Diversify Your Digital Marketing: Adapting to the Facebook Changes
Don’t find out the hard way when sales begin to plummet because you can no longer get the same reach and frequency with your Facebook ad budget or that your organic reach isn’t what it use to be. Facebook made many small ecomm brands millions in 2017, but that’s changing. Now is the time to diversify your digital marketing and make sure it is in alignment with the Customer Path to Purchase.
Facebook was created to connect friends and family together, but as the years went on, more and more brands and businesses began to see the amazing marketing opportunity facebook was providing. This began to flood our newsfeeds with sponsored ads and the original purpose of Facebook was lost in all the noise. Facebook has already made changes in an effort to get back to its roots, but this likely comes at a cost. As more brands and businesses step into the pay to play space going after the same audience with the new algorithm we are going to see a continued increase in cost per click to reach that audience. For smaller brands operating on smaller budgets, this means it’s time to make some changes and look at diversifying your digital marketing platforms while also getting creative with your content to create a sustainable plan.
Let’s first look at a few resources to help us understand the additional changes.
An article published on Marketing Land said, “Brands and publishers have another reason to expect to see their Page posts’ organic reach decline, beyond January 2018’s News Feed algorithm change.
Facebook will finally start to count organic reach impressions only when a Page post actually appears on a person’s screen, the company announced recently.
The new methodology for organic reach matches how Facebook already counts reach for ads.
To help Page Managers adjust to the new counts and evaluate the performance of new posts against that of older posts — and perhaps get a sense of what share of past impressions were non-viewable — Facebook will initially report two versions of Page posts’ organic reach: one using the old methodology and one using the new, viewable-only methodology. But eventually, Facebook will move to only reporting the viewable count.”If you’d like to read more on this topic check out mklnd.com/2nWfQ1p
Since I don’t like to let my readers hanging without a next step, here are 3 tips to start your digital marketing diversity strategy.
● Define and analyze your targeting audiences. Look at your demographics, interests, buying behaviors, and geographies. Develop your primary audience, secondary, and tertiary.
● Look at your customer path to purchase and layout how your target audience moves through that path. Awareness > Consideration > Intent > Conversion > Loyalty/Advocate
● Determine how your current marketing strategy paid and non-paid in alignment with that path. Define if and how you are showing up through that path.
The customer path seems like it should be easy. They see your product or service, they buy because it’s great, and then they become a loyal customer and tell all their friends. If only it was that easy. The actual path to purchase reminds me a little more of my son’s mind when he was 5 years old in Disneyland as we’re trying to leave the park. So many different things he wants to do and see, distractions with each step he takes, and people around him influencing his thoughts and behaviors. Your customer’s path to purchase is no longer linear. Another way to think about it is like a game of soccer with your audience as the ball moving all over the playing field to the player that is in the right place, at the right time, with the right moves. Which player is going make that goal? The one that knows the game, knows his opponents and knows his strategy, that’s who.
Find her on Instagram: @ecommqueen
