Facebook advertising predictions and Facebook advertising are one and the same: always evolving. With that in mind, as an advertiser, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date with the exciting opportunities available to market your product and brand, on the world's biggest social platform.
In this article, I discuss five Facebook advertising predictions you should know about to conquer 2018.
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Prediction #1: Personalized subscription products will gain more attention
It’s no secret that shoppers like personalized experiences. It’s also no secret that they like personalized products delivered straight to their door with no fuss. Think Amazon Prime Wardrobe, meal-kit delivery service Blue Apron, and Dollar Shave Club, which all provide a customized subscription box service. These services…
Digital advertising trends have shifted from desktop to mobile in recent years. This mobile-first approach is quickly taking over as the preferred method for digital advertising and is on the cusp of being the most focused on medium for ad campaigns.
But mobile-first is not the only digital advertising trend that has pushed to the forefront of the marketing sector. We’ve researched what the future holds for digital advertising, and have come back with some deep and interesting insights into five advertising trends that will have a strong impact through the rest of 2018:
Mobile-first advertising
Personalization in digital marketing
The effectiveness of video advertising
Impact of location-based targeting
The effect of micro-moments on consumers
Mobile-first advertising
Mobile-first was intended to notify consumers that a company cares for its websites and digital forms of communication while remaining…
An introduction to the LGBT market, cautions, and advertising examples
LGBT, you might ask? LGBT is the acronym for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community—you may also use LGBT+ to be inclusive of additional members of this group. With the acceptance and visibility of people with various sexual orientations and gender-identities having increased and welcomed, in the last number of decades, I thought it would be a good time to bring understanding to current marketeers inlcuding the members of this group, demographics, and warnings. I have also added several example campaigns to demonstrate how to advertise to this community.
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Within this article:
Explanation of the LGBT+ community
Pronouns in marketing
Demographics
Globalization: Beware of some countries laws
LGBT advertising examples
First, it is…
25 of the best and the worst Christmas adverts from 2017, with reviews from the Smart Insights team
The battle for the most popular Christmas advert is underway. It has been reported that UK companies will spend an estimated £5.6bn on marketing in the run-up to Christmas. While prime television spots alone are expected to attract a spend of £1.3bn. From Tescos to John Lewis we cover the best and the worst of Christmas adverts for 2017.
Marks & Spencer
Marks and Spencer have used a well-known character, Paddington bear, as part of their Christmas advert this year. They have launched a fully integrated campaign using the hashtag, #LoveTheBear, accompanied by its own paw emoji. The campaigns' aim according to M&S’s Marketing Director, Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne was:
'We have to break through that mood of the nation, which is why the campaign plays into something much warmer and more heartfelt. As we see every year,…
Paywalls, donations, monthly subscriptions, stealing your processing power!?…..the internet’s struggle to figure out which model works best for service providers, content creators and consumers.
Recently, Gizmodo broke the news that online torrent search engine, The Pirate Bay, had been caught trialing a new means of monetizing site visitors by getting them to mine cryptocurrency through the browsers on their devices without their knowledge or consent.
Naturally, people weren’t happy. I mean who would be? Modern device battery times deteriorate faster than fruit from Aldi.
But this does raise a good question, just how much is that content worth?
We are all very easily detached from the human and technological cost of our favourite media sites and flavour of the month apps. Ads have served as means of covering these costs for quite some time. The systems are in place, easy to implement and are very much a natural part of the online ecosystem.
However there…
Smart Insights Alert: How will retargeting be affected by changes to iOS11 and macOS High Sierra Safari users? Google also updates Adwords in response to Apple’s ITP for Safari
Apple is making massive waves again, this time in the advertising industry (but not in a good way for digital marketers). Apple has introduced ITP - Intelligent Tracking Prevention - for those using their Safari browser, a new feature in their upcoming software update. Marketers are facing one more obstacle in their online advertising campaigns as this new feature will essentially prevent you from Retargeting your customers effectively.
Safari, Apple's default browser, is used by 14.9% of internet users - a small proportion, but a proportion of a target audience that may no longer be accessible because of this ad blocking. Retargeting is a great way to persuade users to return to a site or convert into a paying customer, a major feature of marketing today.
…
Chart of the day: People skip video ads because the content doesn't resonate with them
It's a familiar sight now, when watching online videos there is either a video ad before or during. Research carried out by MarketingSherpa found what we'd expect: people just want to watch videos without interruption. But in a world where we need advertising to fund content, there has to be a balance. The next highest answer was that the content doesn't resonate. We've talked before in our guides and blogs about personalisation and how the more personalized the content the more it resonates with customers. Perhaps video ads should be relevant to the specific video content?
The research shows people don't want their videos to be interrupted. Facebook recently changed their video advertising to show ads throughout the videos. This research suggests that it may cause more frustration. Respondents…
How you can stand out in a world dominated by Facebook and Google
Just because you believe something to be true doesn’t make it so. It’s one of my favorite adages, and it has some correlation to what’s going on with our friends over at Facebook and Google regarding digital advertising. I fervently believe this duopoly, as it’s now called, will be impenetrable by other paid media platforms.
But is this true?
These two powerhouses, according to some reports, account for nearly 85 percent of all digital media spend. All other platforms are collectively scrambling for the table scraps. Take Twitter, for example. As far as mobile goes, it controls just 2 percent of the total ad spend — down from 2.6 percent in 2016.
The good news is that brand marketers can find efficiencies by focusing on just two platforms with…
Re-targeting is crucial to closing sales. Here is how to do it right.
There is only one difference between using Facebook to promote your services, and having a marketing system that gets consistent, reliable and better results (almost) on autopilot.
Marketers and business owners know how important it is to have a comprehensive marketing plan, one that pushes people into your funnel and transform them into customers.
The problem is that most marketers are NOT using retargeting, or they don’t use it with the aim of creating Custom Audiences in order to reach specific people and gain different marketing objectives.
In this article you will discover why having a comprehensive retargeting strategy on Facebook can cover EVERY single step of your funnel, empowering all your marketing efforts.
Let’s start immediately.
1. Raise brand awareness
An effective marketing funnel should include a brand awareness stage. Here, retargeting can help you reach and engage more people interested in your…
Chart of the Day: New research on web users' perception of ad types and formats
The Nielsen Norman Group has been helping make the web a better place through their research and advice on usability and customer experience for a long time. In fact, it's since 1998, about as long as I've been involved in advising on digital marketing. While their research usually has a solid methodology and sample, I've always felt, it often takes a 'pure usability' perspective that isn't necessarily useful to businesses and marketers who are promoting their service. But perhaps marketers need that counterpoint.
This research is a case in point. In this survey, participants were shown 23 wireframes (not actual ads) corresponding to different types of advertisements and rated how much they disliked them on a scale of 1 to 7. Here's an example:
So, which were the most hated?…
