Break Through the Noise Read online

  Now, this only touches the top of the social media funnel. Once you have created a big sonic boom to get everyone’s attention, it’s time to start pushing them down the funnel toward conversion, and this is where the audience segmentation and targeting get really interesting.

  Let’s say you got a million views on your video. Great work. Now let’s look at what these numbers really mean, and, more important, what real numbers are hiding behind them . . .

  As mentioned in Chapter 3, Facebook counts anyone stopping for 3 seconds or more as a view. They will give you retention data on top of this, meaning how long people stuck around to watch—but they can’t tell if that’s because someone stopped scrolling because they went to the bathroom or if they were really watching, so it’s very hard to quantify these metrics.

  The only real way to determine if someone really leaned in is the engagement metrics. Remember, this is the measure of people who actively choose to react to, comment on, or share your video. The Golden Benchmark is 1 percent; the median for best-in-class on the Ad Age Viral Leaderboard in 2017 was 0.87 percent.

  Let’s say you beat out all the big brands, all the Pepsis and Nikes of the world, and your video had a whopping 1 percent engagement rate—that means 10,000 people cared enough to react, share, or comment. That sounds like a small number out of the 1 million, but this is where the audience segmentation becomes intriguing.

  As you analyze the people who interacted with your content, you will discover audience patterns that may not have been obvious at the outset. Perhaps your content is performing better with young women in Wisconsin than you could have imagined, or perhaps it really resonates with people who like fishing? Whatever the details are, Facebook can extract them for you, and you can now create look-alike audiences based on those criteria. That means that from the 10,000 people you have found to be primed for your content, you can now extrapolate millions more who share some key parameters. When you serve your ad to this new group, you will have a much better chance of engaging them.

  This becomes especially important when it comes to conversion. At Shareability, our methodology is to create conversion assets with visual thematics that connect viewers to the awareness campaign. By retargeting this content to prior engagers—meaning those people who engaged with the awareness content as well as their look-alike audiences—we then trigger a sense of recognition and satisfaction in people’s minds. This connection makes them far more likely to take action.

  Of course, we design the action based on the needs of our clients, meaning we can drive people to click through to a website, or check out more content, or learn about a product, or head off to a store with the intent to purchase.

  This mechanism also makes Facebook one of the strongest options for product discovery. Because the feed is inherently a bubble filled with our friends, we tend to trust it. As marketers, we can tap into this trust and allow people to discover our products through their feed. By serving up reliable product information, we can allow people to conveniently check out a product and start to make up their own mind. Once we see who’s interested, we can then retarget them and build more look-alike audiences.

  3. The Reverse Funnel

  Because we live and breathe this space every day, we have a unique point of view. (If you’ve seen the show Stranger Things, it’s sort of like how Eleven describes the Upside Down. If you haven’t seen the show, then go check it out, it’s great, but in the meantime you can think of it as a parallel world where everything is backward and upside-down, like a fun-house-mirror reflection of our reality.) This point of view allows us to look at ordinary things in an extraordinary way, especially when it comes to bucking the deeply rooted trends of traditional media and advertising.

  As we looked at the traditional sales funnel, it struck us that it should be flipped on its head. Now, as a primary tool, the traditional funnel still serves a great purpose, but as an additional angle of attack. In order to explain this, let’s look at a recent client of ours, TaxAct.

  TaxAct is a software services solution for people who file their own taxes. They are a challenger brand, coming in at fourth place against the established behemoths of TurboTax, H&R Block, and Credit Karma. When we first spoke to them, they were 100 percent focused on a traditional TV campaign for the 2019 tax season. They had a significant media budget and considerable TV commercial production budgets. They were planning to develop traditional TV spots to drive awareness, pushing those spots not only on broadcast but also as pre-roll ads on social media. They were looking for creative ideas and talking to a number of traditional agencies.

  We had no interest in competing in the traditional space and didn’t really understand why we were asked to participate, but we were told they were open to doing something different. We threw caution to the wind and played it straight, all cards on the table. We explained how we operate, how our process is totally different from traditional TV, and then we suggested a revolutionary approach to arrive at their TV ads. It was a three-pronged strategy.

  I. Digital-First Architecture

  Our digital-first mindset means we create all of our content on and for digital, using that as a testing ground, making sure our concepts are resonating with an audience before taking them to traditional media such as TV and print.

  II. Test and Optimize Messaging

  The messaging—telling people what you stand for—is just as important on digital as in traditional advertising, but the difference is that testing your messaging in a traditional way generally involves focus groups or very small sample groups. By testing our messaging on Facebook, we can dial in much more finely tuned results through our proprietary Test & Learn process where we A/B-test different creative variants with real audiences on Facebook.

  III. Full Funnel Conversion

  This is the natural conclusion of the reverse funnel. The results we arrive at will be implemented in a tried-and-tested full funnel marketing approach, including all the advancements that Facebook has to offer, creating a much more trackable consumer journey.

  Put another way, we are testing our content on digital to make sure it hits all the right notes before our client spends millions of dollars buying TV ads, only to discover it may or may not work. This is a much more logical and methodical way of approaching creative content, and it helps yield incredible results. And it helped us win the TaxAct business.

  Facebook Technical Overview

  Remember, the biggest technical difference between Facebook and YouTube is the feed-based nature of the platform. In addition to all the details already mentioned, this also means that you can aggregate other users’ content without fear of repercussion or ill will. If you do that on YouTube, you basically have to rip off someone else’s video and upload it as your own, which is inherently stealing, and neither the community or the platform will reward you. On the other hand, with Facebook, people are excited to share their content, and when they do, your content literally ends up in their outgoing feed, and it becomes part of their story. That is what makes Facebook so powerful—you are essentially creating brand ambassadors out of your audience.

  This also works in reverse. You can like and share and engage with content on the platform, and when these actions end up in your feed, they become part of your narrative. That means your feed is not just your original content, but also a slate of aggregated content. This enables you to create pages that are inherently active and have high engagement, which helps the algorithms when you launch your own content. Because you seem to be engaging with an audience, the algorithm will have a natural bias toward promoting your work. It’s a positive spiral that you can own and control—by understanding this, you will become more or less immune to algorithm changes.

  Consider when Facebook tightened the funnel on postings by limiting the amount of posts from each user in 2018. The amount of organic traffic that people were receiving on their posts went down. BuzzFeed may have been used to 40 percent of their audience seeing everything they posted; n
ow it dropped to 25 percent. That’s cutting their reach almost in half.

  But for the brands who understand Facebook, these kinds of changes shouldn’t matter. The best content on Facebook will perform at the same level regardless of changes in the algorithm. The same principles always apply. Sure, the floor and ceiling may contract a bit, but the best content is always going to outperform all the rest. Facebook will always grade on a curve in terms of what the existing conditions are, and as long as you are in step with the big picture, you will consistently outperform others trying to do what you’re doing.

  In addition to this, there are myriad other small but vital details to consider when creating content for the social media platforms. Here are the most important ones.

  i. Openings

  Creating engaging content is essential on Facebook, and nothing has greater impact on your video than the first few seconds. Think of the town square again, and imagine yourself browsing for a store to visit. What makes you choose which one to enter? Sure, if you are shopping for shoes, you might not stop at the bakery, but what if that yummy pastry in the window looks amazing? What if they have a friendly staff member outside, handing out samples to whet your appetite? Maybe you could stop in for just a minute, a quick drink and a snack won’t kill anyone? It might just be the boost you need to get you through all the important shoe shopping you have to do . . .

  This “barker” outside the store is the first 3, 5, and 7 seconds of your video. It’s what stops you as you are scrolling through your daily feed. If the video you are rushing past begins with text on black, or some mundane landscape shots with boring music underneath, will that tempt you to check out the rest of it? Probably not. In fact, odds are you will never know what that video was supposed to be about in the first place. But if your video begins with an attention-grabbing headline combined with a great visual, you’ll be hooked and will be sure to check out what the video has to offer.

  ii. Sound

  Sound, or rather the absence of sound, is pivotal. An astounding 85 percent of Facebook users will scroll through their feed with the sound off. They might be at work, on the bus, in a meeting, or on the toilet; no matter where they are, the odds are very high they will not have any audio to go along with your video. This means your content must be enjoyable, clear, and concise without any sound whatsoever. Therefore, absolutely compelling text is mandatory. Not just subtitles, which are a must, but also big blocks of text to help explain the narrative. At Shareability, we routinely bake both types of text into our video, meaning we don’t even rely on Facebook’s native subtitling engine, but prefer to make sure our subtitles can’t be turned off.

  Of course, if your audience turns their sound on, that needs to be enjoyable as well. We take great pains to maximize the experience of sound on our videos because the people who will turn the sound on are often those with whom your video is resonating the most, your highest engagers. You need to make them as happy as, or happier than, the casual viewer.

  iii. Mobile

  One of the most important things to remember is that 90 percent of Facebook’s daily users access the platform via mobile. This is huge in terms of how you program content for these viewers. There are three operational steps we always use to ensure our content plays well on mobile:

  1. Go vertical—The standard aspect ratio of modern video is 16 x 9, the same aspect ratio that any modern TV set has. Going vertical means flipping that sideways, making the image taller than it is wide by an aspect ratio of 9 x 16. While this is perfectly native for lots of platforms, and Facebook actually recommends it, we have developed our own proprietary format that we tend to prefer, something we call the Shareability Vertical. We looked at the interface on Facebook, especially based on the fact that we prioritize engagements, and we designed an aspect ratio that leaves just enough space for the icons that signify engagement actions (that is, reactions, comments, and shares), so that these actions are always available to the user, even in full screen. This aspect ratio works out as 1 x 1.25, meaning the frame is 1.25 times as tall as it is wide. In simplest terms, we found that this is the best size ratio for viewing on a mobile phone.

  This works well inside the feed, not just in full screen, as it creates a better viewing experience for the user, keeping them engaged for a longer period of time, leading to better engagements. It also helps hide the next post in their feed, helping to minimize distractions.

  It’s important to note that we still shoot almost all of our videos in the traditional 16 x 9 format because we deliver not just on Facebook but on YouTube and other platforms as well. You don’t need to capture vertical in order to deliver it, but you do need to be mindful of it as you go through production to make sure you are covering all aspect ratios for all of your intended delivery formats and platforms.

  In addition, you can transform a 16 x 9 aspect ratio to square, or to our Shareability Vertical, by using what’s known as a meme box. This is essentially the placement of bars at the top and bottom, ranging from simple black to any color or image you like, where the top bar has a captivating message that places the video in context and the bottom bar houses the subtitles.

  2. Pick a dynamic thumbnail—Many people assume that thumbnails don’t matter on Facebook because the video starts playing as soon as you scroll to it, but that is simply inaccurate. If you are on desktop, you might be able to see three or more posts on a single page, but only one of these videos will play. On mobile there is an option to turn off autoplay when not connected to Wi-Fi, to save on data. That means your thumbnail has to be captivating enough for someone to actually click on it before it starts to play.

  3. optimize Text—You are already using text to communicate with those watching with the sound off, but now you have to make that text bigger, bolder, and more in-your-face so that it stands out at a glance on a tiny mobile screen. This often means breaking the rules of graphic design in order to get your message across, but if you are a graphic designer at heart, you should stop and ask yourself what’s more important: that the text looks “right” to you, or that people actually read it. I hope it’s the latter.

  Another important element is the post text optimization. This is the text that accompanies the video in the feed. It informs the viewer of what they will be getting into and why they should engage. This text is pivotal, because viewers will often read this at the same time as they are absorbing the first few frames of your video, and if they don’t process the two together in a positive way, they will simply move on.

  Remember to keep this text very short and to the point. We’ve found the optimal length of post text is a mere 6 to 9 words. Wherever possible, avoid using links in the post text, which take users off the platform. This, we’ve observed, will not only affect watch time, but will negatively influence the organic reach of the post. If you need to link anywhere, use a native link button, such as a “learn more” activation, for example.

  Instagram: The Art Gallery

  Adjacent to the town square of Facebook in our internet city, we find the art gallery, also known as Instagram. While you might look at Instagram and feel like it’s somehow raw or unpolished, the similarities to a fine art gallery are deeper than you might think.

  Think of what gets displayed in the Louvre, or the Met—not just any old painting will make the cut. These are the museums of only the finest works of art, carefully selected by curators and committees, occasionally with some specific piece on display that stands out, perhaps muscled in by a well-paying sponsor.

  If we translate all of this into the digital world of Instagram, the work of art on display is there to showcase the absolute best version of ourselves. People don’t post their anxieties or fears on this platform—those are for the conversations in the Facebook town square. On Instagram, it’s all about holding up a truly polished image of ourselves, to show all the best aspects of our lives, or our brand.

  Where the library of YouTube explores deep topics and complex instructions on things like how t
o assemble garden gnomes, these posts are all about evocative aesthetics. While you might go to YouTube to find out how to make the best chocolate cake by watching a fairly detailed video that gives you all the necessary steps, on Instagram there won’t be any steps or directions, just a picture of the best-looking chocolate cake ever.

  If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, with more than 30 billion pictures shared, Instagram is home to 30 trillion words. This makes Instagram the place for visual storytelling. This is powerful because it gives both people and brands the ability to tell their stories through imagery, offering their audience a window to see the world through somebody else’s eyes and to encounter images that evoke a strong human connection.

  Because Instagram started as a photo-based feed, with video becoming what is now an inevitable afterthought, the video requirements are different than on other platforms. Unlike YouTube and Facebook, Instagram caps their video length at 60 seconds. Because it’s primarily a visual medium, with a real premium on the quality of the visuals, more experiential or visceral content does not perform as well, while evocative or more glossy imagery does better on Instagram than on Facebook.

  Instagram’s integration with Facebook (which started in 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram) means that the same type of targeting can happen, but the user interface is different, and that changes some of the core fundamentals. Whereas Facebook is great for that sonic boom, Instagram is more of a niche platform. On Facebook, an audience that likes a certain item will also have other interests on the platform because the content available is so varied—between friends and family, articles and shopping, not to mention all the ads they are reacting to. In other words, the information flow on Facebook is fairly broad.