Wednesday, October 30, 2019

How one of the world’s biggest marketers ripped up its playbook and learned to anticipate intent

For decades, the CPG industry has been about doing things en masse: mass manufacturing, mass distribution, mass communication. Media and marketing campaigns were focused on reaching the most people, rather than the best people to drive growth for the brand.

But mobile and technology are disrupting our industry in every aspect. Today’s shoppers are more connected on mobile, have a limited attention span, and are more demanding of brands. Furthermore, people are being presented with an astronomical amount of choice and are bombarded with hundreds of messages everyday. As a result, their decision journey is no longer linear. And enabled by digital, people can now thoroughly search and review everything, including food and beverages, making their choices much more personal. To stand out, we needed to evolve our approach and deliver a personal and valuable experience every single time a customer interacts with our brand.

To stand out, we needed to evolve our approach and deliver a personal and valuable experience.

If we anticipate consumer needs, we can shape the nonlinear journey and deliver more valuable and personal experiences. That means ripping up quite a bit of the traditional marketing playbook and learning to anticipate individual intent at scale.

Change is hard for any brand. But to not attempt it was out of the question. We had to deliver against an increasingly unpredictable consumer journey if we wanted our brands to be as loved for the next 120 years as we have been for the last 120. So, as an organization, we took a deep breath and got to work.

First up: Find the right tools for a customer-first approach

There’s no efficient way to manually anticipate and deliver against individual consumer needs at scale. It’s just not physically possible for humans to ingest and make sense of that much data. For starters, there’s so much data out there to make sense of: first-party data, data from retail partners, syndicated sources, and digital partners. To make things even trickier, data sets are often incomplete or exist in silos. The answer lies with machine learning technologies that can build a consumer-first approach.

Because PepsiCo’s underlying infrastructure was designed for our traditional marketing goals, we didn’t have the right digital tools, talent, or processes in place to help us more deeply understand consumer insights and intent signals. Becoming more digitally mature meant we had to rethink across each of those dimensions.

We then hired analytical talent and established cross-functional workflows around an infrastructure designed to put consumers’ needs first. Then we set up the right processes to make critical decisions based on data and technology use cases. Finally, we invested in the right technology stack and platforms so that data could flow into a central cloud-based hub. This is critical. When data comes together, we develop a holistic understanding of the consumer and their journeys.

When data comes together, we develop a holistic understanding of the consumer and their journeys.

Next: Understand the consumer’s DNA

Once you’ve got your digital tools in place and your data connected in a central repository, you can start to anticipate needs, define the shopping journey, and deliver more valuable and personalized experiences. We call this understanding the consumer’s DNA.

We can now deeply understand our consumer’s needs, context, and location in the shopping journey. From that, we’re able to combine insights with storytelling and drive personalized experiences at scale. We can see if and when to connect with a consumer and know what to say.

To reach the right segments with the right messages for the 2019 launch of Bubly, we used YouTube’s Director Mix to dynamically develop creative based on individual preferences. This means we can personalize video content depending on someone’s current state of mind. If someone was interested in music, they might have seen an ad with copy that reads, “Add me to your playlist.”

Someone else who is health conscious might see an ad that says, “No calories. No sweeteners.”

These personalized ads drove best-in-class brand awareness, increasing awareness by 30% more than the product-benefit messaging alone. Over the last two years, we have refined our personalization playbook to reach consumers based on their individual intent.

Finally: Use insights to fuel business strategy, not just marketing

We can no longer rely on outdated methods and tools to help us get the insights to shape business strategy. As an organization, we’re rebuilding from the inside out, so we’re in a better place to predict what the best content and innovation strategies are.

We’ve built an in-house consumer insights engine using Google’s Ads Data Hub that replaces traditional research (such as, focus groups) and uses real-time data to detect areas for innovation. For example, we brought back Crystal Pepsi in response to consumer demand. Our Maker Overnight Oats and flavored water products were developed based on search and social media insights. And the launch of our new e-commerce-only brands, such as Ojas Studio, were designed in response to the demands of our online shoppers.

We’ve also developed a dashboard that helps us anticipate consumer needs. This geographic “heat map” uses relevant search queries and sales so we can have a real-time snapshot of the types of products people want, and where they’re looking for them. We’re even finding ways to use insights to project upstream supply-chain opportunities, which can impact changes in distribution. We can have the right products available in areas where people are more responsive to our advertising and have a preference for a specific item.

Future-proofing never stops

This is an ever-evolving journey for us. We understand the world of digital, data, and media is constantly changing. To future-proof our business, we’re committed to learn and unlearn where necessary. That means constantly rethinking how we connect with people, finding new business opportunities, and measuring success. It feels daunting, but every journey starts with a few steps. For us, it was getting to the heart of what our customers want and then mapping out the people, processes, and platforms to get there.

What we learned from the most effective YouTube campaigns of the year

A panel of experts chose the most creative, compelling, and effective YouTube campaigns of 2018. Kim Pedersen of Kantar, who advised the panel, shares some lessons to help any advertiser or agency create videos that drive real business results.

What does it take to create a great video campaign? This year, I got to find out.

As partners of the first ever YouTube Works Awards — a competition that celebrates the brilliant minds producing the most innovative and effective campaigns on YouTube — my team and I at Kantar reviewed dozens of submissions, spoke to the judges who chose the winning campaigns, and even carried out a quantitative analysis of the most impactful ads.

Here are the insights we gathered that can help any advertiser or agency create a YouTube campaign that drives real business results.

How to create a winning YouTube campaign

Sparks: Tap into YouTube insights to come up with new ideas

For the marketers behind the winning campaigns, YouTube wasn’t just a platform on which to reach their audience. It also provided the inspiration they needed to create stand-out ads. Of the finalists, 86% used YouTube to identify insights that could serve as the creative spark for their campaigns.

After noticing the rise of grossly intriguing and humorous experiments on YouTube, Liquid Plumr created a series of videos that both picked up on this trend and helped showcase its product. The videos increased awareness and favorability by 38% and 40%, respectively.

Samsung did something similar for its winning campaign, which showcased the new Galaxy smartphone. Knowing how popular YouTube creators can be among the Gen Zers it was trying to reach, it created a video series called Make, which featured influential YouTuber creators doing things like reviewing scripts and shooting footage on the smartphone. According to Samsung, 17% of those who were exposed to the ads were more likely to purchase the Galaxy as their next phone.

Signals: Use audience signals to inform your creative and media approach

When people go online to start researching a family vacation or head to YouTube to watch highlights from their favorite sport, they’re giving all sorts of clues as to their passions, interests, and needs.

The most effective advertising campaigns draw on these signals to inform both their media and creative processes. For example, 71% of finalists (compared with 42% of nonfinalists), used YouTube to personalize content to individual audiences at scale.

That’s what Xfinity did in its Grand Prix-winning campaign “Data in Dollars,” a series of pre-roll, six-second ads that showed users how much the video they were about to watch would cost to stream using their current cellular provider.

“We shot completely different commercials to match all of the most popular genres on YouTube,” explained Tristan Graham, a creative director at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the agency that worked on the campaign. For example, if someone was about to watch a beauty tutorial video, the pre-roll, six-second video they saw was on a related topic. “It was a lot of work, but it created a sense of mass intimacy,” Graham said. “Every part of every ad felt like it was made specifically for the person watching it.”

Stories: Choose the right storytelling format and techniques

People are fascinated by stories, yet only 40% of advertising uses storytelling as a technique.

The most effective YouTube campaigns we saw all understood the importance of storytelling, but none more so than “Dundee: The Son of a Legend Returns Home.” The team behind the award-winning ads, Tourism Australia, Droga5, and Universal McCann, created a trailer for what viewers were led to believe was a remake of Crocodile Dundee, a movie that, when it was first released in 1986, spurred a huge amount of interest in Australia as a tourist destination. The team created a dedicated YouTube channel and used YouTube in-stream ads to get the trailers in front of viewers. Two weeks later, they released a new trailer that revealed the truth: It was an advertising campaign, not a movie.

The elaborate story captured people’s imagination and their attention. Visitor spending increased 30% and U.S. tourist visas increased by 12% in the six months following the campaign.

Building a winning YouTube campaign

Anyone looking to build a video campaign that captures attention and drives real business results will want to take into account these three lessons. It might just make them the next YouTube Works Award winner.

Facebook Marketing: Essential Guide for Advertisers!

“Senator, we run ads,” replied Mark Zuckerberg when the senators grilled him about Facebook’s source of revenue.

Well, that is what Facebook is, an 80,000-pound advertising gorilla. It is a clear fact that 9 out of 10 marketers use Facebook Ads to grab leads and fill the newsfeed with sales. More than 2.2B active users is a country on its own.

With more than $15 Billion in revenue, Facebook Advertising is one of the biggest revenue sources for Facebook. But, is it the same for businesses that use Facebook ads?

In a HubSpot article, it was cited that Facebook has decreased it’s organic reach from 16% to 6.5% from February 2012 to March 2014 and since then everything is going down the spiral for businesses who are looking forward to getting organic reach.

The only viable way for businesses to reach more users is to run Facebook ads. Running Facebook ads is as an art and in this piece, we will teach you that art.

Set up your Business Manager Account

The first step is to set up your business manager account. The reason why you should have a Business Manager is that it keeps your personal account separate from your business account and lets you focus on the business.

If you plan to run ads on behalf of other businesses or have multiple businesses of your own it is always a better option to sign up for a Business Manager Account.

Using a Business Manager account, you can easily group different people, pages, ad accounts and other data resources such as Pixels, Catalogs into separate Business Accounts. Managing roles and access to different properties is also straightforward if you are using a Business Manager Account. A plus point of business manager account is that you can add people to manage different pages or ad accounts without having to add them as a friend on Facebook.

Moreover, you can create multiple ad accounts with different currencies using a Business Manager Account which is not possible if you are using simple Ad Account, as only one ad account can be created through a personal profile.

Not only that, you can also have yourself added to someone’s Business Account as an employee to run ads for them or manage their pages if the client wants total control or wants you to run ads using their credit card.

Having a personal account on Facebook is a prerequisite for a biz account. Prior to creating a business account. To set up your business manager account, go to https://business.facebook.com/ and click on ‘create account’.

How to Navigate in Facebook Business Manager?

Once you have created a business manager account, the first thing that you must do is to add people in the account.

Facebook Business Manager offers two levels of access: Admin and Employee. An Admin has full-level access in which they can add pages, remove them, revoke or give permission to employees.

Employees can only access the accounts and tools they are assigned to by the admin. To add people, go to Users in Business Page manager and from that go to People. Now clicking Add you can add people.

You can add pages by clicking the Pages tab under the Accounts. You can even add your Instagram account and control its advertising from Facebook Business Manager settings.

How to Manage Ads and Campaigns?

Structure of Advertisements

Before you start setting up ads, let’s look at how Facebook organize ads. Facebook organizes ads in three levels. These levels help us optimize, organize and measure the performance of the ad.

1. Campaign: This is the objective of our ad campaign. For instance, we may run a campaign to drive traffic on our website.

2. Ad Sets: Within the campaign, there are ad sets. Each ad set can have a separate budget and its ser of criteria like demographics, interests, placements, etc. You can use ad sets to target different custom audiences as well that you have created using the Facebook Pixel or even find newer audience segments using the Facebook Lookalike option.

3. Ads: This is the part where you build the creative of the ad. There are several different options available based on your selection of campaign. For example, you can choose from a single image or video ad, carousel ad or a more complex selection such as canvas ads, catalog ads, etc. Remember to choose an appropriate Call-to-Action based on your objective. Ads can drive people to a landing page or accomplish one purpose like gaining subscribers, enticing people to like your page, initiate a chat or reaching out to more people.

Let look at how each level operates.

If I have a beverage product, I will create a separate campaign for each of the following things:

Drive traffic to a website.
Increase brand awareness
Promote coupon.

To drive traffic on the website, I might create an Ad set for current customers: like from an email list. Also, another Ad set for people who play sports and are from my city. You can run two ads side by side and see which of the advertisements are performing better than the other. How to Create Ads on Facebook Business Manager?

Make Bulk Changes with Facebook Ads Manager

One valuable option in Facebook Ads is that you can make bulk changes in the ad all at once. For example, if you want to update the city in 3–4 ads, you can go to Edit and select those campaigns.

Organize Campaigns with Tags

When you are working on a large scale it is necessary to keep track of everything that you do. One of the ways to do is to organize your Ad campaigns with Tags. When you Tag an ad, you will be able to identify the ad campaign with these tags. You can search tags with various filters.

You can use tags to organize campaigns by:

Page name
Ad account
Event/holiday
Campaign objective, such as likes, conversation, and post engagement.
Campaign duration

When you create a new ad campaign, you’ll be given an option to add relevant tags. Separate tags with commas. Then complete and publish the campaign.

Alternatively, navigate to the campaign dashboard, which is already published. In the campaign details section, click the new tag and add new tag to the campaign.

This is where you can remove tags from the campaign too.

How to Add Facebook Pixel on your Website?

To put it, Facebook Pixel is a shortcode which is placed on your website or webpage to note traffic and number of conversions on that page.

What can Facebook Pixel Track?

Facebook Pixel can track several types of actions known as events. These events include Website visits, Purchases, Add to carts, Video views, etc. More than fifteen events can be tracked with Facebook Pixel. For each of the event you must choose whether to track on the page load or the in-time action.

Tracking on page load: When you track on page load, you’ll able to track actions like sign-up or successful purchase of a product.

The in-line action: It will track events like, “add to cart” or anything is done on that specific page. You can also set parameters for some events. For example, maybe you specifically want to track purchases over a set dollar value. You can do that with pixels.

How to Create Custom Audiences to Target your Customers?

To create a custom audience, in the Business Manager, go to the top menu and select “Audiences” from the Assets section.

Now from the drop-down of Create Audience, select Custom Audience

From here, you can select where do you want to pick your custom audience. It can be website, customer list or any offline activity.

Check this fantastic step by step tutorial on setting up Facebook Custom Audiences

Split Testing on Facebook

If your budget allows it is advised to contact a professional digital agencywhich will turn your users into raving fans. For small business owners, you can use split testing to boost sales. A split test will help you experiment with various versions of your ad and see which version will work best.

There are three ways in which you can use split testing:

Guided creation. If you are new to split testing, this is the method which will walk you step by step towards the end.

Quick creation. If you are familiar with the structure of the test this method will help you to make smart ads.

Duplication. To duplicate your ads, this is the most feasible option to choose.

The goal of split testing is to figure out which of the ads are performing better than others. However, we begin let’s look at some of the major mistakes that people make while performing A/B testing.

Trying too many variables at once: It will be impossible to check which of the variables made a difference. Don’t test many at once.

Analyzing fast with low budget: You need to place some extra amount to test conversion. A small budget will not reveal anything impactful.

The test setup is not wrong: You must give each test variable some time to deliver results.

Sticking with the low-variance elements: Just changing one element will not reveal anything useful in a split test.

Facebook Ads Split Testing — Step by Step Tutorial

Final Thoughts

62% of businesses are unable to get ROI from Facebook ads. Your business doesn’t have to be part of the majority. You can stand out, follow some best practices and make Facebook ads work for you.

Remember, it is not Facebook Ads that is at fault. Optimization is key. Facebook ads can be a hit or miss depending on the nature of your business. With trial and error and constant optimization, you can find that sweet spot where your ads will start giving positive ROI.

Always begin with multiple campaigns and smaller budgets. Scale the campaigns that are performing well while pausing the ones that don’t. Use it wisely and Facebook ads will do wonders for your business! Facebook advertising can steal your night’s sleep. Which is why we are here to offer you Facebook Marketing and Advertising services. Let us take all your strain away with a set of professional digital marketing services.