Super Social: Facebook & Effectiveness

Social media has radically transformed brands' ability to reach people and trace their thoughts, feelings and perception towards their products. VP, Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook, and Global Effies Board Member, Carolyn Everson, talks Laura Swinton through fans, likes and shares and gives a marketer's-eye-view of effectiveness.

LBB> In your experience, what are the key ingredients that make for a truly effective advertising campaign? 

CE> A truly effective campaign has to focus and deliver upon a marketer's business goals. What are you trying to solve and how can this campaign help you and your brand? Are you looking for top of the funnel awareness? Are you looking to increase sales, either online or in-store? Increase loyalty? Build affinity? The right creative paired with the right tools on the right platforms can and should help your bottom line. When you are very focused and honest about what your business needs, then you can build a great campaign around those needs.

LBB> What sort of measures do you use to assess advertising campaign effectiveness - does it always come back to increased sales or should effectiveness be considered in broader terms?

CE> Sales is a major part of it – for a lot of brands across many verticals that is the most important measure. But great marketers know that with the right campaigns they can influence every level of the purchase funnel, from awareness to consideration to conversion to loyalty and advocacy. There are effective measures associated with every level of that funnel. Ultimately marketers need to move customers through that funnel, using different tools and measures along the way.

LBB> The tide is turning on the way people are thinking about social media - a lot of strategists and effectiveness experts I've spoken to don't think the number of likes and tweets or whatever necessarily mean much as a measure of how well a campaign has done. What are your thoughts on this?

CE> I agree. Social metrics including fans, likes, and shares are important, and they can be effective proxies for marketers depending on what their goals are for a campaign. But marketers are short changing their efforts if they simply think of Facebook and other social platforms as places where they can drive buzz. We aren't just a social network, we are a media platform with over 665 million engaged users each day. We can deliver all of the people who matter to you. Every day, everywhere, where they discover what matters most to them. It is about targeted reach that helps drive real business goals.

LBB> How do you see the relationship between creativity and effectiveness? Is there a tension there or are the two simply different sides of the same coin?

CE> You cannot be effective if you do not have fantastic creative. We can deliver millions of engaged users who are incredibly well targeted, but if you are not putting the right message in front of them, you are wasting time and money. On Facebook, with ads now in the News Feed, marketers have a responsibility. Is your message, your creative, as good as the great news of a cousin's new baby, pictures from your best friend's honeymoon, or the most important news of the day? It is really about taking the most important craft skills we have in advertising – great copywriting, art direction, illustration – and utilizing those skills plus the power of the platform to get the perfect message in front of your intended audience.

LBB> Effectiveness seems to be a buzzword of growing importance to agencies and clients – I’ve even heard production companies and post houses express interest in awards like the Effies – are there any misconceptions you come across from those who are somewhat later to the party?

 

CE> Sometimes people still associate "effectiveness" purely with direct response campaigns, but every single advertising campaign should look at impact and effectiveness. If you have objectives in the beginning of the campaign, you should have metrics or KPIs associated with your goals to measure ultimate impact. This is true across brand and DR on every type of medium. 

LBB> The process of judging effectiveness really intrigues me – what are the key challenges you face trying to make that call on a piece of work you’re viewing ‘from the outside’? And how do you balance the need for tough objective measures whilst also assessing each piece of work on its own merits?

CE> There is definitely a balance. Judges have to look at the same metrics across all pieces of work so that they are judging fairly, but they also have to look at the campaign on an individual level for what it was trying to accomplish. All judges will look at the idea, the execution, the results, and ask if it truly achieved its intended objectives for that particular audience. For instance, you cannot look at reach numbers from a campaign in the US and a campaign in Finland and compare just the impressions because they are going to be dramatically different.  Another way to look at a campaign's effectiveness is to focus on scale. Was the work scalable or was there something in the idea or execution that limited the campaign's potential? 

LBB> … and leading on from that, having spoken to a few people who have sat on effectiveness juries, I’ve heard many horror stories about the dreaded case study video. What advice would you give to people putting together an entry? How can they ensure that their submission is… well, effective?

CE> The most important thing is to focus on the key business objective you were trying to solve and highlight the campaign's real impact on that objective. Judges also like to see the thought process behind the work, particularly the consumer insights that were generated and how the team came to an idea. Finally, judges see a lot of numbers throughout the day, so putting context behind the numbers that you show is an easy way to highlight how successful the work really was.