Over the past several years, there have been a slew of articles lamenting the death of traditional media, otherwise known as television spots and out-of-home ads (billboards, bus boards, and shelters, etc). Well, as it turns out, there are still a lot of TVs and billboards out there -- and still plenty of advertisers with massive budgets for “traditional” media. So, it’s not actually dead at all. But it should be.
Somehow traditional media has not been forced to make itself cheaper and more effective like more democratized digital media forms have. So still to this day you have to have a moderately large budget to even make table-stakes for a television buy. Not to mention, your television rep is going to up-sell you with a pile of “value-add” placements (by “value-add” they mean media that is too worthless to sell on its own merits). You are also going to most likely be pushed into sub-par placements for your audience because the major brands have bought up all of the best placements in upfronts.
To top this all off, once you hit upload and stream your spot to the TV station for traffic, all you can do is sit, wait, cross your fingers, and hope that your agency made the right (very expensive) ad to bring your customers through your doors. Point being: If you have millions of extra dollars laying around the corners of your marketing budget, then by all means call up your rep at the network and buy yourself a primetime placement or two. If not, you might want to keep reading.
In the past couple of years, Facebook has developed a huge and ever-evolving variety of ad formats to serve a multitude of purposes. Whether it's awareness, leads, phone calls, or any number of other things, there is a Facebook ad format for you. There are formats for video, single images, multiple images, or even immersive experiences that are almost like mini-websites. So right off the bat you have more options than a :15, :30, or :60 second television spot. Add in the fact that Facebook users now exceed the number of television viewers in America, and you should really start thinking about moving your media dollars to Facebook stat.
According to Nielsen, there were 115.6 million television households in the US in 2015. However, there were 133.7 million US Facebook users in 2015 -- and that number will only continue to grow.
So, scale is the first reason to consider pushing those dollars to Facebook. If you are looking for lots of eyeballs, Facebook has more of them than all of television combined. But wait, there’s more! (Yes, that’s a Billy Mays joke.)
Targeting is the second reason that paid Facebook is far superior to television. Facebook lets you target audiences by a complex (nearly mind-boggling) array of variables which allow you to cut out nearly all of the “audience spill” of a traditional buy. One of the most advanced targeting methods Facebook has is what they call a “look-a-like” audience. Using encrypted (for customer privacy) email lists of your current customers, Facebook extrapolates a list of new customers that “look like” your current customers.
Accurate tracking is yet another reason Facebook is better than a traditional buy. The (let’s call it) “art” of tracking the effectiveness of traditional media is highly speculative. It’s a process of correlating spikes in sales before, during, and after a television buy. If sales go up, TV gets the credit, even though you could be selling air-conditioners during a heatwave. It’s a lot more like reading tea leaves than science. Digital forms of media like Facebook allow you to follow every click to know what kind of engagement that dollar spent got you. Why spend it if you can’t track it? The technology is too good not to.
Remarketing is another wonderful possibility when using Facebook. You can take customers that have previously expressed interest in your brand by visiting your website, clicking an ad, or a variety of other actions. The closest thing traditional media has to offer is frequency (simply showing viewers the same ad over and over). A carefully crafted remarketing funnel allows you to tailor your messaging to the moment in time your customer is experiencing and move them to action.
If all of that isn’t enough to convince you, here is my last point:
Testing and optimization. With traditional media, once you launch a campaign there isn’t any going back. You've made your bets and all you can do is hope they pay off. With Facebook you can tune the performance of your campaigns nearly in real-time. You can launch a group of ads, see what is performing, turn off the ones that aren’t producing, and then make more that embody the qualities of the ones that are garnering the best engagement. And you can repeat this process over and over throughout a media flight.
Creatively, you do have to keep in mind that people need to want to watch or read your ad. So, there is a larger onus to make sure that your ad is truly relevant to your audience. But, once you find the sweet spot where your product crosses into your customers need for your product, your response is going to be much greater than shouting to a broad, uninterested crowd.
The upside to this is that the level of costly polish needed to make effective digital ads is far less than what you need to produce a national-quality television spot or print ad. In fact, a slightly “disposable” quality tends to make your message more authentic to viewers. Your digital agency should be able to help you navigate through all of these variables and help you build campaigns that will blow the doors off of your old “traditional” buys.
So, the next time budget allocation time comes around, think about peeling off some of those traditional marketing dollars to giving Facebook a try. There is no need to make a huge commitment of dollars like traditional media. You can start small and pour on dollars as you find success. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you can even open an account and build a campaign yourself -- but you will most likely find that the number of ad formats and targeting options to be a bit bewildering and something best left to the experts.
If your current agency is not as convinced as you are of this idea, we would be happy to talk with you about the possibilities.