In this post I talk about:

• Facebook Ad auctions,
• what Facebook charges us (the advertiser) for, and
• a breakdown of Facebook’s Total Value Score.

Every platform varies but essentially, for Facebook, when you’ve set up your free account, you create your ad, select the audience you wish to target, and choose the amount of money you’re willing to spend per day. When your ad is approved by Facebook, it goes live. Your ad is placed into the appropriate Facebook ad auctions, of the billions that take place each day. You can pause and unpause your ad at any time, this activates and deactivates its participation in the auctions. When paused, your ad cannot be shown, and you won’t be charged.

What does Facebook charge us for?

Each time a Facebook user logs in to the platform (or any of Facebook’s partner apps), an ad auction takes place. If this user is in your selected target audience, your ad becomes part of the auction. You and your ad are up against advertisers who share the same target audience. If you win the auction, you pay the bid fee and your ad is shown. If you’re using the Lowest Cost bid strategy and you set a daily budget, Facebook chooses the amount of money to bid on each auction without going over your budget.

When it comes to advertising, Facebook seems to be pretty serious about making sure ads are relevant to Facebook users. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of seeing ads pop up on our newsfeeds that we have no interest in, and that have little or nothing to do with us.  To make sure this doesn’t happen (or at least happens less), more than half of the weight in a Facebook ad auction is based on how relevant your ad is to the people who will see it. This prevents the highest bidder from always winning. The advertiser with the highest Total Value Score is the winner of the auction. Your Total Value Score is based on three things: how much you bid, the quality of your ad, and estimated action rates.

Here is the quick breakdown of Facebook’s Total Value Score:

Your bid is the amount of money you’re willing to spend on your ad(s). There are a few different bidding options available. If you use lowest cost bidding, Facebook will automatically split up your selected daily budget among the auctions.

Your estimated action rate is based on how likely a person in your target audience segment is going to take the actions required to reach your pre-set goal.

Facebook uses several factors to gauge the ad quality of your ad including:

• Historical performance of your ad account;
• Positive feedback from target audience (clicks/ likes/ positive results from pop up surveys, etc.);
• Negative feedback from target audience (report ad, hide ad);
• Assessments of low-quality attributes in the ad / policy violating.

 So, what does this mean?

When it comes to Facebook advertising, it’s important to take the time to strategize about the audiences you are targeting and how you are targeting them. Instead of simply putting forward a big budget.

Ads that are more relevant cost you less money and deliver better results!

An effective ad strategy means that more of your targeted audiences are seeing more of your ads and, ideally, clicking on them. Ads are intended to drive conversions of some kind, be they sales, or signatures, views or votes. Facebook can help deliver your desired outcome.

The post Facebook Advertising in 2020 appeared first on Thornley Fallis.

Market research has been a mainstay for private and public sector organizations for nearly a century. Back in the 1920s, the golden age of radio, marketers recognized the need to understand the demography of their customers so they could choose which radio shows to sponsor. That was really how market research as we know it today began. Skip ahead a century with the emergence of surgically targeted online advertising through Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other social platforms, the need for market research has never been greater. Through it all, focus groups have remained a key step in the process, whether early on to help shape large-sample quantitative studies, or as a final check on consumer messaging and marketing materials. But how can we gain the important insights focus groups yield without violating the social distancing demands of the post-Corona world?

We need to re-engineer the focus group.

We have integrated video conferencing into our digital public engagement platform, 76engage, to give private and public sector clients the flexibility and security of conducting focus groups within the 76engage platform using Zoom. An added benefit is that focus group participants can respond to specific questions directly on the platform rather than forcing the moderator to count hands as she or he would in a traditional in-person focus group. This actually adds a quantitative element to what has historically been qualitative research. These digital focus groups are managed in the same way, with a moderator and the ability to test visuals (stills and video) and audio materials while the participants remain safely in their own homes.

This new feature consolidates 76engage’s leadership in the digital engagement market and complements the survey, consultation, and engagement capabilities of the platform. With the world now online, it was perhaps inevitable that focus groups would somehow move online to continue to give organizations the proven benefits qualitative research offers without the expense, and in the midst of a pandemic, the danger of gathering strangers together to solicit their views. Of course, it also means no more coffee and doughnuts for the participants and the clients behind the glass. So, there are also health benefits to this new approach.

Integrating video conferencing in a proven digital engagement platform is an elegant solution that offers clients a new, improved, and cost-effective way to conduct focus groups in a socially-distanced world.

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There aren’t many positives we can take out of the pandemic, but it has forced organizations to confront the idea of working from home, catalyzing a process of examination that might otherwise have taken years. I suspect that many organizations will be pleasantly surprised at just how flexible, effective, and economical working from home can be. While it’s certainly different for larger companies to have their employees sequestered in their homes, many are finding they’re getting the job done under less than ideal circumstances. This realization could be a game-changer. I’m not sure I’d want to be in the commercial real estate business in 2020.

But if working from home is here to stay, there are important questions to address.

How do you sustain a common work culture and engender a sense of mission among employees when they’re not coming into the office every day? After all, a common workspace has been a key contributor in creating and nurturing a common culture.

Well, it calls for a shift in emphasis. A focus on internal communications becomes very important. Employees are principal assets, and in this post-Corona world, many of them will not be riding the elevators in your building every day. They need extra care and attention to bridge the physical distance that now separates them, literally and figuratively, from the company. In short, the move to having employees scattered rather than all together elevates the importance of effective internal communications. And it all begins with strategy, not Zoom. Don’t get me wrong, platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are essential tools for bringing disparate employees together. The ability to see colleagues when interacting with them is important, but these platforms are tactics, not strategies. But where to start?

It’s hard to develop an effective internal communications strategy without first having a solid grasp on the current state of internal comms. So, step one should be a comprehensive audit of current internal communications programs in the context of best practices, the approaches of similar organizations, and the post-Corona world. Among other elements, the audit will entail interviews with key players in the organization and with internal comms staff at similar organizations.

Step two is to re-engineer your internal communications program to tackle the challenge of a workforce that’s no longer in the office fulltime. Setting goals, segmenting key internal audiences, and understanding positioning and messaging, determining vehicles and frequency of communications, will all by important. As part of the strategy, tactics like using Zoom or Teams will likely emerge, along with the need for regular, even prescribed video contact with homebound staff. But let the strategy drive the tactics, not the reverse.

Finally, leadership is required to make this transition work. The organization’s senior echelon must take, and be seen to take, a strong interest in internal communications—which, in general, has not historically been the case. That will send a critical signal that in this new era, internal comms is important to the future of the organization.

We have counseled organizations on internal communications for twenty-five years now and have recently completed just such an audit and strategy for the University of Toronto. The pandemic places these internal comms efforts in a much more critical context.

The Corona virus has changed the world and the workplace. Responding effectively is part of protecting and promoting the long-term interests of the organization. It’s also an opportunity to be seized and a chance to build competitive advantage. Extraordinary times. Extraordinary measures.

The post The Elevation of Internal Comms in a Post-Corona World appeared first on Thornley Fallis.

There was a time in the halcyon days of PR agency life when media relations was a mainstay—perhaps the mainstay—of the business. We’d spend our days developing targeted media lists, cooking up stories, crafting story pitches, drafting news releases, reaching out to reporters, and monitoring media to harvest the fruits of our labour. Along with special events, and guerilla PR, it was one of the few ways we had of showcasing our clients and their products or services. Then in the late 1990s, a little thing called the weblog—shortened to blog—breached our shores followed not long thereafter by MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn and Facebook in the early 2000s. After that, nothing was really the same.

The rise of social media and the emerging realization that anyone with a highspeed internet connection could be their own broadcaster, marked the beginning of media relations’ slow decline. Running parallel was the massive consolidation of mainstream media among fewer owners, and the inevitable shedding of unprofitable media outlets, including thousands of radio stations, community newspapers, and even larger metropolitan newspapers. Advertising budgets shrank. Reporters were laid off and those still on the job suddenly found themselves covering many beats and writing multiple stories each day. Mainstream media entered the eye of a perfect storm. That storm is still raging.

As social media took off and we began to wrap our arms around its potential, media relations headed in the opposite direction. There were fewer reporters available to pitch and they were all harried and stressed and even harder to reach than before—and believe me, they were hard to reach even in the glory days.

So, what’s my point?

Media relations has been in serious decline for many years courtesy of the rise of social media and the long-term financial pressures faced by mainstream media. The pandemic has not helped. According to the Toronto Star, in the first six weeks of the lockdown, fifty daily or community newspapers have closed, many permanently. And the future looks even bleaker.

For the last decade and a half, media relations has played a diminishing role in the business of most communications agencies. And that was before the Corona Virus. When we all come back and business returns to at least a semi-normal footing, I suspect there’ll be even less media relations activity than before we all started wearing masks and letting our hair grow. But that may not be such a bad thing. In fact, the pandemic will likely accelerate adoption of the PESO (Paid, Earned, Owned, and Shared) content model.

Organizations need no longer rely on media relations to get their messages out to their target audiences. At the best of times, media relations was an imperfect tactic, plagued with uncertainty and vulnerable to an unpredictable and capricious news cycle. But it was the only game in town for so long. Now, organizations can essentially circumvent the mainstream media and create and share content specifically for their target audiences and disseminate it directly to them without the filter of the media. Of course, this means crafting content that audiences want and not just self-promotional sales pitches. But the company is in control. In most communications agencies (or marketing and ad agencies too, for that matter) a growing percentage of the team is involved in creating and disseminating content. And it works.

So, as our economy begins the long road to recovery, here’s to more organizations shifting marketing and communications resources away from old school tactics, like media relations, and into the development and delivery of their own content. Welcome to your post-pandemic future.

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