Category: Insights

Tiger Pistol Releases Treasure Trove of Beverage Industry Insights on New Microsite

Posted on by Tiger Pistol
Beverage brands see tremendous wins from collaborative digital advertising campaigns launched using Tiger Pistol

Tiger Pistol, the leading collaborative advertising platform that delivers local activation at scale, recently launched a fast-reference, one-stop microsite with the remarkable campaign-based results from their recent work in the beverage industry.

Tiger Pistol’s beverage industry microsite details how collaborative advertising drives exponential success for brands and their channel partners.

The microsite offers over 10 published case studies that demonstrate how global beverage brands have can scale their local advertising efforts with partner-level personalization across a myriad of campaigns, including ones driving product sales, awareness, online conversions, in-store traffic, and even recent efforts in the omni-channel.

“Tiger Pistol has always had a strong connection to the beverage industry through working with global beverage brands,” said Donny Dye, SVP Sales and Marketing at Tiger Pistol. “I believe this is in no small way due to the desire to empower local bars, retailers, and restaurants. It’s no secret that the traditional ways of supporting trade partners, such as providing swag, signage, and coasters, have begun to wane because of the limited value proposition. Tiger Pistol’s Collaborative Advertising Platform™ offers brands an effective digital alternative to maintain and increase trade partner product sales by bringing their local expertise into social advertising.”

Tiger Pistol enables its beverage clients to support their channel partners with high-quality collaborative social campaigns complete with brand-centric creative and copy that partners can personalize to enhance local relevance without compromising the brand’s voice. Tiger Pistol has more than 100,000 on-premise and off-premise locations connected to its platform across 22 countries worldwide.

Tiger Pistol has received 11 industry awards for their work in the beverage industry. Specifically, the company won the 2019 and 2020 Digiday Technology Award for Best Social Marketing Platform, AdExchanger Award for Best Social Media Campaign, and U.S. Social Media Awards for Best use of Facebook/Instagram and the Innovation Award. Additionally, Daniel Ingram, Global Director of Customer Experience at Anheuser-Busch InBev, received the Consumer Goods Technology 2021 Visionary Award and the 2021 Path to Purchase Shopper Marketing Industry Innovator Award. Tiger Pistol nominated Ingram for these awards based on his innovative mission and proactive engagement of Tiger Pistol to execute Ingram’s COVID revitalization initiative at scale.

Access the microsite via https://go.tigerpistol.com/beverage.

Lock it Down: How to Ensure Brand Safety Across Channel Partners

Posted on by Camryn Rosenstein

No more are the risks of social media more pronounced than for through-channel marketers. But safety means different things for different industries. No matter the vertical, there are three things that marketers can use to ensure brand safety: 

  • Disclosure: Rules that require disclosure of license numbers, certifications, or financial/offer terms in all advertising.
  • Targeting: Similar regulations also apply to how campaigns are targeted. For example, Real Estate campaigns can not target based on demographics or would otherwise be in violation of FHA guidelines, or for insurance campaigns, where agents are only licensed to sell within the bounds of a state. See Facebook Special Ad Categories for more information. 
  • Variable rules: Requirements that vary by state/country/brand. 

In this article, we will present the three ways to guarantee compliance by demonstrating it through vertical examples.

Use Case #1 – Alcohol Industry

An emerging challenger brand sought to increase sales of its signature party drink while also helping drive traffic and sales for its retailers. However, alcohol brands face challenges when running ads for their products in the U.S. due to a 3-tiered structure, composed of brand, distributors, and retailers, and this structure’s associated legalities. Brands are prohibited from directly advertising specific retailers or from paying for their advertising. 

The brand needed a method to promote and drive retailer sales while still maintaining a level playing field in the marketplace. By leveraging Tiger Pistol’s platform, the beverage brand could run compliant hyper-local campaigns that would drive dynamic localization at scale and direct consumers to the brand’s store locator page or an alcohol delivery company that services the user’s area, making for a frictionless path to purchase. In this model, all ads run off of the corporate brand page, with locations defined as cities versus end locations. This method accounts for disclosure by not calling out a specific retail location. Rather, it allows the brand to direct customers to the best place for them to buy, all while supporting their local network of restaurants, bars, grocers, gas stations, or convenience stores. Using Tiger Pistol’s solution, the brand was able to account for targeting compliance with campaigns that were proximity-targeted and personalized to only reach consumers who were of the legal drinking age. Their campaigns also adhered to the variable rules affecting alcohol promotion at the state level. 

Use Case #2 – Real Estate 

Real estate marketing compliance does not have to be complicated when you know what you’re accounting for. Disclosure, real estate agents must disclose what brokerage they work for in their campaign. This can be done in a number of ways, but the easiest is probably to include this disclosure in the advertisement’s copy. For example, “I’m Shannon Austin and I work for Coldwell Banker. I am having an open house for 124 Loveland Lane on August 31st from 2-4pm. Masks required!” However, agents can choose to include a disclosure statement in their lead form instead. Another thing agents must consider when targeting audiences is the Federal Fair Housing Act guidelines to ensure agents’ ads are not discriminatory. Tiger Pistol’s platform offers automation controls that guarantee audience targeting is compliant with the FFHA. 

Use Case #3 – Insurance 

When marketing insurance services or products you must be extremely explicit in your copy or messaging about the coverage and/or services you’re offering and how much you are selling them for.  Adding a disclosure in your ad is crucial for Facebook marketing. Insurance marketers are only allowed to target audiences who are over the age of 18 and live within the state where the agent is licensed. Hyperlocal targeting is often essential, as targeting by DMA does not work in many cases. For example, the Chicago DMA stretches into Indiana and Wisconsin; and even the Charlotte DMA leaks into South Carolina. 

While these examples centered around regulations, brand governance/compliance should not be ignored, the average channel partner is an expert at running their business, not marketing. Brands struggle with the competing need to both retain brand-level control and consistency while ensuring that each individual location can achieve success. This is especially complicated when Facebook advertising enters the picture. Most locations have already created their own Facebook Business Page and want to drive ads directly from it to garner attention to their location. Your network of channel partners represent enormous opportunity for brand extension through social media channels, but risks like brand dilution and compliance make it challenging to relinquish local social advertising control. Tiger Pistol ensures your collaborative advertising™ campaigns are brand approved, yet perfectly tailored to effectively engage with community audiences.

Ready to gain control of your brand in the social advertising space? Let’s talk. 

Is Your Social Advertising Plan Thinking Small Enough?

Posted on by Tiger Pistol
Tiger Pistol’s new eBook creates a blueprint for how brands can leverage collaboration with their local partners to drive better performance and deeper personalization with social campaigns.

Tiger Pistol, the leading collaborative advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, combines strategic thought with tactical practicality in its most recent eBook, “Is Your Social Advertising Plan Thinking Small Enough? Three paid social engagement models that drive localization and personalization.”

Through a 3-pronged approach called Activate, Collaborate, and Enable, the Tiger Pistol team illustrates how brands can collaborate with their channel partners to boost sales, awareness, and traffic to exponentially drive results around thousands of micro-campaigns. Tiger Pistol makes it simple to build a strategy with each approach broken down into its own section, complete with explanations, industry statistics, use cases and client results. 

Among the critical areas addressed in “Is Your Social Advertising Plan Thinking Small Enough?” are how to:  

  • Activate the modern shopper by seamlessly allowing them to convert digitally or in-store
  • Collaborate with complex channel partner networks
  • Empower independent representatives beyond sharing assets for social media with effective social advertising that can be launched in under 5 minutes

“Scale and complexity barriers are no longer acceptable reasons to continue to offer lackluster solutions to local franchises, resellers, channel partners, or agents. Tiger Pistol, and other companies like us, are allowing marketers to innovate in local social at a level that has never been seen before,” said Donny Dye, SVP, Sales and Marketing at Tiger Pistol. “Collaboration is vital to this shift as modern local shoppers are now purchasing across every path from curbside pickup, delivery, directly from the brand, and, yes, definitely in store. These engagement models are critical to allow brands to have a local connection to where they sell their products and in turn a connection with their consumer. ”

Get instant access to the eBook now.

Facebook Stats Marketers Need to Know in 2021

Posted on by Camryn Rosenstein

Facebook is the #1 social platform in the world. Its reach is unparalleled when it comes to activating consumers at scale. Whether you’re a global brand or a small business, advertising on Facebook properties should be essential in your digital marketing strategy. Not convinced? You will be. Consider these stats.

A True Global Network

1 in 3 people globally visit Facebook properties daily (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Marketplace). With 320 million active Facebook users, India has the largest country-wide base in the world. The United States has the second largest user base at 190 million users which nearly accounts for 60% of the entire US population. 

Facebook Usage

A recent report from Data Reportal found that users spend an average of 19.5 hours on Facebook each month. The same report showed that 98.3% of Facebook users chose to use a mobile device over a desktop when engaging with the social media app.

Local Activation

With Facebook reaching nearly 2.8 billion monthly active users on average, it remains the largest social media platform in the world. Moreover, it’s vital for brands to delegate their ad dollars on Facebook with national and local social campaigns, especially when ⅔ of Facebook users visit a local business page at least once every week.

Now there are more than 200 million small businesses worldwide using the Facebook Family of Apps in some capacity to market their business. The numbers make it clear that an ecommerce presence on social channels is key to reaching your customers where they want to shop.

Facebook Ads Deliver Highest ROI

Hubspot reported that Facebook ads deliver the highest return on investment (ROI) among all paid advertising channels. This finding only gives brands and partners more of a reason to integrate or ramp up their social presence on Facebook.

Social Shopping

Facebook and its family of social media apps allow users to discover products and now even buy them through these platforms. More than 4 in 5 consumers like to shop on social media and more than 2 in 3 shoppers have made purchases through Facebook. 

With 56.1 million buyers, Facebook has become the #1 social commerce platform in the United States. Facebook Marketplace has become many people’s go-to site for purchasing housewares to cars. Therefore, it is no surprise that Marketplace receives over 1 billion visits each month. In addition, since their launch in May 2020, Facebook and Instagram Shops retain 300 million plus monthly visitors. 

Video Ads Drive Most Ad Clicks

According to DataBox, videos drive the most ad clicks on Facebook. In some cases, using videos can double your engagement rate. More specifically, Statista found that video posts get an engagement rate of 6.15%, whereas status-type posts get only 1.38%.

If you should take anything away from this list it’s that Facebook is not going anywhere any time soon, so leverage the platform to your advantage now. Check out The Case for Brands to Implement a Local Social Advertising Program to learn how to make the most of Facebook’s community-driven focus.

How to Empower your Franchisees with Brand-Safe, High-Performing Collaborative Advertising Tools

Posted on by Camryn Rosenstein

The Enable Engagement Model: Effective Advertising, Easily Executed

As a marketer responsible for providing your partners with effective advertising tools, you likely struggle with:

  • Ensuring partners create relevant, compelling messages for their local audiences while maintaining control of the voice of the brand 
  • Motivating your partners to focus on marketing, especially when their budgets are limited
  • Avoiding marketing overlap among partners in densely populated territories
  • Providing marketing tactics that allow your partners to understand what they are achieving
  • Building trust with your partners while also building your brand

Leveraging a brand correctly is critical to the success of every interdependently-owned or franchised partner. Unfortunately, many brands’ messaging and resources get lost in translation. The Enable Engagement Model allows brands to give their partners the right social advertising tools, at scale, so both parties can make the most out of their advertising commitments.

  • 65% of partners say that marketing enablement is the number one thing they want from brands.
  • 65% of partners have poor content quality or simply can’t find the content.

In this model, the brand creates campaign templates that allow partners to customize with their local knowledge of what resonates in their region. Partners build their ads in less than 5 minutes, editing copy according to brand-set parameters and selecting images or video assets from a brand-provided library. Local partners aren’t marketing experts. They’re time-strapped humans who know how to run their business. The Enable Engagement Model was created to save time with smart social advertising automation, so partners have time to easily launch campaigns, handle their business operations, and make it to their child’s evening soccer game. 

  • After seeing co-marketed campaigns, 68% of consumers are able to make buying decisions before even speaking to sales representatives. 
  • Brand partnerships that leverage digital channels see 4X the pipeline of non-digital partnerships. 

With hyper-local partner location targeting, you can easily avoid marketing overlap among partners in densely populated territories. Because the ads run from the individual location’s Facebook Page, brands can achieve a level of granularity, even at scale. For a QSR franchise brand, this could mean individual franchises could choose between two corporate offers, say 2 for 1 cheeseburgers or any size soda for the price of a small, without overlap as ads could target only X blocks or X miles from the location. This model simplifies the complexity of Facebook and Instagram advertising, as brands can securely share first-party data with their partners by pre-establishing audience and targeting for each location.

Data Driven Success

This collaborative approach challenges what’s possible and what should be expected from investments. With automatic campaign reporting, brands can empower their channel partners with access to performance metrics of their campaign and gain understanding of their customers through local, regional, and global dashboards. Both brands and channel partners can assess what is working and what isn’t. In turn, your brand can use these data insights to inform and amplify your national branding efforts and build better audiences.

Embracing your channel partner’s local knowledge is the perfect stepping stone to building a line of trust with your channel partners. Value creation between your brand and channel partners will produce campaigns with relevant, localized messaging that doesn’t risk your brand’s voice. Plus with brand-controlled templates, channel partners do not have to worry about breaking any Facebook compliance policies.

The Enable Engagement Model in Action

A Fortune 500 real estate services provider enabled their agents to promote their listings on Facebook and Instagram with auto-configured, high-performing campaigns, empowering their agents to localize campaigns at scale. The results were exceptional, nearly half a million leads were generated, over seven million click throughs to agent websites and over 21,000 Facebook and Instagram campaigns were launched at scale. In addition, lead campaigns were 55% more cost effective and traffic campaigns were 68% more cost effective than the industry benchmark. 

With the Enable Engagement Model, empower your franchisees with brand-safe, high-performing advertising tools. Request a demo with Tiger Pistol today. 

How Collaborative Social Ads Reactivate the Local Market

Posted on by Camryn Rosenstein

Mutual Collaboration Engagement Model: Local Customization

At the heart of collaborative advertising is the belief that brands and partners working together creates a result that neither could attain on their own. Nowhere is this more evident than through local customization, or as we call it, Mutual Collaboration.

For many channel partners, effective advertising feels like a foreign language, especially when they attempt more complex approaches such as social advertising. While the majority of them are planning to invest in social advertising, they find the path to effectiveness to be unclear, and usually without a guide. Consider the stats below:

Source: BrandMuscle

Channel partners are seeking the very expertise that brands leverage every day. In fact, many brand marketers attempt to solve this challenge through providing creative assets and instructions to assist their partners in social marketing, but when those same marketers review how these resources are used, they find their partners are using the components incorrectly. Instagram images are found in Facebook ads, copy has been edited, and best practices are missing. Partners need more direction than simply being handed the ingredients to great advertising. Just as eggs and flour require a chef to become a delicious cake, great copy, imagery, and audience data require a talented marketer assisting the local expert to become revenue. 

Collaborating on Social Media 

It is becoming more evident that social advertising has been a missed opportunity for brands to better leverage the strengths of their distribution channels. With 75% of sales occurring indirectly, brands constantly compete to stand out from the rest of the shelf. This battle extends to driving preference over competitors in cases where a retailer chooses only one brand to offer its consumers.

Collaborating on social advertising is the perfect way to combine a brand’s power and marketing resources with the local business’s knowledge and reputation. The brand gains strategic control of the messaging and tone of how their brand is presented. Simply stated, brands that offer collaborative social advertising solutions to their network of channel partners create a competitive edge for both the brand and the partner.

Anatomy of a Mutual Collaborative Ad 

A templated publishing workflow allows brand and agency teams to design campaign concepts that automatically localize and deploy to the appropriate partners while maintaining brand integrity at a global scale. These templates should afford flexibility, ranging from complete brand control with dynamic localization, to partial brand-control, where partners can select and enhance brand-provided creative with local dialect, events, points of interest, or offers for increased localization and personalization.

Better Together

    Brand’s Benefit By: 

  • Accelerate customer acquisition through advertising that resonates locally 
  • Increase down-funnel product sales/consumption
  • Deliver greater advertising spend efficiency through micro-budget campaigns 
  • Improve partner performance, brand preference, and loyalty
  • Maintain brand quality and control 

    Partner’s Benefit By:  

  • Receive powerful brand-level tools that would otherwise be out of reach
  • Save time and avoid costly mistakes
  • Utilize high quality brand creative that elevates their local presence 
  • Gain access to brand funded programs and/or co-op options
  • Obtain direct access to performance reporting and leads

The Collaborative Engagement Model in Practice

An international beauty brand engaged Tiger Pistol for supplier funded collaborative social campaigns, which would run from individual salon Facebook and Instagram Business Pages, when salons purchased a certain level of the brand’s product. Value creation between the brand and their network of salons helped to improve partner satisfaction, plus participating salons saw a 22% increase in product sales compared to the 1% growth from non-participating salons. 

A Global Fortune 500 beverage company partnered with Tiger Pistol to help with their COVID-19 revitalization strategy to support their global network of bars and independent retailers during the uncertain time. With the Tiger Pistol platform, the brand could build and distribute 1000s of dynamically localized campaigns at a global scale in minutes, driving foot traffic and sales for local bars and retailers in addition to brand awareness. The brand’s channel partners saw exceptional results in a matter of weeks, a 20% uplift in orders and a customer return on ad spend nearly 8x. 

With the Mutual Collaboration Model, reactivate the local market and connect your brand to where shoppers buy your product. Request your demo today!

How to Activate the Modern Buyer Through Collaboration

Posted on by Camryn Rosenstein

Multi-Path Activation Engagement Model: Instant On, Transaction-Level Targeting

If you’re a marketer responsible for driving brand sales through traditional retailers, or managing complex pricing, market, or channel strategies, you already know that Covid-19 changed consumer shopping habits.

  • 73% of US consumers changed stores, brands, or the way they shop.
  • 46% of shoppers tried digital purchases for the first time. Of those, half plan to continue post-pandemic.
  • 61% of consumers are “ready to go” with returning to normal pre-pandemic behavior.
  • Buy Online, Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) usage has grown by nearly 500% due to the pandemic. 

Shoppers learned some new tricks during the pandemic. As this new normal emerges, shifts in purchasing paths have splintered.

The biggest problem? No one knows which channel individual shoppers will choose: In-store, BOPIS (Buy Online Pick up in Store), Delivery, D2C.

Activating the Modern Buyer Through Collaboration 

Options for traditional retailer collaboration are highly limited. In many cases, a brand’s story is buried either among other promotions or reliant solely on in-store experiences. The Multi-Path Activation Engagement model removes the noise with advertising that targets each audience at the individual retail level, from large chains to small family-owned locations. In addition, it offers shoppers multiple ways to transact, addressing them with their preferred shopping method.

Collapse the Shopping Funnel Through Activation

Multi-Path Activation enables a brand to connect shoppers to where they can buy brand products in the method they choose. Where a national campaign targets overall brand awareness objectives of e-commerce initiatives, a collaborative campaign drives sales-focused metrics in a channel that has top of funnel reach. In other words, the Multi-Path Activation model collapses the shopper funnel by combining multiple touch points. These ads energize existing retail marketing campaigns with digital advertising, allowing brands to launch and optimize store level campaigns with multiple conversion paths, in-store, pickup, delivery, and click to cart.

Anatomy of a Multi-Path Activation Engagement Model Ad

Build A Strategy That Reflects New Shopping Habits

As a marketer, you need to understand how shoppers purchase by geography and by partner. The Multi-Path Activation Engagement Model lets you test and define the best mix to match your shopper’s preference. Multi-Path Activation expands the marketing strategy beyond the end cap, and allows shoppers to respond to shopper marketing campaigns even if they purchase via curbside pickup or a concierge delivery service. Brands stand out from their competition by advertising that they are sold at major retailers.

Local campaigns allow your brand to focus on specific initiatives or needs, such as new product launches or under-performing campaigns. Your brand can leverage what matters at a much more granular level. Targeted communication in micro-markets activates both increased and consistent engagement. By connecting to individual single locations, ads are more relevant to the community, and these campaigns are rewarded with higher conversions and Facebook’s relevancy discount.

Multi-Path Activation Engagement Model in Practice

A United States beverage company ran hyper-localized Facebook and Instagram social advertising campaigns with the added capability of geo-fencing to specific key markets. This meant that consumers would see ads that upon click-through would always be presented with a controlled set of different retailers they could immediately purchase from. This helped to remove friction and provide a quicker path to purchase for consumers. This method was 50% cheaper than the national advertising benchmark, plus the CTR increased by 40% and 80% of clicks resulted in store locator searches.

A Global Fortune 500 beverage corporation engaged Tiger Pistol to run hyper-localized, geo-targeted campaigns at scale to encourage top of mind recall of vending machines to increase sales. With collaborative social advertisements, the company saw a 22% uplift in net contribution from vending machine sales, helping reverse the downward trend of vending. Their campaigns received 1.3 million impressions activating 500,000 users. 

With the Multi-Path Activation Model, engage the new shopper and improve customer experience with a simple shortcut to the purchasing journey. Request a demo today!

White Paper: The Indirect Majority – Why the Future of Social Advertising is Collaborative

Posted on by Chris Mayer

75% of global sales occur through indirect channel partners, yet many brands still rely on antiquated and ineffective methods of supporting and leveraging their channel partners. Today, success requires innovation and collaboration to drive local engagement, activation, and sales. Complete with use cases, this white paper demonstrates why offering collaborative social advertising solutions to your network of channel partners will dramatically improve the sales of your products/services, and in doing so, enhance the value and depth of your channel partnerships.

Get the White Paper





How Collaborative Advertising Delivers Exponential Success for Brands & Their Channel Partners

Posted on by Camryn Rosenstein

With everybody and their mother using social media these days to advertise, it’s necessary for brands to create effective marketing messages that reach and resonate with their consumer base. Enter collaborative social advertising. Through a symbiotic process, brands empower their channel-partners with resources and templatized branding materials while channel partners offer brands their knowledge of their local markets. This enables brands to build and distribute meaningful, relatable social advertising that successfully identifies different audiences’ needs, wants, and purchase patterns. 

Collaborative advertising addresses the crucial need to connect a brand’s power with their channel partners uniqueness. Furthermore, when brands and their channel partners collaborate in advertising, they realize results greater than either entity could achieve on their own. Think of it like 1+1 = 3.

Benefits For All 

    What’s in it for the Brand

  • Accelerate customer acquisition through advertising that resonates locally 
  • Increase down-funnel product sales/consumption
  • Deliver greater advertising spend efficiency through micro-budget campaigns 
  • Improve partner performance, brand preference, and loyalty
  • Maintain brand quality and control 

     What’s in it for the Partner 

  • Receive powerful brand-level tools that would otherwise be out of reach
  • Save time and avoid costly mistakes
  • Utilize high quality brand creative that elevates their local presence 
  • Gain access to brand funded programs and/or co-op options
  • Receive direct access to performance reporting and leads

This should be a no-brainer. Neither party has anything to lose, only everything to gain. 

So Why Isn’t Everybody Doing It? 

Using Facebook’s native tools to build hundreds or thousands of ads from scratch for each location is like trying to build a sand castle with tweezers. It’s just too hard and time-consuming to be worth the effort. To achieve this level of localization in social advertising requires advanced automation tools. 

Enter Tiger Pistol

In a post-pandemic world, the modern shopper values convenience and local shopping. Tiger Pistol’s Collaborative Advertising Platform™ marries the recognizable creative of the brand with the locality of the channel partner to facilitate immediate action and a path to purchase without friction. Here’s how it looks in practice: 

Still not convinced that collaborative advertising is the best move for your brand? Here are some performance metrics from our clients to illustrate the positive results: 

  • A Global beauty brand collaborated with its salons to achieve a 22% Increase in its professional product sales 
  • A Global Fortune 500 beverage company realized 8x ROAS through local campaigns published across their independent network of bars and restaurants. 
  • A skin care company partnered with its dermatologist network to recognize 190% higher lead acquisition than national benchmark campaign 
  • A nutritional supplement company collaborated with its grocery network to achieve a 36% incremental uplift in sales quantity over the campaign period.
  • A beverage giant partnered with a national liquor store chain to recognize a 710% YoY increase in sales quantity. 
  • The leading U.S. fabric and craft retailer applied advanced attribution to ads run from their locations to discover that localization drove store visits in 80% of ads that were clicked. 

Tiger Pistol is the only advertising platform that brings true collaboration between brands and channel partners into the digital space. Our platform makes collaborative social advertising stress-free and accessible while delivering unparalleled sales and acquisition results for your brand and channel partners. 

Ready to bring true collaboration between your brands and your channel partners into the digital space? Contact us today. https://www.tigerpistol.com/contact-us/

The Secret Weapon Brands Need to Fight Against Facebook’s Rising Cost of Advertising

Posted on by Chris Mayer

Facebook CPMs are rising once again, and it’s no surprise that as parts of the world begin to approach a more real sense of normalcy, brands are returning to the platform after many months of holding or reducing spend. While there has always been some seasonality to Facebook CPMs, both COVID’s upheaval and the social justice related black outs on Facebook posting in 2020 likely caused more dips and valleys than normal with ad delivery costs. Even still, AdExchanger is predicting that CPMs are going to continue to rise (and then some more once the holiday season hits). While it may seem like an unavoidable increase in cost due to increasing demand for digital advertising space, in truth, marketers still have much more control than one might assume to manage CPMs. 

Higher CPMs are nothing if not a signifier for increased competition, but in an ad auction system that factors ad quality and relevancy in its bids, you have everything you need to win – regardless of the competition. Facebook lays it out nicely, 

“People prefer to see ads that are relevant to them, and when businesses show their ads to relevant audiences, they see better business outcomes. That’s why we consider how relevant each ad is to a person before delivering an ad to that person. Ads that are more relevant cost less and see more results.”

While all bidding systems have an element of variability, Facebook itself even warns against relying too heavily on relevance diagnostics alone. They do note “an ad that’s relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids.” As marketers, we need to consider our direct control over the inputs to our advertising campaigns. With increased competition on Facebook, it’s a race towards building the most clickable, relevant ads that consumers want to engage with. 

Tiger Pistol’s own data actually shows a different trend, from Q3 2020 to Q4 2020 our aggregate CPM did rise in the holiday period, but has been on a steady downward trend since, carrying into Q1 2021 as well.

In many ways, it is a story of the types of campaigns published through Tiger Pistol, which all tend to be brand focused micro-campaigns – hyper-local, highly-relevant ad campaigns that focus on specific consumers, products, and communities. The effect is a highly-focused ad unit, with a clear call to action and singular focus on driving a transaction at a point of sale.

Tiger Pistol campaigns, whether cross-channel or collaborative, are tightly focused on three key components: proximity, applicability, and transaction optimization – all of which contribute to better performing ads, as they are always constructed in a way that is most relevant for a consumer.

  • Proximity: Even under COVID, geo-proximity remains an important component of digital advertising. Tiger Pistol campaigns always work to deliver consumers ad units that feature the point of sale that is closest to them, whether that is a vending machine or convenience store for a CPG brand or a local insurance agent who serves their town.
  • Applicability: What’s more, a consumer living in a small town in Ohio, might have two or three grocery stores in town to choose from. A cross channel Tiger Pistol campaign ensures they are shown an ad from their preferred store, the one they actually shop at. If their neighbor prefers the other store? That same campaign delivers them a focused ad unit from that store.
  • Transaction Optimization: Brand campaign performance is often judged on ROAs, which is why transaction optimization is so important to driving ad relevance and performance. Our campaigns often feature 1-click or fully-contained transactions that allow consumers to interact with ads quickly and purchase products or services.

It is when all these are factored together that a campaign ran through Tiger Pistol is able to show a BOPIS (Buy Online Pick-up In Store) ad unit to the customer that always likes to buy online and pick-up from the store, and a home delivery ad unit for the consumer who prefers to remain at home. Send a campaign like this to Facebook, and you never worry about being irrelevant. 

Taken together, they become more than the sum of their parts. Put simply, it’s all about showing captive consumers where to buy products – capturing micro-moments with an easy path to conversion. It’s a recipe with many different flavors yet with the common denominator of data. If your CPMs are still rising, consider taking a hard look at your creative, your target audience, and the buying paths you ask customers to take. If it’s not imminently obvious where and how they can buy your product or service when delivered your ad, then you very well might be losing out. Advertising is just as much about being inspiring and captivating in the high-minded sense as it is about making it easy for your customers to purchase from you.

Ready to collapse your funnel with Tiger Pistol’s Collaborative Advertising?  See how it works.