Last week’s episode of Optily Radio was a really engaging conversion about the best practices for Facebook and Instagram Ads. These two platforms are crucial for most eCommerce brands, so it’s key to put a lot of thought and care into these two channels.
Akvile DeFazio has been working in the space for over a decade. She founded her own agency, AKvertise, that focuses specifically on paid social. Leveraging that, Akvile had some great pointers on what you need to do to set yourself up for success.
Campaign Manager, Klayvann Camargo, who works with a wide variety of Optily+ customers across the major social media channel joined us on the show.
We covered off a lot in this episode, including:
- The importance of being organized with your paid and organic content planning and structure
- The impact of iOS 14 on advertising and changing tactics for audience targeting
- The power of video in all stages of the funnel
Check out a clip from the episode, have a listen to the full podcast, or get a sneak peek into what we discussed below:
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Who are Akvile and Klayvann?
In 2014, Akvile DeFazio founded AKvertise, a social media agency based in California that won the best small agency award in the U.S. Social Media Awards last year. They primarily work with eCommerce brands, mobile apps, and events.
Akvile is a regular contributor to WordStream, where she’s constantly sharing her insights and experience with the major social platforms. She (@AkvileDeFazio) is also very active on Twitter, so you should definitely give her a follow to stay on top of Facebook and Instagram changes and best practices.
Klayvann Camargo is the Campaign Manager here at Optily and has over a decade of experience in digital marketing. In recent years, his focus has been on online media, primarily Social Networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Before joining the Optily team, he founded his own digital marketing micro-agency in Brazil to help small and medium-sized businesses with online campaigns.
The two of them had really complementary experiences, which lead to a really fun and lively discussion between the three of us.
Build Around your Funnel
The theme of the marketing funnel is really critical, but a lot of the time we marketers can lose sight of it in the hustle and bustle of trying to launch campaigns quickly. Akvile, much like our own Brendan Hughes, stressed the importance of planning and structure.
It’s really important to be organized. Akvile highlights the value of having your “campaign objectives match your audience and match your ad copy, creatives, and landing pages.” Everything needs to be structured with the persona and stage they’re at in mind. You simply can’t present the same information to someone who is only hearing about your products for the first time and someone who’s already bought from you twice.
Dealing with iOS 14 changes
The marketing world has been talking about iOS 14 all year and the changes to tracking iPhone users all year. Well, it’s finally here and the opt-in figures are looking pretty grim–only around 4% in the US.
Some changes on Facebook went into effect as a result of Apple’s updates, including domain verification, and changes to the attribution window. Besides these more minor changes, the big issue is going to be dealing with data loss. Klayvann pointed out it might not be too bad, depending on what percentage of your audience is on Apple devices. However, the trend towards higher online privacy is only going to get stronger over the coming months and years.
For this reason, Akvile suggests leveraging native audiences, if you’re not already. Rather than relying as heavily on lookalike or custom audiences, which will be more and more difficult as cookies and pixels become less effective, native audiences enable you to use your own first-party data for marketing.
Video is still King
No surprise here, but it’s still the case on almost all platforms–use videos when you can. While it’s crucial to always test and see what works for your target audience, try video placements when possible.
Keep it short and to the point, ideally under 15 seconds, and show your brand in the first 3 seconds. It’s much easier for people to digest videos than blocks of text–just keep in mind most people are scrolling without sound! Even the slightest bit of motion, Akvile says, is enough to get more clicks.
