelming to try to keep up with the continually changing social media advertising trends without committing significant time – these nine tips will help you stay up to speed without sacrificing too much time.

Spend Time on Social Media Every Day

Try to set aside 10 minutes every day to scroll through your brand’s social media feeds. This is a great way to see what people are talking about, what’s trending today, and what changes are happening.

Social media tips to use your time efficiently:

  • Customize your feeds so that you can easily see relevant and trending content/topics.
  • Save articles to read for later so you can revisit when you have more time.  
  • Ask your team to also spend 10 minutes a day on social media and then share interesting findings regularly.
  • Familiarize yourself with new social platforms in order to understand new consumer trends

Use SEO to Find Places Where Your Business Could Fill a Market Gap

Use tools like SEMrush, Keyword Hero, Screaming Frog, or SEOquake to see what your customers are searching for in your industry and vertical, analyzing their behaviors at various stages in the funnel, and understanding nuances between various types of consumers.  Using keyword and search research will not only help you stay on top of trends, but can also help guide your brand’s content creation and create best practices.

Utilize Customer Feedback

Solicit customer feedback via surveys and customer interactions on your business’s social media pages. Surveys and feedback will help you to better understand your audience, their needs, and their interests, allowing your team to provide even better customer support and service. Additionally, feedback from your customers and social media followers helps you identify what type of content resonates with/performs best. 

Ideas of questions to ask:

  • What’s one feature/product/service you’d like us to start offering?
  • What [BRAND/COMPANY] product can you not live without?
  • What kind of [BRAND/COMPANY] content would you like to learn about?
  • What’s your struggle with _________?

Of course, once you receive feedback, you need to apply it

  • Your customers have the best pulse on your products and services and may think of things you didn’t. Listen to their suggestions of how to improve current offerings, things they’d like to see, or new ideas.
  • Don’t ignore negative feedback. Negative feedback is an opportunity to understand pain points, make improvements, and improve customer service.
  • Incorporate feedback into your product roadmap.
  • Thank your customers who provide positive feedback. These people will become positive advocates for your brand.

Keep an Eye on What Your Competitors Are Doing

Set aside 10 minutes a week to look at what your competitors are posting and promoting. Ensure you derive inspiration regarding emerging trends in your industry, or even some of your personal favorite brands, but are not copying content. Share your unique POV and showcase the expertise of your brand.

Subscribe to Trade Journals, Publications, Newsletters and Magazines

Schedule time on your calendar weekly to read through your subscriptions to keep on top of the latest trends and changes.

Some good publications that frequently share the latest and greatest on social trends include:

Join LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are a great way to network with other business owners and social media enthusiasts. You’ll be able to ask questions of your peers to learn from their experiences and discover new social media sites/trends. Some great groups to join include “Social media Marketing Group by Connect365.io”, “Digital Marketing: Social Media, Search, Mobile, & more”, and “Digital Marketing.”

Attend Conferences Monthly or Quarterly (whether in-person or virtual!) 

Get the most up-to-date and relevant information about social media trends and advice from industry experts. Conferences are a great way to network and interface with other professionals in the social media industry who have different backgrounds.

Stay Current with Twitter and TikTok Trends

Twitter and TikTok function differently in terms of the type of content and algorithms than the other social media platforms. Here are some tips to help stay on top of what’s trending in both platforms:

Twitter

  • Create a stream on Twitter with hashtags such as #socialmediamarketing, #smchat, or #TwitterTip to help understand what to expect in the coming weeks.
  • Follow social media marketing influencers on Twitter and LinkedIn (sometimes discovered through hashtags!) and spend time reading their content.

TikTok

  • The “For You” page is a great place to start to see trendy and viral videos but this should not be the only place to look for trends.
  •  Hashtags help people find relevant content (think #mentalhealth, #prank, or #taylorswift). The most-used hashtags in video captions are the best place to see what is trending on TikTok. Many users will often use hashtags relevant to their niche in addition to one or two trending hashtags to help boost their content organically.
  • Keep an eye on challenges on the platform. Users are actively creating and engaging in challenges, which can create new trends. Many challenges include lip-syncing, dancing, or skits.
  • Observe what influencers on Tik Tok are posting. Influencers and celebrity posts on the platform will be popular in addition to clueing you in to what is trending.

Commit to Learning

The world of social media is always growing and changing. By spending time daily or weekly on social media platforms and news, you’ll be able to have a firm grasp on trends and changes. 

Staying on top of social media trends can be a daunting task. Using these 10 tips can help you use your time efficiently and stay in the know.

 

Further reading:

How to Moderate Trolls on Facebook Ads

Posted on by Emma Beverlin

Trolling is the act of leaving frequent, offensive/negative comments on social media posts. This can be done by a single person (troll) or a group of people (trolls). Having moderate trolls on social media can be uncomfortable. Here are a few strategies to help eliminate trolls on your Facebook page. 

Utilize Facebook Filters

  • Community Standards –  Facebook automatically conducts moderation on the Facebook platform as a whole. In order to use Facebook, users agree to the Community Standards. These standards ban things like nudity, hate speech, excessive violence, and fake profiles. 
  • Profanity Filter – Any page admin can implement the Profanity Filter setting on Facebook. When using this filter, admins have the option to set the filter to either “medium” or “strong.” The difference between the two settings is the allowable offensiveness of the profanity. Facebook determines this criteria.  
  • Keyword Blocking – Facebook allows admins to block up to 1,000 keywords from appearing on their pages. This setting is not case sensitive and will block variations of the specified keywords from appearing as well. 
  • User Banning –  In the case of an individual or small group of trolls, it could make sense to simply ban the offending users from the Facebook page. The banned user(s) will still be able to share content from the page, but they will not be able to comment, like, or post on the page. The banned users are also blocked from sending messages to the page’s inbox.

Additional Considerations

While each of the aforementioned Facebook settings can be incredibly useful, those filters are typically preventative. When actively dealing with trolling, consider the following recommendations: 

  • Responding to the Troll – In general, it is best practice to respond to comments on your posts. The same applies when it is a troll commenting. If possible, address the frustration or concern of the commenter and provide a solution. This could be through encouraging the user to reach out via personal message or phone call. Other users generally react positively to a brand being responsive and helpful by commenting back. Alternatively, ignoring the troll can give credence to the troll’s complaints and even encourage other trolls to comment. 
  • Deleting Comments– If responding to the user’s comment is unsuccessful or if the user’s comment leaves no room for a solution, it is possible to delete comments from your posts. This should not be the first course of action as it can lead to frustration from the commenting user. Deleting a comment can provoke the troll to leave another, more offensive, comment. It is also important to consider the fact all comments (negative or positive) play into an ad’s engagement rate. A higher engagement rate leads to better performance. 
  • Resetting Ads– If there is one ad causing the trolling, it is possible to reset the ad. This is not ideal as every time an ad is reset, all of the data and learnings associated with the ad reset as well. After resetting an ad more than once, it is worth considering sunsetting the ad in question and replacing it with a new ad. Resetting an ad is an extremely manual process and is not something you can do for all live ads frequently. 

Ultimately, having a troll target your page be a nuisance. However, there are multiple strategies and resources to help stop a troll. Inconvenient as it may be, appropriately responding and reacting to a troll can be a positive reflection of your business.

Measure What Matters

Posted on by Coegi

One of my long-standing mantras at Coegi is ‘Measure What Matters’.

So when the ANA released a report entitled ‘Media KPIs That Matter’, I was more than a little intrigued.  What the report found won’t surprise too many of us that work in performance marketing: most brands focus on KPIs that don’t really align with their business objectives.  

So why is this?  For starters, there is a lot of pressure for digital campaigns to be ‘data driven’.  I bet if the ANA asked if their members organizations are data driven, 100% would say yes.  The challenge is that there is too much data for the decision makers to truly understand. For marketing veterans that came from creative or PR backgrounds (that weren’t exposed to digital media buying earlier in their careers), it is challenging to grade the effectiveness of an omni-channel digital marketing.   Thus, they lean on the stats they feel most comfortable with: CPM, CPC and CTR.  Website traffic, reach and completion rates.  What we have longed referred to at Coegi as vanity metrics. To be fair, media efficiency should be a factor, but far less than many brands think. As my friends at The Trade Desk say, you can’t report on CTR on an earnings call.  

But what about ROAS?

Isn’t that the magic metric we should all be optimizing to anyways?  It should be in theory, but in practice, it all depends on attribution.  Is 100% of the conversion credit going to the last touch or last impression?  There are very few digital programs that are even attempting multi-touch attribution, and those that try are stymied by walled gardens that don’t share a unified measurement framework.  ROAS numbers are only as accurate as the data you use to analyze it, and too often there is more noise than signal in last-touch attribution.  Recent changes to app tracking on Apple phones and the impending elimination of third-party cookies on Google Chrome make attribution all the more challenging.

So what about the agencies?  Isn’t it their job to advise their clients as to the metrics they should be measuring?   Certainly many performance strategists are pushing to move towards more meaningful measurement, but it often involves a lot more institutional buy-in at the brand that you would expect.  Advocating an advanced measurement framework at the end of a proposal just isn’t going to cut it.  Often, you not only have to educate the marketing team, but the C-suite, product and sales teams as well.  

Creating a path to measure what matters

So what is the path forward for marketers trying to determine their media KPIs?  From my perspective, there is no singular KPI that defines success for any digital marketing campaign.  Instead, we should build custom measurement frameworks across multiple KPIs, that incorporate not just media efficiency metrics, but also engagement, brand lift, transactional data, and ROAS analysis, to get a better understanding of your digital program as a whole. Furthermore, it can be worthwhile to revisit the more academic and statistical forms of analysis, such as media mix modeling, matched market tests, and regression analysis, to get to the heart of success. 

Recommended reading:

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