Blab #27: Paid Social Uncovered

Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Labs podcast. I'm your host, Tilly Hayes, and I'm the SEO exec here at Marketing Labs Page. Social media has become an essential component of any digital marketing strategy. With the ever-changing algorithms and increasing competition, it's more important than ever to understand how to maximise your ROI with social media ads. In this episode, we're going to uncover the essentials that make a good paid social campaign. Today we'll dive into the strategies you need to know to take your social media marketing to the next level. Joining me on today's pod is our CEO, Matt Janay, our digital marketing assistant, Charlie Kinsella, and our creative director Tom Haslum. How are we doing guys? Good, thanks.

I'm good. Yeah. How are you? Til,

Yeah, good, thank you.

Nice. How are you, Charlotte?

Good. Charlie's first episode?

Yeah,

Usually behind the cameras or the editing. Are you excited? Nervous are, yeah. What are you nervous about?

Don't know.

You don't need to

Really sweated.

You

Are going to edit that out though. No, you're keeping that in.

So paid social then, which covers a lot of different channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok. What would you say are the key differences when it comes to thinking about running socials on those?

Big one depends on the target audience really. Obviously if you are going B2C, then I would probably suggest Facebook, Instagram, or Meta. If you are B2B, then probably LinkedIn, but it all comes down to what the campaign is, who you're trying to target when and what the campaign is. Really. If there's evergreen campaigns, then you can probably structure your campaigns to suit, but I think it's all about understanding your audiences more than anything, to be honest.

Yeah, it's key to getting social to work well, isn't it? Knowing where your audience hangs out, knowing what kind of behaviours they have. If you're a ladder seller, TikTok probably isn't the platform for you. Ladders. It might be, yeah, maybe. But you got to be careful about where you put your budget, haven't you? Basically. And also I think B2B is difficult on social anyway. Often you've just got to really make sure your audience is there and LinkedIn the only real place to do that properly, isn't it?

The problem that you've got with paid social is that there's no intent there. So unlike PPC campaigns with Google or Bing ads, people are actually searching for something to answer a specific question or they're searching for a specific product. With social media, we've all been there where we're sort of scrolling through our phones and we see ads, but majority of those, I will put more money on it that they are retargeting you via the Facebook pixel. So you've obviously been to their site or you might have, I dunno, been to a similar site and they're retargeting you that way and that is the most powerful sort of tool that Meta ads can provide is the retargeting. We've all been there and we might've been to different sites and things and you get an ad.

So the thing about social media, you're right, there's no intent there would be in search marketing people aren't searching for specific things. They're there to engage with their friends, their family, maybe celebrities, they follow that kind of thing. So you've got to make sure that what you are offering and what you're advertising is more impulse or awareness. So that's why it's so important to match the audience type to the platform.

Absolutely.

Does that impact click-through rates on social?

So on paid socials, you're lucky if you get an average of a 1% click-through rate. So it means that your ads really do need to be quite targeted and you need to be well targeting the right people, whether that's through for an awareness campaign, a traffic campaign because you click through rates aren't as high as PPC campaigns tend to be, then you need to make them as super laser targeted as they can be.

Yeah, because on search ads, rarely you want to click through rate of at least if you're getting good visibility, you want to click through rate of anywhere from 3% to 20, maybe even 30% sometimes, especially for very specific things where the competition's low, like branded campaigns. And that comes down to the intent. Again, there's intent when people search, whereas on social, there's no intent They're there to chat to their friends or to see what the family are up to.

So how would you go about determining your target audience and is it different on different social channels?

I think my answer to that question would be it depends on the ad objective. So are you looking to drive traffic? Are you looking to build awareness? Are you looking to drive conversions because the targeted audiences that you use for all of those are going to be very different. So for an awareness campaign, let's say you've got a new product that you're launching and you go into a completely new audience, then you want to target specific people, ages, demographics, you can go abroad, you could test, that's an important thing to note. You'd test with different audiences at least initially, and then super narrow it down as you go along. Start broad, have a broad audience, then have a sort of semi road audience than then a really targeted one. So by that I mean for example, your super targeted one could be as far as women aged 30 in Baying stoke, I dunno where that came from. And then your broad one could be 18 to 60 year olds across the whole of uk, male and female with interest in sport gym, et cetera. Whatever you want to target, I'll give it to Facebook. On meta, there are some decent targeting criteria that you can put into your ads, so it is quite useful

I think as well. I mean most businesses should be aware. You'd like to think of what their ICP is, what that profile looks like, so that helps. It gives you a headstart, doesn't it? At least to understand who might perform best when you display those ads to them. The other thing that probably should be used is Google Analytics, so you could extract all of your converted visitors in analytics and get an idea of what that demographic looks like. That's always useful as well.

You can obviously do things like AB testing on Google ads. How does it compare with social ads and can you do that on there as well?

Yeah, you can AB test within meta directly. There's a number of different ways you can do it. I tend to do it by segmenting the audiences and then trialling different creatives. And then obviously as the campaign goes on, you tend to get a good idea of which creatives are working and which aren't, and then you turn them off mid month and then review it at the end of the month for example, and then say, right, those three creatives out of the 10 were by far the best, so then the next month you just use those three and then maybe add some more into the mix and later down the line because it's good to keep it fresh as well. You don't want to get ad fatigue, but then you also want to keep things fresh. So it's good to test different creatives, different audiences all the time.

Are there any common mistakes that people might make when they're setting up ads on socials?

Yep. Well the first one is they'll not retarget properly. The most crucial thing for retargeting is obviously first of all via the pixel. So by that one I mean you would instal the pixel on your website and then Facebook can then track the people that have visited the website or specific pages.

So I'll give an example, we've got a client called Arten Heating. They're based in Kent, and we set a campaign up to promote their boiler installations offer. So by that, what we did, we targeted people obviously in their area, which goes without saying, and specifically people who had visited the boiler instal page within the last 30 days. So by that, that means that you are retargeting people that are active in the last 30 days. You can go up to 180 days in meta. So that just allows it to be a bit more targeted on that sort of let's say audience. Yeah.

Do you know the thing that I see it's very common and I think it completely gets in the way of determining performance for social is vanity metrics. The classic combination of vanity metrics in any digital marketing is likes and engagement.

And

Actually that doesn't always determine whether a social ad is working well or not. And I think it's a difficult mindset sometimes for businesses to get out of is, oh, this advert might be working, had likes or we've had comments, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it is doing a good job depending on what job it's supposed to do. And if that engagement is what you want, then that's fine, but if you've got actual real commercial goals, it's probably not best. Thinking about vanity metrics,

I tend to find the engagement objective quite poor, to be honest. In meta it's not great. There are better ad objectives there.

Yeah.

When it comes to social ads as a whole, would you say that it works better for specific industries? Because like you mentioned Artan and they're a plumbing and heating business and obviously they're selling a service as opposed to selling an actual product, whether it's you go on Facebook and you might see clothing items from different brands that you're more likely to see and go, oh, I'll buy it straight away. So would you say it works better for businesses that are selling a physical product as opposed to a service?

Good question. I would say it is considerably easier, to be honest, to use Facebook or meta ads for e-commerce websites,

Especially something that's sexy.

And

When I say sexy, I don't mean in a sexy way, but if it's something people care about, then yeah, for sure clothing is always a good one. But tech, anything that's maybe aspirational or very lifestyley tends to work quite

Well. We've seen really good performance from clients where we've done meta ads campaigns where they've got an actual physical store because there's loads of opportunity to put products into specific collections and market them and create different campaigns around them. Obviously majority of the time when you've got an e-commerce store as well, you can be very seasonal. Like now it's Halloween for example. We've got Christmas, black Friday. So those kind of offers do work really well on social as well, especially from a retargeting perspective. I'd say for driving traffic social's. Okay, for building awareness it's great, but for retargeting it's awesome. It's really good for, and the most important thing within all of that is get data into it. So use client lists. I've talked to you about this quite a bit to be honest, but segment them as well. So you might have different sort of segments of your client lists.

It's probably worth highlighting as well. So there are pros and cons of different platforms, but also social where it fits into the marketing mix. So Tom just said there, social is great for awareness, for raising awareness. That's something that actually is very difficult to do in search. You can't really raise awareness in search. You could use Google Display ads slightly different to search, but social is fantastic for that and it's great for, as Tom says, remarketing, retargeting, however you want to describe it. Whereas search search does almost the opposite thing because it's intent driven. It's not very good at creating demand. It's about capturing demand. Whereas social is great for creating demand.

So if you imagine you've got it in a full multichannel strategy, paid social, S-E-O-P-P-C is great getting all your traffic from PPC campaigns and SEO, you can retarget them with your social media campaigns. So it just shows how important it's to have everything in the mix. If you're just doing social on its own, it's probably not going to be as powerful if you were doing all three of those things. So it's only just one small piece of the puzzle. But like I said, client lists are really important for retargeting. It's like gold dust, that stuff,

Campaign monitor did a study and of the accounts that they checked out and there was a 760% increase in performance for those that use those lists and correctly segment. So that's huge. That's a massive, massive difference. So that shows you the power of segmentation in your audience.

Yeah, it worries me the amount of people that just don't use customer lists

Or way too broad has its uses sometimes, but if what you want is commercial performance, really broad is only useful for awareness.

It's almost as if you have to have multiple different campaign objectives running for simultaneously. So you've got an awareness campaign running, you've got a traffic campaign running, and then you've got a conversion campaign running social media is perfect for top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. There is a placement for middle, but those two predominantly are the winners. So yeah, it is pretty powerful in that perspective.

Have you ever seen it where someone's probably gone for they're completely wrong objective when you set up socials on meta

Pretty much every time.

I'd say it's a good 70 or 80% of the time, isn't it really? Yeah, I would say so.

It's a very high percentage of clients that we've dealt with who don't get me wrong, some have it really good, but I would say 99% of the time we can step into an account and improve it just purely on audiences.

But there are loads of areas where you can improve these things. Audience is a massive one, but then also you've got the creative and this is where the testing is extremely important for both, but for, it's amazing how uninspiring sometimes you see the creative or even amateur actually, but sometimes you see it where it's quite amateur and it doesn't really give a great perception of who you are as a brand.

And

I think again, if you've got great creative, it makes such a big difference.

Well, video plays a big part in that because the video, the click-through rates on video are average around 3%, 4%, maybe even higher sometimes. So to utilise video in meta campaigns is

Especially UGC if you can,

UGC

Is really good. Makes a big difference, doesn't it?

Yeah, it just adds that social proof, doesn't it, and it

Just really helps you. That's user generated content by the way, listeners.

Is there anything specific that you have to think about when it comes to content on different platforms?

Sort of? I think obviously very different audiences on say LinkedIn to Instagram for example. So on Instagram you need to be quite visual and engaging, so video is quite powerful. LinkedIn, again, video is the one that I think is the winner across all social media sort of campaigns that you run if you're running paid social campaigns. But when I'm considering a campaign, I think, right, I need a mix of lots of different things. You need some video in there, some still images, maybe even some gif trialling around. There's lots that you need to consider. I think it depends on the objective as well. Again, it is quite important to just consider all avenues really.

So speaking about audiences, don't lookalike audiences play a big part?

Yeah, lookalike audiences again are really important. So for anyone that doesn't know what Facebook does, once you've imported your first party data in the form of a client list, you can create lookalike audiences from it. So it's as close as taking your first party data and making a really close duplication of it. Now what that does is Facebook uses a percentage, so obviously 1% is really close, 10% is really broad. So again, even then you might create a 1% lookalike, you might create a 5% lookalike and you might create a 10% test. Majority of the time the 1% will work the best, the closest to your imported data. But yeah, they're so important. Lookalikes.

Yeah, well, ad Espresso did a study and their results were essentially that if you use first party data to build lookalike audiences, it holds you cost per acquisition, so it holds you conversion cost basically.

I think people miss a trick with lookalikes. It is scary how many people don't create lookalike audiences

Well, but it's also when you think about it, to create a lookalike, you need the data in the first place, and I think that's the challenging part for a lot of businesses is they don't have the technical nows, let's say sometimes to be able to set up analytical platforms in the right way to create those audiences, and I think that's the stumbling block as it, it's quite easy once you're inside meta ads to be able to do that. It's just having the data in the first place.

I think it's important to think that within Meta specifically, you can create custom audiences. So you might create one from the Pixel for all website visitors in the last 90 days or let's say you've got an offers page, people that have visited the offers page in the last 90 days. You create a custom audience for that and then you can create a lookalike of it. But people miss a trick on that as well. You can create lookalikes for everything. It's most powerful with first party data for sure, but building it out from the custom audience preset that you can get with Facebook is quite powerful as well. So for those people that don't understand how ads are structured, you have your campaign, then you have your ad set, and then you have your ads. So I tend to segment the audiences at a asset level. You've got maybe a lookalike audience, a retargeting audience, and then a targeting audience, and then you can put different budgets on each of them. Probably majority of your budget is going to go towards retargeting. Then probably another big portion on lookalike and then targeting.

I was going to ask as well, when it comes to leveraging first party data, have you found any issues with things like restrictions and stuff?

Not really because

Not when it comes to privacy.

Yeah, privacy is important. Obviously with customer lists you're not giving away super detailed information like addresses, telephone numbers,

So yes, so Google Analytics won't track demographics unless they've accepted cookies, provided the cookies are set up correctly. So that sort of takes care of that part. In terms of first party data, obviously let's just say you're exporting all of your customers from your content management system, from your website or from your CRM or whatever it might be, then yeah, absolutely you need to be making sure that you've collected that data legally, but also that they've explicitly approved of you using that data. So that does pose a potential legal risk.

And when you import in your customer lists as well, you only really need to give Facebook one main identifier, email address, phone number, first name or surname. Email address is a good one because it links with the account, but you can also hash the data out as well so that Facebook can't actually reshare it, if that makes sense. So normally nine times out of 10 you may identifier would be an email, then you might put a surname in and then city or country and then the date of birth, and if you can put gender and age in, it's good, but you don't need to that one main identifier, if you just had the one email address, you can get away with that and you could create some decent lists from that. But yeah, you've got to make sure that in your gathering that data that you can then reuse it.

It is really important to mention. I think now as well, it is not an assumed use of that data, it's an explicit use, so you can't just say, well, they're a customer, I can use it. That's not enough. It has to be that they've explicitly suggested you can use it, so it is worth checking that Before using that kind of data,

We mentioned budgets briefly, how would you go about determining the budget for paid campaigns?

It's a tough question because we've seen some really good performance from campaigns that we've ran with considerably low budget, but there is a ceiling with that and you will hit that ceiling pretty quick. Obviously you can put daily budgets in there with Facebook, so you can allocate a specific budget per day or you can put what's called a lifetime budget in there. So from the first of the month to the 31st of the month, you might put 500 quid and then Facebook will sort of chuck money in as and when it thinks is the right time, you can then add schedule, so it only shows your ads at a specific time so that you can be more precise with it. But it is tough to say you can get away with a monthly sort of budget, 200 to 300 quid, you can still get some decent performance, but it depends what it is you need the campaign to do.

I think it depends whether it is a new project or if it's something that you've already had running or tried before. So if you've never ran any of these social ads, it's a bit harder to decide how much budget you should have for it.

If you have historic data though, actually it's probably a bit easier because you can start from the point of saying, well, what am I trying to achieve? If you're trying to achieve, for example, a certain amount of revenue generated and you can see that historically you generated a certain amount of revenue for a certain amount of cost, but you've got an idea roughly of what you need to spend to achieve it. If you don't have any of that, I still think it's quite important to start from what the goal is though, so what are you trying to achieve and then aligning it with a test campaign and see how it forms to see how you can achieve that testing as well is really important to note. I think almost every account should always have an allocation for testing. It's very easy to get to a point where you've just got things running that are performing, but in order to get there, you've got to do the testing first because not everything will work. So yeah, I think it's quite important that there's a certain part of a budget that is there just for testing.

Would you perhaps approach it where you incrementally increase the budget like you would on Google ads and see where the return kind of levels off,

Especially if there is a good return? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we've seen it before, haven't we, where the return might be six, seven times and actually it only needs to be free at that point actually it's quite a good opportunity. You can keep scaling that naturally over time. That return on advertising spend will probably come down a bit the more you spend, but if you can bring in more revenue and actually that return on investment stays above where it needs to be, then yeah, absolutely it makes sense to just keep spending. Doesn't it really in that sense,

How would you go about optimising your bid strategy then to try and maximise your return?

Well, I would do that via audience. Really start off putting the majority of your budget towards the retarget in one and then a little bit towards lookalike and then a little bit towards Target. If you haven't got as much budget to even segment that far, maybe even combine all your audiences. It's not ideal because you can't track which one specifically does better than the other, but at least then that's what I've done with a lot of campaigns before where the budget is not high. I've combined the audience altogether, so in one audience you've got all the people you retargeting, you've got your lookalikes and you've got your targets all in one. It's a good way.

I think as well, it's probably important while you're thinking about budgets to also think about how you're going to analyse this. If you've set your goal and you've set your budget, you need to know what's working and why it's working and how it's working. And one of a really common mistake that I see all the time, especially this is more of an issue on social than anything else, if any form of that jigsaw, that advertising conundrum that you're trying to piece together, if any form of that is on awareness, that process can take a long time to really start benefiting. Once you gain more affinity with your brand and more awareness of your brand, that's going to increase the return on investment of all of your campaigns. But that isn't something that happens overnight. So if there's a chunk of spend that goes to awareness, you've got to have reasonable expectations of how long that takes

When it comes to budgets, would you say that smaller businesses ever have a real shot at competing with larger businesses?

Not really, in all honesty,

In terms of visibility and stuff, no,

It's hard, isn't it? It's hard because it ultimately, let's say for an awareness campaign, it comes down to impressions.

So

How many times is you a going to be seen by people on screen?

The other challenge as well with that is you are not just fighting against your competitors on social, you are fighting for your audience and that makes it harder to gain that awareness. So for example, just really, really rough example, but let's just say you want to nail bar your audience is almost certainly going to be identical to someone that runs a hairdresser, so they're not in competition at all, but they are for the audience and that makes extremely difficult on very low budgets. I would say on lower budgets it might be better going for intent driven marketing like search because you can just make sure you pick up some crumbs on some specific keywords and maybe in a small local area. I think that generally would work better for small budgets.

Say you had a client and they sold sort of either toys or products that were kind of aimed for a younger demographic and you were setting up a social ad for them because unlike things like Facebook, you can be on Facebook from 13 and we always see that people are around there from a lot younger. If you were to set it up, would you have to make the visual appealing to a younger audience, but then maybe change the copy if there's a deal or something to attract the parents, especially around Christmas and Black Friday and things like that?

Yeah, you'd probably target the parent in all honesty. So you'd tailor your creatives to appeal to them. Obviously if it's offer based and they're going to save money, then that needs to be the main CTA in your creative. But yeah, certainly target the parent as opposed to the child or the kid.

What I would do in that instance is target the parents through social, but I'd create demand through something like YouTube video ads and you could target specific channels or specific audiences and you get the kids aware of the product that way, which almost sounds a bit immoral, doesn't it? But kids' toys a massive market and you've got to make the kids aware, otherwise the parents won't care. So yeah, I'd go something like YouTube display and then also maybe target the parents on social and build some awareness that way.

You never know how it's going to work, but it might be a case of kids watching a YouTube video, they get an ad this year, oh, that looks great,

Show

Them mom. Mom might then visit the website. I'm not getting that. There no offers on Black Friday comes round. They've been re-targeted. Bish Bash Bosch

I suppose as well. I think it used to be more you'd see something on adverts and then you'd ask your parents and they'd be aware of it that way, but I feel like now more younger people, they're not watching TV with adverts. They're watching things like Netflix that have, you haven't got that option, so you've got to kind of find it somewhere else.

Yeah, it's games gaming, it's YouTube, it's TikTok, things like that. So again, you can target them that way, but I think the purchase would almost certainly be the parent, so you've got to find a way of then tying that in.

This is almost like the perfect time to say why paid social is not great as a standalone marketing channel. It needs to be used with all the others really. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can use it as a standalone, but it's just more powerful when you use it in the mix with the others. I know I've mentioned it before, but there's lots of different ways that you can really utilise your social media

Ads. Going back to the adults thing as well, there was a study that found that 71% of adults use social media and they're probably going to be a real tool if you want to shop for kids and things.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, there's so many things that relate to kids outside of toys, so anything toy related really, it's probably the parent, isn't it?

Even clothes and things like that. Suppose anything really until they reach a certain age. What kind of metrics would you say the most important to be looking at when you're measuring the success of your campaigns?

Likes? Definitely not likes, I'll tell you the one that is the most important. Roas.

Simple

As,

Yeah, yeah. Apart from maybe an awareness campaign because it's going to be so long before you understand when that converts and it would fall off the tracking data. But yeah, I agree.

If it's an awareness campaign, impressions and traffic, if it's a traffic campaign, visits to the website or link clicks and things like that, if it's a conversion or sales objective campaign roas, but you can't always do ROAS for a B2B business, it's tough to track that. You can track things by putting in custom conversions and things like form submissions, phone calls, and put a rough value on that and say, look, we've generated X amount of calls via ads, we've generated X amount of form submissions via ads. It's equated to a rough estimate of X, and that's how you work your ass out.

If one of the goals as well is building demand, there are ways you could analyse that outside of return on advertising spend as well, I guess. So let's just say you've got a new product, there's no awareness whatsoever for this product. You could monitor things like search volumes for related keywords specifically about that product that wouldn't necessarily turn into revenue directly, but at the same point, you can at least determine that you are creating demand for that product.

You can directly track obviously purchases as well via Netta. It's worth noting that obviously cookie policies and things hold some of that information back, so it's not as accurate as say analytics would be, but if you've got both

And also meta generally analyses view through as opposed to click through, which is slightly different. There's no point going into this on this podcast, but ultimately if someone sees your ad, Facebook assumes responsibility for that conversion, but actually they might not necessarily have seen the ad. They haven't necessarily clicked the ad and converted, they might've seen it, so it's best to use something else to gather your data. The data in meta ads is extremely useful, obviously, but for conversion and ROAS data, I think it's sometimes best to look at it from both the perspective of the data inside meta, but also maybe something like Google Analytics just to try and get a better picture.

Are there any trends unfolding when it comes to the future of paid socials,

TikTok shop? I think it's already started, but I think that's growing. It's also really annoying.

What about trends with influencers and things like that?

Influencers are one of them that actually do work. I mean in certain industries and things, they work better than others, but yeah, influencers can be quite powerful to be honest.

I think there's definitely a trend in using more specific micro influencers now. For a long time people were just desperate for big audience, and the problem with that is when you have a big audience, you can demand quite a large fee, whereas micro influencers are generally quite happy with the product to review

Or

Something that's maybe a fee, but a small fee, they're more reasonable, but also their audiences are much more engaged and specific.

Yeah, sometimes you get people with, I dunno, maybe five to 10,000 followers getting sent free stuff and they're simply just happy with the free stuff that they'll then promote and it doesn't really cost the business anything. Does it?

Yeah, that's more powerful than someone who you're paying to do it because I've seen them when they're on the ads and they don't really understand the product.

No,

They're

Reading the label as they're on the video, aren't

They? Yeah. You can say, oh, this is fantastic. It's got collagen 450 seeing it and it's going to make you smell like roses.

But also I think there's this weird behaviour that's grown over the last, I dunno, maybe three or four years maybe around covid time and I actually don't think consumers now trust influencers at all, whereas micro influencers and smaller ones, there's still an element of trust there.

Yeah, definitely.

They're more authentic and genuine. I think it probably is. That may be started that process a little bit because there's like an automatic assumption now that you see someone with hundreds of thousands of followers or millions potentially, and you know that when they talk about a product, it's just an advert and it's an advert you don't particularly want to see usually. So yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why micro influences tends to work a bit better. It's got to be the right influencer though, hasn't it? That's the key. Again, similar to the audiences, it's got to be

The right one. The one that annoyed me the most was when people jumped on the love islanders.

When they'd

Come out of the villa,

The amount of them, they all start a clothing brand and it's like, and you never see any of them again. And it's like there's just, that epitomises that lack of trust I think. I'm not saying it doesn't work by the

Way,

Sometimes it can work.

The thing is that's a sad thing. I think it does work for the brands, but they'll not be getting audiences that are going to last's

A flash in a pan

A hundred

Percent, but they've forgotten about within six months usually at least. And it's quite a sad state for marketing, I think, because I almost get the impression that that is actually what they want. They want to an audience and become an influencer. It is a thing now, isn't it, where kids will say, yeah, I want to be an influencer. And it's like they want to be an influencer for the fame and for the, I guess money and freebies, but that won't last forever because the moment businesses really start realising that they're not getting a good return from that kind of influencer campaign, it's just going to stop and dry up. People will stop doing it a bit like they did with magazine adverts.

It's

A similarish thing really. Psychology of people changes very quickly.

Part of this pod that I think could be quite useful. Why don't we all go round and say a brand or an ad that we don't actually mind seeing when we're going on our socials that we like

Sonos?

Sonos? Yeah,

I like a good Sonos ad. I quite like some tech ads as well. I'm a tackle tar on ad

DGI

Do. You know what? I haven't seen that many DGI ads on social. Have you?

I've seen a couple.

Have you?

Yeah.

Okay.

They're not heavy on social ads though, I don't

Think. No, no. I wouldn't mind seeing DGI ads tech,

Any trainers. Yeah, mine would be, yeah, trainers to things like Footlocker come up on Instagram quite a lot. Oh,

That's interesting. I don't think I've ever had a Footlocker. Mine are quite niche brands like Loki,

Just Nike, I get targeted by all those kind of ones. Also really small sustainability brands I get targeted at. Oh,

Okay.

So things like sustainable deodorant, sustainable like hair stuff, beauty products, things like that.

That's interesting.

I'm always looking at little things I can change, so

I

Find that's quite helpful.

I get a lot of Kickstarter ones. Yeah,

Because you've been on Kickstarter quite a lot.

Yeah, I'm probably matched their 1% audience in terms. Yeah,

Probably.

And I do go on there quite a lot. I don't very rarely buy from Kickstarter though, but I also really like to see the new ideas and cool stuff. So it's probably not that cost effective

One for me without a shock is guitar stuff and music stuff. There's a brand that keeps popping up for me all the time and I'm so close to just wanting one of their guitars. They're not a very well known guitar brand. I think they're actually American, but some of their guitars are so cool. They're called B-B-A-U-M, BM Guitars, but some of the ads that they put together are really good. And then obviously Spark. I bought Spark Camp, which is an interactive light amp where you can link it with an app on your phone to get loads of different tones every time they bring out a new product, it's like, buy this amp. I'm more for minute, but yeah. Anyway. Music by

You cha.

I dunno, because I dunno whether I'm a marketer's dream or nightmare, but I click every ad that I ever see. It's pure curiosity, even if it's completely irrelevant. But then I find if you click things and then a week later I get an ad for the same company and then it starts annoying me and I think, well, I'm doing it to myself,

But

Most of mine I think are clothes trainers,

New look,

No, not they come up on my Facebook a lot and they irritates me. They, yeah, or beauty products. Basically any generic product.

Look fantastic. Look fantastic is a big one for me that I love. I'm like, yeah, I love that.

Well, beauty Bay, I get that all the time.

Cult beauty as well.

I bet the algorithms struggle to determine how you fit into lookalike audiences if you click every ad.

The thing is, it's just curious because I think, oh, what is it? But I don't, well, I often buy from ads on Instagram and things, but I don't tend to, if it's something completely rogue, I will sit and read through and learn about what it is, but I won't necessarily purchase it.

So what's interesting about that is I reckon that because they're struggling to figure out what, because you engage with it all, but you're not buying a lot of it. I reckon the algorithms probably just default you back to a generalised, okay, you're a female under the age of 2020 or whatever, and because they're going to really struggle to see that engagement, aren't they? How are you behaving? How you behaving? Click, click. So you're getting shit ads. Do you know what? If you stop clicking on all of them over time, you might start seeing some cool stuff that you might

Read it back a bit. Shaz.

Just going back to future trends and things, have you seen any uplifting AI automation when it comes to social ads?

Yeah, mostly quite bad ones as well. Do you know what? There's a lot of AI creative generation and I think you can spot it a mile away. I think it looks really bad.

You can,

And that's just people being lazy in my opinion, but certainly the use of AI for creating ad copy and things can be quite handy. You could easily pump in what kind of copy you think might work and say, can you improve this? And it's all about the input. So telling your target audiences, so on and so on. We all know how to get the better AI outputs.

Well, Facebook have got just a button in there. Facebook have got it built in now to the primary text. So if you put your own version of the primary text for the ad together, they've got a sort of functionality in there where you can sort of click create me five different AI variations of that. Some of them are really naff, but there might be a couple in there that you could use.

Just on that note, actually, this is a common mistake that we've seen before. Facebook will automatically select, allow AI to adjust the ad. So you might get, we've had it before where someone's come to us and they've said, I've created this ad, but for some reason it's saying this and it's because they've not unticked the allow Facebook or meta to play around with the ad. So that's really important to untick actually, if you don't want meta to control that ad looks like

It's the AI enhancement.

That's right. It's

Like a tick box and it's really small

And in some cases it actually makes no sense. You see the ad and you think, well, what's that even mean? That's T dreadful. So yeah, I'd recommend keeping an eye out for that and unticking it. But on the case of ai, we're also building something at the moment. Josh is building something that could be really helpful with both organic and ads social. So keep an eye out for that.

Sounds very mysterious.

It is a little bit, but we are working on something that we'll bring in a huge amount of information, be able to expand on it, segment it, and give you either ideation or content calendars, things like that. So

Exciting.

Nice. That's all for today's episode on Paid Social Media. Thanks to the ML team for sharing their expertise and insights with us. Ultimately, paid social media is about testing, optimising, and staying ahead of the curve by following the strategies and tips shared in this episode. You'll be well on your way to maximising your ROI on social media ads. Don't forget to tune in next time for more marketing insights and expert advice on the Marketing Blobs podcast. See you next time.