kingfisher on Monday December 9, 2019

New Digital Marketing Opportunities for Your Sustainable Business

Whether you want to increase visibility for your brand or sell more online, you can hardly do without ads on Social Media and Search engines, Google in particular. In a bid to win the advertiser, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google are constantly improving their platforms and offering a more personalised experience, more granular audience targeting, more prominent “real estate” for ads to grab online users’ attention. Here we look into the most interesting updates from the Social Media giants and Google, and the ad functionality they have introduced recently but which is not widely used yet. In the first part, we’ll go over opportunities from Facebook and its digital products, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook and its Properties: Instagram and WhatsApp

Facebook Instant Experiences

Facebook Instant Experience, formerly known as Canvas, is a mobile-only ad type that provides a fullscreen experience and is a surefire way to grab the social media users’ attention. You can create a new Instant Experience ad from a template for any existing ad format: Single Image, Single Video, Carousel, Slideshow, Collection.

Source: Official Facebook for Business Resources

Another option is to create the Instant Experience ad from Scratch. Follow a step-by-step process and build your ad from customisable blocks: choose your colors, sizes, descriptions and fonts.

You can include up to 20 images, multiple texts, several buttons with unique CTAs and any number of videos, the total length of which shouldn’t exceed 2 minutes.

Source: Orange Bird Agency’s images

Main advantages: With an interactive ad format, Facebook Instant Experience enables post-click engagement, offering your potential customers to browse a catalogue of products in a storefront-like fashion, view an engaging video story about your brand or explore the lookbook of your goods.

Best for: for e-commerce, fashion, tourism and hospitality industries, as well as for promo B2C campaigns.

Suggestions:

Use an Image Grid Layout to showcase a collection of your products and increase sales rates;
Use an Instant Form to gather contacts of those interested in your offering at the consideration or purchase stages;
Use Videos to increase brand awareness through visual storytelling, tell more about your product features or your services;
Try to experiment with different destinations and send visitors to both your website and your mobile application in order to complete their order.

Instagram Checkout

Introduced in March 2019, this feature seems to be a game changer. If your Instagram business account or creators account is in a market where Instagram Shopping is available, the Instagram Checkout feature allows users to instantaneously complete the checkout process without leaving the platform. While browsing various goods and products on Instagram, they can go for buying them directly on the social network. Once provided, email, billing and shipping information will be stored for a later use and can be easily retrieved during the next purchase. Moreover, Facebook is replicating the same in-app purchase experience for its dynamic newsfeed ads – now in beta-testing for selected brands.

Source: Instagram blog news, https://business.instagram.com/blog/new-to-instagram-shopping-checkout– now in beta-testing for selected brands.

Main advantages: With many brands adopting D2C strategies, reaching consumers and closing sales directly from the leading visual digital platform is a great business opportunity. User attention won’t be diverted once they land on the same product’s description page on your website. In-app shopping closes the gap between discovery and buying stages and increases conversion rates.

Best for: The “See it – Own it” experience will benefit any retail B2C business from household names like Adidas or H&M to small and mid-size companies with no mobile app or well-optimized mobile storefront experience.

Suggestions:

Make sure your audience has enough information to make a purchasing decision;
When advertising, refine your targeting very carefully. With the Instant Checkout Experience your customer won’t have an opportunity to look through your entire product catalogue and buy the most appropriate item.

WhatsApp Status Ads

According to Facebook, WhatsApp wants to enable in-app ads sometime in 2020. At the Facebook Marketing Summit in the Netherlands, the company revealed its plan to introduce a paid-ad experience to the previously pristine ad-free WhatsApp. According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal though, Facebooks’ plans seem to be paused, at least for now.

The future will show whether WhatsApp Status ads will prove to be engaging and informative rather than disturbing and privacy threatening. At the moment it is difficult to predict the reaction of Whatsapp users to such a contradictory ad type.

Main advantages: With more than 1,5 billion active users in 180 countries, WhatsApp is one of the most popular Instant Messaging and social media applications across the globe. In terms of audience, advertising in WhatsApp is a huge opportunity both for large brands and smaller companies.

Best for: Local businesses and brands that want to promote special offers, new product lines, and events to existing customers. In light of possible outbreaks from privacy-concerned audiences, it’s better to start with loyalty and retention campaigns. For broader campaigns, try targeting users who have given their explicit consent for communication with your brand – either by endorsing it on social media or sharing their mobile phone numbers with you.

Conclusion

Facebook is clearly striving to extend its products to provide a full-fledged shopping experience right where the user’s attention is captured. Better engagement and retention through Instagram Checkout, Facebook Instant Experience, already existing click-to-WhatsApp-chat ads and WhatsApp promoted stories that are yet-to-come can mean better conversion rates. Contact us online, if you need any help with harnessing these opportunities for your business – we will be pleased to support you with professional campaigns.

To find out what Google has rolled out for digital marketing campaigns, continue reading our next post on new online marketing opportunities.