How To Run Effective Branding Campaigns on Facebook

With the holiday season just around the corner, it is time for advertisers to start thinking about their full-funnel strategies to maximize their holiday campaigns. Mid and lower funnel campaigns tend to steal the spotlight, but what about branding? What makes branding campaigns effective and worth the budget?

Choose your Branding KPIs carefully

Let’s start with KPIs: when planning your branding campaigns, choosing the right KPIs, to run alongside your Facebook objectives, is fundamental. Here is a list of Optimal Branding KPIs according to Facebook:

• Reach
• Frequency
• Number of Video Views
• Ad Recall
• Brand Awareness

Each KPI can be aligned to a Facebook campaign objective. When measuring the success of a campaign, we measure it by the selected objective. And, with objectives, we don’t mean Engagement or Clicks because neither one leads to effective results - not in branding nor in lower funnel objectives.

As seen below, a study done by Facebook and Nielsen proves that there is no correlation between CTR and real business objective KPIs such us Ad Recall, Brand Awareness, and Purchase Intent.

Source: Nielsen BrandEffect meta-analysis of 478 online global campaigns that ran between Oct 2014 – April 2015

Why Reach Matters?

Reach and Frequency buying enables advertisers to predictably buy unique reach on Facebook and Instagram, while giving them the tools to control frequency throughout their campaign. It is, however, important to understand how to relate reach to impact:

• Narrowing reach to a small and potentially more precise audience: this approach can have a bigger impact on people’s behavior because the product is more relevant. The scale of the campaign, however, limits the size of the audience.
• Scaling reach to a broader audience: This may yield a lower response rate to the ad, but the total number of people impacted is much greater. When measuring the total impact, reaching a broader audience is more successful.

The key is to measure the result of Branding campaigns by the audience impacted and the exact number of people lifted.

Why Video Solutions?

The following study has proved that the more time a person spends watching a video, the higher the Ad and Brand Recall. And that’s not all! Purchase Intent also increases to more than 70%, which is good news for full funnel campaigns.

With Smartly.io’s tools, you can retarget those who watched a video and converted with a particular campaign.

View Duration is often considered to be a good KPI. However, duration isn't a good proxy for attention, and measuring duration alone doesn't really account for the fact that mobile video consumption is often fast, frequent, and on-the-go. Measuring impact based on business objectives, such as brand awareness, ad recall, and sales, should therefore be marketers' top priority. We are seeing an increase in advertisers’ use of mobile video to drive and measure sales.

With Smartly.io’s Video Templates, you can easily use your existing materials to craft amazing videos to capture your potential customers’ attention and drive sales. Our Creative Studios team has implemented video presets that help you in getting started. These presets can be easily tailored and edited for your specific use cases and needs. 

Brand Advertising Resources and Tips

• Localized, and weather-specific brand advertising with Automated Ads and feed-based targeting: McDonald's Weather-Based Dessert Menu
• Automated Ads with weather personalization: Weather-Based Convenience Store Ads
• Automatically boost organic posts on your page: Automated Post Boosting
• The Smartly.io Video and Image Templates help you scale your creative across the funnel by applying template designs to any product catalog automatically.
• Awareness: apply a frequency cap on Reach and Brand Awareness Auction campaigns.
• Prospecting / Interest / Upper funnel: our Lookalike audiences can go up to 20% , which gives you a broader reach compared to Facebook's 10%.