We’ve been sounding the drumbeat for months about being ready for an upheaval in the digital advertising practices you’ve come to know and love. Combine changes to third-party cookies and evolving privacy restrictions with parent company Meta’s recent announcement that it’s removing certain ad targeting options from Facebook, and the day of reckoning arrives in January.
If you haven’t started developing new marketing plans and audience profiles during this tidal wave of change, you might just find yourself underwater before it’s too late.
Here are the five things you need to do right now:
Keep your friends close
In mid-January, Facebook will remove targeting options that relate to health causes, sexual orientation, religious practices and groups and political beliefs, social issues, causes and organizations. With significantly less detail to help target audiences, it is clear that leveraging your own data will be critical to building profiles of users who interact with your brand. Collecting data about your current audiences will give you the ability to reach them in more personalized and effective ways, and it will give you the insight to reach entirely new people.
No SEO, no go
In addition to relying on first-party data, you’ll need to beef up your SEO practices. It will be an important way to get inexpensive traffic to your website based on users’ organic searches. Once users make that touch point, they’re likely to engage with your brand further.
Drunken sailor time
Wring as much as you can out of your year-end marketing spends before the targeting party winds down. Come January, the top of your funnel must expand if you’re to gain new supporters or customers — and that means increased spending. With limits on the data you can collect, you’ll need to reach more people and then filter for the perfect fit. It’s akin to using newspapers and billboards, where you’re buying media based on usage instead of a user’s self-described attributes.
Tighten the screws
Question your media buyers, and don’t let them use these changes as an excuse to limit the data they provide on your advertising investments and strategy. It may be more laborious to target the right audience, but that hasn’t changed the analytics tools available to ensure you’re not wasting your ad dollars.
Become one with your data
You should already be swimming in data about your customers and supporters. It’s time to dive deeper. Perform a complete analysis of it because, if you don’t know what you have, you won’t know what you need. Being smarter with the data you have will let you dip into pools outside of your core audience.
Social media channels will continue to respond to the public’s concern over how they collect and disseminate user information, and that undoubtedly will restrict available user information further. If you become adept at mining and analyzing the data you collect on your own, you’ll turn the Meta mess into a goldmine.
