Thursday, 25 April

🗣 Running a B2B and want to reach 33,441 DTC Brands? Start here

Ask Ibrahim: If you need advice for your business, ask our DTC expert here

WHAT’S HOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

How cool is that? 🤯

We haven’t used this app yet, but it’s called One Text!

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Social Proof can make or break your Bank (Though your website sucks)

First things first, having an aesthetic and easy to navigate website for any brand is mandatory.

These create first impressions in your consumers mind, and you never dare to mess with that.

Beyond aesthetics and product info, what actually convinces your customers is the social proof.

In fact, Surveys show that 95% of consumers read online reviews before they shop.

Have you noticed, we just used a social proof to convince you?

Well, there are 8 types of social proof you can leverage.

1. Customer Reviews

2. Industry Expert Testimonials

3. 3rd Party Certifications

4. User Generated Content

5. Celebrity Endorsements

6. Badges

7. Media Logos

8. Influencer Marketing

“Ok, I’m convinced that I need to use Social Proof, but where do I put the social proof on my website?”

Good Question!

Ideally, on every step of your customer journey.

Homepage, Product Pages, Cart Summary page, Checkout Page and even Thank You page.

A quick note, if you are on shopify, you will only be able to customise your checkout page if you are on shopify plus.

For the rest of the pages, native integrations and third party apps can help you customise/add testimonials to suit your brand.

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

Hi there!

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “We should run awareness campaign on Facebook,” then today’s nuggets are especially cooked for you :)

Okay, let’s get into it..

In 2020, I joined a cosmetic company called Squeaky Clean that made cosmetics convenient for travelling purposes, and I joined as their Lead for Growth Marketing, where it was my job to help them hit revenue goals for the DTC business. The challenge I was coming in to solve was they couldn’t acquire more than 25 customers per day without having enormous costs associated with customer acquisition. So I decided to dive in and really focus on paid social as a way to begin turning the ship.

Some of the campaigns looked right, but a few others had no numbers as I looked to the right. Why? Because they were campaigns set as Awareness and Website Clicks campaigns. In theory, these campaigns should drive awareness and site traffic, right? Sure, but it’s deeper than that.

For the purpose of today’s email, I’m going to name the Facebook ads engine, “Zuck”—the best way to understand how Facebook ads work is by thinking of it as a person, not just a computer. Zuck is a bunch of software and code, but Zuck is so smart it’s better to think of him as someone who makes rapid decisions based on data rather than software.

Zuck knows everything about its users. Whether you know it or not, here are a few ways that Meta gets its data on you:

• User-Provided Data: The most basic layer is what users willingly offer up. Names, ages, locations, interests—you name it. Even the groups you join or pages you like contribute to your ad profile, and we call this first-party data

• On-Platform Behavior: Facebook closely tracks how you interact on the platform. What you like, share, or even just spend time looking at all goes into understanding what might catch your eye in an ad

• Off-Platform Behavior: Ever heard of Facebook Pixel? Think of it like a security guard on websites… it knows who you are when you get there, what you’re doing on the site, what you’re clicking on, etc. It's a small piece of code that businesses can put on their websites. This pixel tracks user behavior on these external sites and feeds that info back to Facebook. So, if you're shopping for shoes on a different site, don't be surprised to see shoe ads on Facebook later

• Third-Party Data: Facebook partners with data brokers to get even more info. Things like your offline purchase history, property ownership, or even what kind of car you drive can be included

You, as an advertiser, can easily buy this data for yourself too. I used to buy customer segments. You know Experian? That company you use to check your credit? They make most of their money selling you in a group of anonymized users to people like me. I’d imagine about 30-40% of their revenue comes from this.

Device Information: Facebook also knows what kind of device you’re using, your internet speed, and sometimes even other apps you've installed. This helps in serving you ads that are tailored to your device's capabilities

Location Data: If you have location services enabled, Facebook can serve you ads based on where you are, where you’ve been, or even where it thinks you’re going

Social Connections: Your friends’ likes and interests can also influence what ads you see. The thinking is, if your friends like something, there’s a good chance you might too. This is why you and your friends see the same TikTok videos

Lookalike/Similar Audiences: Advertisers can upload customer lists. Meta will then try to match those to existing profiles and create "lookalike" audiences who are similar to those customers but haven't necessarily interacted with the brand yet

Retargeting: If you interact with a certain ad or brand, you’re more likely to see their ads again in the future. This is a core part of retargeting strategies

Machine Learning Algorithms: On top of all this raw data, Facebook uses advanced algorithms to make sense of it. These algorithms predict user behavior, making educated guesses about what kind of ads are most likely to engage you. etc.

By using all this data, collectively, Zuck can decide which of its users are actually going to buy things from the advertisers, which users will browse a site and not buy, which will add to cart and then bail, which users will just click a link and then bounce, and which people won’t click anything and don’t care. Of course, all this data changes in real-time, but it’s not far from what was shown in The Social Dilemma (it’s a Netlfix movie)

If you’re still following, you can now start to understand that Zuck knows, on a scale, its most valuable users to advertisers and it’s least valuable users to advertisers. For example, those who are likely to purchase products are purposely shown more ads, with advertisers looking for a purchase intent. Those who are likely to keep scrolling without making purchases but can be counted as an “impression” will only see ads for advertisers running Awareness campaigns

So when the company I worked for was running website clicks campaigns and awareness campaigns, those ads were not only a waste of money, but we were just targeting unqualified prospects. The argument I often hear is, “The CPMs are so much lower when we run awareness,” or, “But this is top-of-funnel marketing!”

Yes, both of those things are true, but you’re targeting an unqualified audience. If they were qualified, the cost of landing a site visitor in an awareness campaign wouldn’t cost 5-6x as much—that is, while your CPM cost would be relatively a lot cheaper in an awareness campaign, just like Pinterest, it costs a whole lot more than the conversion campaign to convert a customer, or whatever CTA that you want the end user to make.

You need to understand that unless you’re a brand like Crocs, you don’t need to spend your dollars on Awareness or Website Clicks campaigns. Everything should be a conversion campaign. What changes is the Conversion Event that you optimize toward. If you’re looking for purchases, you optimize for Purchases. If you’re looking to fill your funnel, you optimize for Add To Cart. If you’re looking for site traffic, you optimize for View Content. If you’re looking to get leads, you create a custom Conversion Event with the Events Setup Tool and make that “Submit” button the conversion event. If you’re looking to drive awareness for your product at Target, you create a Conversion Event for the button people click on the store locator once they put their zip code in.

Running campaigns this way makes sure that you’re getting high-quality, qualified prospects to your site. Large companies have goals like “Impressions” or “People Reached” they need to hit, but they’re also household brand names doing over $1B in revenue. If you’re not doing $1B in revenue, you don’t need to run Awareness campaigns.

That said, amongst all this, please know that I’m a huge advocate of brand building. If you ever ask me, “Ibrahim, what’s more imporant? Brand building or performance marketing?”, my answer would be brand building any day. You need to understand that when you have a brand built, your performance marketing gets a lot easier and cost-effective, because it doesn’t cost you as much to acquire a customer as it is for a brand that’s unheard of. It’s the combination of building a brand + performance marketing that you should be inclining towards.

So what’s the punchline? Figure out your conversion events that align with what you need to accomplish, and run a conversion campaign optimizing for that. Don’t let me catch you running an awareness campaign because you think you’re reaching more of the right people.

Alright, that’s it for today folks.

Thank you.

TOOLS TO TRY

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Have any questions that you need help with?

Ask here - and look out for Fridays Issue where Ibrahim will answer them.