The title of this post says it all! We’ve heard quite a lot about cross-channel marketing, but what about cross-channel advertising? There’s a lot more to digital advertising that the ability to use the tools and available features. Advertising, in the end is marketing and if you were to take a holistic view of the entire prospecting and customer journey, you can see that there is a lot of untapped opportunities.
In this post, we’re going to be focusing mainly on Facebook advertising, and how you can boost the performance of this channel by tapping into data from other channels. Let’s explore 3 ways to do this. Bearing in mind that of course, there are more ways to do this and I would love to hear from you what other ways have worked.
Leveraging Google Analytics Data
In Google Analytics, besides demographic insights, there’s a sub-report on ‘Affinity’. From here you can see the affinity of your website visitors. Hence, if you’re an online pet shop, and you were wanting to run Facebook Ads, you could either target only pet lovers, keep the targeting super broad, or find a good mix in between these 2 extremes using the Google Analytics affinity report.
Once you’ve identified a few options, do some test runs to find out which audience type gives you the best ROI (Return On Investment) and ROAS (Return On Ad Spending). From testing, you can then decide how best to split your advertising budget! Take it a step further, you can also create look-alike audiences to customize your targeting even more.
Re-marketing Inactive Users from Your CRM Database
What’s the point of re-marketing inactive users? Well…. quite obviously, let’s activate them! Inactive users in your CRM database (Customer Relationship Management) are users that at one point, had shown interest in your website, products and services. Many marketers get into the habit of marking users as inactive when they have not opened an email for the past 2 months or made a recurring order for, so and so period. Fact is, perhaps they aren’t opening your emails because those emails got filtered into the junk folder, or perhaps they changed their mobile number, or mailing address. There are hundreds of reason why a user may have become inactive without them actually being dissatisfied.
Where does Facebook advertising come in? For one, you can’t really re-activate users in your mailing list by sending them another email if their junk filter has flagged your sender email, because your re-activation email will simply end up in the junk folder again. However, what you can do is create a custom audience from the inactive users in your CRM database and run Facebook Ads targeting those users. The assumption is, say between two types of audiences: those that have never seen your product or service, and those who have had some brief experience with your service, the latter is more likely to engage and interact with your ad when they see it. Hence, boosting both your Facebook advertising performance and also re-activating sleeping users in your CRM. Win-Win!
Insights From Activation Campaigns
Facebook is a lifestyle. The browsing behavior of Facebook users differ a lot from search-term based advertising. If a user is to click on an ad, very rarely do they already have the intention to buy; they are pretty much simply scrolling down the news-feed to catch up on what friends and family are up to. Hence, besides having already set-up a campaign with great targeting, custom audiences and what not, the key message of the entire ad campaign has a a very important say on how the campaign performs.
Insights from your activation campaigns, whether it’s giving out free samples, surveys or demos, can tell you what the market is looking for. The data collected from offline campaigns can tell you just what is it that interest people as they walk pass your booth at an event or come across your parades. This is lifestyle. And Facebook is a lifestyle. Use insights from your activation campaigns to design the key message, landing page and core mechanic. If it fits the audience lifestyle, chances are, you should see pretty good engagement from your ads!
In the end, these ideas to help you boost your Facebook advertising campaigns from cross-channel insights are only the tip of the iceberg! Have other ideas you want to share? Want to discuss other ways to boost your campaign? Feel free to get in touch and discuss with a digital marketing enabler from our community. We’d love to hear from you!