Ecommerce Influence Podcast 224: How To Prepare For The Future Of Facebook Advertising
by: Austin Brawner and Andrew Foxwell
Due To Facebook’s Influence, Your Website Is Less And Less Often The First Place Potential Customers Learn About Your Brand.
We don’t see this changing anytime soon. In fact, Facebook’s already moving to on-site checkout, removing the need to visit your website altogether.
Today we’re talking about the future of Facebook advertising and how we see it evolving. We discuss what Facebook’s plans are for the platform, as well as for Instagram, and how you can be prepared for what’s to come.
Enjoy!
Episode Highlights
5:13 Why we’re talking about Facebook’s future and what you’ll learn today.
6:53 What Facebook has planned for future interactive elements.
9:04 How to use Instagram polls to increase engagement.
11:17 The future of augmented reality on Facebook and how it could impact your CPM.
14:22 Interactive games as ads: worth the hype or overrated?
16:05 Andrew’s biggest takeaways about the future of Facebook advertising.
Transcript
Austin Brawner: One of the things I want to talk about, Andrew, is how fired up I've been recently just talking to business owners about what they are doing and how they're building interesting businesses around their lifestyle.
I just got back from my Profit Summit in Boston, and it was interesting talking to three of the attendees and they all had very different ideas about what was exciting to them about running a business and why they were doing it, and they were just leaning into it. And it's been really inspiring. And every time I talked to a business owner who's got a business that supports their lifestyle and is growing, I'm just so fired up.
Andrew Foxwell: Yeah. I think that's really true. Maybe we've gone through a shift here in the last few years where people are starting to do that more, where it's not that the business is your entire life and it's more around how do I design this to work for me. And I think you're seeing that shift too in clothing.
People are buying less clothing, they want more quality, and even just I guess, clothing and stuff too. It makes me feel comfortable because that's where my head is at certainly. Right? It's like the money is fine for a business as long as we can support what we're wanting to do, which is basically just to travel and do other things, and everybody has their own independent goals.
And even those that are really growing, I think about that episode we had with Josh Meyer talking about they are the fastest-growing company in Maine and he sounded like they're working really hard, but you can tell that he's still living his life, he's still supporting his lifestyle, which is really cool and really inspiring to hear. And I think that's really, really neat.
Austin Brawner: I think it is interesting. I hope that's the way that the future is going and I think that the more options that we have, the more you start looking at different channels as kind of like tools for growth rather than just the inevitable channel you have to go in to continue to grow your business. It's more like tools to help you get to where you want to be.
In today's episode, really we wanted to dive into a tool and think about the future of this tool, a tool that most people use, and that is the future of Facebook advertising and what we see this tool evolving into.
Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of discussion obviously this year about what is happening with Facebook advertising and the competition that's arising. And I think that it will continue to settle in a lot like Google advertising, right, where it's something that people do that's a part of the mix.
I don't know if it's going to continue to be the lead that it has, and I think more people are going to continue to use more channels to diversify the sources that they had. I mean, for a long time you could just do Facebook and have a website and that was it, right? And I think that that time is going away, but it's still going to be part of it, and especially with Instagram, it's going to be part of it too.
So there's some big things that we saw in a report that Austin and I read from Facebook about the future of Facebook advertising and what it looks like. And on the episode around this podcast generally, we talk about tactics a lot but not as much around what we know will be happening or what Facebook has said on the roadmap, so that's basically why we wanted to bring this to you today to help us all be better prepared for the next year and years looking forward on Facebook advertising.
Austin Brawner: So today you can expect that you're going to learn what Facebook's plan for their platform, and not just Facebook, but also Instagram. We're kind of using that synonymously. So let's kick it off Andrew, and dive into let's talk a little bit about interactive elements, what that is, what that means and what Facebook has planned for interactive elements.
Andrew Foxwell: Absolutely. So "interactive elements" is this phrase that Facebook is using more often and they have come out and said that 60% of businesses on Instagram use an interactive element, like a mention, a hashtag or a poll sticker in stories every month, and this is data from 2019.
So that's interesting that there's some sort of mention, you're tagging someone, you're using a hashtag that's categorizing it a certain way, or a poll sticker in the Instagram story. They make the platform stickier, right? So they're looking to introduce more of them.
I mean, I think if you think about the platform generally about animated gifs, you think about Facebook Lives or Instagram Lives, reactions, people using face filters and stickers, we're only seeing more of those elements, not less, become part of the experience of being on Instagram and Facebook.
So one general direction they're heading for advertisers is to bring those elements into advertising units. And an example of this is what we talked about earlier this year on the podcast is polls on Instagram story ads on paid Instagram story ads, right? Where you can put a poll on there and you can say, "Vote one way or another," and they've been actually a good performer from a direct response standpoint and they get feedback from potential customers.
So think about the value of something like that. Someone clicks on the poll, then they're added to an engager custom audience within your Facebook ads, and then you're able to turn up the engager custom audiences because of their vote on a poll.
So that's one thing that I think is important to think about these interactive elements becoming more of that experience and how we as advertisers are going to have to bring those things into the creative that we're putting out there.
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