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On-Demand Webinar: How Going Local Made Anheuser-Busch InBev the Toast of Towns Around the World

Posted on by Tiger Pistol
By investing in localized marketing, Anheuser-Busch InBev aggregated touchpoints in communities around the world. 

Watch and learn how AB InBev’s bottom-up approach to advertising generates larger and more meaningful results for its brand, drastically lowering cost of advertising, increasing consumer engagement, and fostering loyalty among its worldwide network of bars, restaurants and retailers. AB InBev reveals how Tiger Pistol’s technology enables this global-to-local strategy, and explains how its versatility helps them promote its local recovery and revitalization initiative for its establishments around the world.

Key Takeaways

  • Pairing AB InBev brand equity with local establishments drives a more personal connection with the consumer, increasing relevance 
  • Publishing ads at scale can still be personalized and meaningful
  • Publishing ads at scale does not need to be an expensive endeavor requiring a huge staff
  • Local advertising with the right technology makes pivoting simple and efficient

Speakers

  • Daniel Ingram
    Global Director of Trade Innovation
    Anheuser-Busch InBev
  • Talia Wachtel
    VP Client Management
    Tiger Pistol

Daniel Ingram, Global Director of Trade Innovation, Anheuser-Busch InBev

Daniel develops, tests, and scales innovative media, technology, and hardware programs for bar and retail customers across ABI’s global footprint to enhance consumer experiences and drive incremental sales. Daniel is a Level II Certified Cicerone, and is passionate about bringing people together over a great pint of beer.

Talia Wachtel, VP Client Management, Tiger Pistol

Talia has extensive experience working with national and global brands to generate meaningful business results from digital marketing. Talia’s expertise lies in the productization, go-to-market and operational fulfillment of scalable social ad products, with brands such as Realogy, Yellow Pages, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Web.com leveraging her to consult on the ideation and launch of successful social ad solutions to their end advertisers.

Ready to see how Tiger Pistol can develop a global-to-local strategy to suit your brand’s needs? Contact us today!

Tiger Pistol Contributes Social Platform, Services to JOANN for Local Amplification of “Make to Give” Mask Initiative

Posted on by Tiger Pistol

Tiger Pistol’s social advertising platform helps JOANN achieve its benevolent mission, while contributing to the health of stores and local communities.Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, has partnered with JOANN, the nation’s largest specialty retailer of crafts and fabrics, to amplify the promotion of its “Make to Give” handmade mask donation initiative through local advertising on Facebook and Instagram. 

“Tiger Pistol is dedicated to helping JOANN in its initiative to support our country’s medical personnel and fellow citizens,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “While JOANN supplies free tools, supplies, and guidance, Tiger Pistol is providing our social advertising platform and campaign management resources to help extend the reach and impact of the initiative.” 

Beginning in early March, JOANN began to notice groups of people in the crafting and sewing communities making protective masks, gowns, and other essential items to donate to local hospitals and health care facilities. Inspired by the customers who were looking to help during this unprecedented crisis, JOANN wanted to contribute to the cause, providing free mask-making supplies and guidance through in store experience, Curbside Pickup and joann.com. After just a couple of months, more than 150 million masks were created through a combination of customer purchases and directly donated masks and scrubs to hospitals and health care facilities nationwide. Now, the company’s focus is expanding to supplying masks for everyone in America. 

In support of this effort, Tiger Pistol is running high-performance Facebook and Instagram ads with copy that dynamically localizes to drive community relevance and ad performance. JOANN is using the ads to drive awareness for the company’s ‘Make to Give’ initiative and donation efforts in connection with its local stores.

“With state and local lockdown orders still in flux, JOANN needed agile and flexible advertising technology,” said Talia Wachtel, VP Client Management, Tiger Pistol. “Tiger Pistol’s Platform allowed JOANN to rapidly deploy and update ads based on the status of each store, whether open for business, offering curbside or in-store pickup, or only offering ship-to-home service. JOANN can now easily manage its locations with the Tiger Pistol platform’s ability to group JOANN’s campaigns by county, state, or city according to local government orders, and giving JOANN the flexibility to change or pause these campaign groups in minutes.” 

The Tiger Pistol platform’s unique capabilities enable brands to adapt their strategies to store openings and closings.  Government orders may be lifting in areas, but with COVID-19 still looming and contact tracing ramping up, retailers still need a way to rapidly change store status within their advertisements, whether open for business, closed with only online ordering or curbside pickup, or closed for a couple days due to cleaning.  

“Unlike other advertising platforms, Tiger Pistol can support a quick and responsive local strategy, ensuring that brands can more easily account for different scenarios,” said Elliott. “With templatized local campaigns, the ability to shift creative and messaging based on store status, and easy tools to turn campaigns on or off based on changing local orders, Tiger Pistol gives brands the opportunity to deeply reach communities with both sales-driven and/or purpose-driven content.”

“Tiger Pistol saw the value in our efforts to protect our communities, and approached us wanting to help spread the word about our Make to Give initiative,” said Chris DiTullio, Chief Customer Officer, JOANN. “Once we saw the platform’s capabilities, particularly the ability to provide accurate information down to each store location, we knew there was an opportunity to inspire more customers and create a much stronger local connection. We’re thankful for the support of our efforts, and the impact this platform and services have made on our initiative.”

Learn more about JOANN Stores and its ‘Make to Give’ initiative. 

Learn more about how Tiger Pistol’s disruption-proof technology empowers brands and their local partners with local social advertising at scale. Contact us today. 

An Advertiser’s Guide to Picking a Facebook Objective

Posted on by Laura Kraay

With over 2 billion people around the world using Facebook and usage rising during coronavirus, social advertising offers an opportunity to reach an ever-growing audience. When building a social ad, one of the first decisions you’re given is which objective to select. Here, we’ll look at how to pick an ad objective that aligns with your business goals by breaking down three of the most common: Reach Traffic, and Lead Generation. We’ll also provide overall best practices surrounding social ad creative, which are harnessed from servicing thousands of SMB advertisers. 

Reach Ads

Using a Facebook Reach objective maximizes the number of users who see an ad. Choosing this objective helps build brand awareness. When considering the marketing funnel, these ads are at the top, since their goal is to let as many users as possible see your ad. As consumers lower their spending amidst the pandemic, this is a good type of ad to help keep your brand top of mind without pressing viewers to let go of cash. In fact, Huffington Post found that many brands have shifted their ad campaigns towards messages of compassion and support. If you’re looking to raise awareness of your core values or community initiatives, a Reach ad would help set you up for success. 

Traffic Ads

Traffic ads seek to bring more users to a specific destination URL. If you’ve recently switched to a to-go menu or converted to an online store, a traffic objective would find users more likely to click and visit that URL. This objective is further down the marketing funnel because you’re asking a user to take the time to look at a website. Demonstrate the value the user will get from visiting the website, like learning about your new menu items, viewing your most recent product arrivals, or placing an order. Traffic campaigns are also a good option for advertisers seeking to promote a service that requires more information on an accompanying link. 

Lead Generation Ads 

These campaigns allow you to collect information, like a name and email address, from potential customers directly on Facebook. For advertisers running consultations or services that require phone or email contact, lead generation campaigns are best. Make sure to highlight your unique selling point to differentiate from competitors. Since you’re asking users to give you some information, it should be clear what they’ll be getting in return. Some examples of things you can offer include the following:

  • Newsletter Sign-up
  • Price Estimates
  • Business Information

Picking an audience is especially important for Lead Generation ads since they’re closer to the bottom of the marketing funnel. Adding some additional audience parameters, like a Custom Audience or Lookalike helps ensure the people seeing the ad are already familiar with you or similar to your best customers! For advertisers looking to run LG campaigns, make sure you also check out Tiger Pistol’s Justin Chavolla’s advice on how to receive high-quality leads. 

No matter which ad objective you choose, it’s also important to look at the messaging of your ad. We know how important it is to make every ad dollar count, so here are some quick tips as you move from objective into ad creation: 

  • Have a clear CTA in your ad copy. Don’t assume your audience knows what to do next.
  • Offer a unique selling point. What makes your business stand out?
  • Include strong visuals. Your media needs to support your message to ensure Ad Cohesion. If possible, use high-quality custom imagery over stock photos. 
  • Find your audience. You want your relevant audience to actually see your ad and not just everyone. On Facebook, you will literally pay for everyone who sees and clicks on your ad, so targeting the right people is key.
If you’re looking for more information about advertising during coronavirus, we laid out 50 tips for 50 different kinds of businesses. Looking for something more in-depth? Don’t hesitate to reach out. 

iOS 14 and Privacy: What it Means for Advertisers

Posted on by Bob Govia

The latest in the tug-of-war between consumer privacy and effective digital advertising pits Apple against Facebook, Google, and others. At stake for ad tech: significant revenue for ad publishers and app developers, effective ad results for advertisers, and more relevant ads for consumers. At stake for users: consumer privacy protection, the use of their behavioral data for marketing, and possibly – the future of “free” software. Apple’s pending release of iOS 14 is a strong consumer-privacy-first stance and a potential disruption to digital marketing as we know it. But what is the real impact for targeted digital advertising?

What is Changing?

In a nutshell, Apple devices running iOS 14 will now require explicit user opt-in to allow apps to track behaviors across sites using the Identifier for Advertising, or IDFA. The IDFA ties a unique, random number to a user’s device, allowing advertisers and data companies to evaluate ad interactions on an aggregated basis. Blocking user tracking by third parties has already been a staple for privacy-first browsers for some time (Apple’s own Safari, Chromium-based Brave, the Tor browser, and others), and has been offered as an opt-out model within mobile operating systems, as well. However, the shift to a more aggressive opt-in model is expected to be disruptive to app ad targeting and attribution.

Impacts on the the Facebook Ad Platform

Consumer Behavior Data

By losing access to information that links consumer behavior across experiences (apps, websites, etc.), Facebook and other ad networks will have less visibility into user actions outside of their own properties. This downturn in insights may decrease targeting effectiveness in aggregate over time.

Ad Targeting

Without distinct information about potential consumers, networks like Facebook must rely on non-personalized information when determining to whom to serve an ad. On iOS 14 apps and devices, consumers can expect their ads to be less personalized, and advertisers can expect the impact to be far lower as a result.

Attribution & Optimization

Not only is it difficult to determine who an ad is served to, Facebook algorithms will be blind to the impact of the ad, diminishing the ability to understand how many clicks resulted in installs or other conversions. Losing visibility into specific consumers who viewed the ad makes it far more difficult to determine which converted users saw the ad.

Specific Impacts for Facebook Advertisers

This may seem obvious, but this is (currently) only expected to impact consumers on iOS 14. While Apple is a dominant player in mobile devices in the U.S. (58.78% in the US versus Android’s 41.03%), they are less dominant worldwide (24.82% versus Android’s 74.6%). Is this a precedent that could expand, with broader adoption of Apple’s opt-in approach, or will we see networks maintain status quo with the opt-out standards already implemented by companies like Google and Microsoft? Only time will tell. 

Third-party Placements (via Facebook’s Audience Network)

Facebook uses its Audience Network (FAN) to provide advertising placement into non-Facebook properties. These ads are commonly served in apps and games, and are particularly effective because Facebook knows far more about a consumer than the app developer does, giving them an opportunity to target ads and attribute from where positive results originate. Some of the biggest changes to iOS 14 target app access to consumers’ IDFA, requiring an opt-in to use. Advertisers expect this to negatively impact Facebook’s ad effectiveness and behavior tracking in third-party platforms. Based on their tests, Facebook expects a 50% decrease in ad revenue due to a reduced ability to personalize and target ads. This seems to be the leading Facebook risk, and may become so ineffective as to be discontinued.

App Install Objectives

App installs, a type of conversion objective optimization, are reliant on a signal from a consumer device that the desired app has been installed (and possibly opened). This is expected to be significantly hindered for iOS app installs, driving attribution and targeting effectiveness downward. Facebook is asking developers to use a new version of the Facebook SDK to support the new Apple SKAdNetwork API, and also to create a dedicated iOS 14 ad account for these ad campaigns.

Lower Immediate Impact (or None)

Advertisers using Facebook’s First-party Placements

The bulk of Facebook’s advertisers today use Facebook’s first-party placements, which include Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Marketplace. These placements reach consumers wherever they spend time on the Facebook platform: in-app or in-browser, mobile or desktop, and benefit from full targeting, attribution, and optimization as before. The only exception is for app install objectives.

What’s Next?

Facebook continues to invest in methods to improve advertising and conversion signal resiliency. Some of these, including the ability for businesses to provide external conversion data (such as business transaction matching), or server-side (rather than client-side) signals for consumer behavior, are unaffected by these changes. These require businesses to share first-party business data (activity, conversions) directly with Facebook for attribution and optimization. Using these within campaigns and to create custom and lookalike audiences remain very powerful tools for effective marketing.

At the same time, there is a looming specter of broader governmental regulations, following in the steps of GDPR and CCPA, which look to take a stance on consumer privacy and the use or sale of this data for advertising (or other means). Legislation is being considered or implemented in many U.S. states (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and many more) and in other countries like India.

iOS 14 changes the game for monetizing in-app ad placements with their opt-in-required updates for tracking. App-centric campaigns (by objective or placement) are hardest hit, with tests showing a 50% revenue hit as targeting, attribution, and optimization become severely limited. Other first-party campaigns on Facebook’s platform should expect no immediate impact. The trend toward more consumer privacy is clear in products and legislation; what remains to be seen is whether the industry will embrace a new opt-in standard or stand by the current opt-out model

As a preferred Facebook Marketing Partner, Tiger Pistol is committed to helping our clients and their stakeholders navigate changes like these. Contact us today. 

Bob Govia is Director of Product Management at Tiger Pistol. 

What’s the Right Amount of Local for my Brand?

Posted on by Chris Mayer

It feels like establishing a digital local presence has been the bread and butter of brick-and-mortar strategy for decades. With numerous specialized agencies and tools, listings management, Google Places, Facebook location Pages, etc.,it can feel like there are a thousand different permutations you need to cycle your brand through with the aim of going local. 

Insurance brands can advertise locally through agents and advisors, as these representatives work out of local offices and service particular local areas.

“Going local” can mean many different things, depending on your industry and how you engage with customers in your buying flow. In some cases, like for a large national insurance brand, the value of locality is self-evident. The brand can advertise locally through agents and advisors, as these representatives work out of local offices and service particular local areas. For other industries, such as consumer products, “going local” might mean marketing through independent dealers or chain partner retailers. Even wholly digital brands, such as delivery service apps like Doordash and Uber Eats, have reason to drive value through local marketing of their partner merchants to their local consumers. The real power of local marketing lies in its flexibility to work across decentralized and centralized networks alike.

So while the buzz around “local” marketing may feel tired at times, brands continue to take the plunge. Yet it’s important to keep in mind that someone else’s version of “local” doesn’t have to be yours. Take Red Bull for example. Going local for them means hosting local events and building subcultural communities to promote them through. A quick search of their brand on Facebook reveals a distributed page presence, such as Red Bull Music, Red Bull Motorsports, Red Bull Gaming. From a marketing perspective, these fronts are reflective of their larger marketing tactics in play, as the product offered never changes. Red Bull simply sells Red Bull. 

Contrast that with a search for “Allstate Agents” on Facebook. You will see thousands of business pages returned from local Allstate agents.

Of course, retailers often use location pages, creating one for every one of their stores to contain their local presence and house store-specific information, namely geo-location, but also hours, WiFi names, and more that are location specific. Many chain stores now have a distributed store page presence across Facebook.

Facebook continues to be the first choice for social media marketing with a local presence. With the right tools, brands are able to take advantage of their local presence with paid media. It’s important to consider holistically where the value lies in paid media activations. At Tiger Pistol, we work with partners across many different verticals, from real estate, retail, consumer products, financial services, and insurance, in addition to digital re-sellers and franchise brands. Every one of our clients is taking advantage of a different flavor of local paid media.The core power of local marketing is truly it’s ability to connect brands, consumers, and everyone in between to holistic ROA-based advertising strategies.

For example, a global beauty consumer products brand leverages our technology to enable salons and retailers to promote themselves through the brand’s Facebook Business Page, with each merchant receiving their own individual campaign, designed and optimized to deliver sales to them. While also empowering their campaign through attachment and association with the global brand’s page. In effect, they use paid campaigns to take the brand to a local level, by featuring specific merchants in what would otherwise be a brand level campaign.

Tiger Pistol enabled Ben & Jerry’s to publish on-brand local social advertisements for scoop shops leveraging a local tie-in with Uber Eats delivery. Ads were geotargeted for Uber-Eats’ delivery area, with the call-to-action to “Order Now via Uber-Eats.” Each ad’s “Order Now” button drove to Uber-Eats’ online ordering page for the local Scoop Shop. 

In other cases, it’s about bringing together independent merchants through a distributed local presence, such as our work with AB-InBev where our technology allows merchants to connect their own business pages and receive curated ads, published through them.

There are even cases where the locality is no more than a deliberate messaging tactic. Our Real Estate partners often publish local recruitment ads through their brand Page. This gives them a means to propagate localized messaging quickly that both target hyper-locally and feature creative that is locally aware – allowing their brand to speak to local job applicants in particular locales and feature local office information as necessary. 

As you can see, there are many paths to “Go Local.” They may sometimes include multiple Pages and places, or locality can simply be a messaging tactic – a first touch engagement into a larger national buying path, when it’s important to feature your brand in a specific local community. The value is in being able to quickly get local when it makes sense to, and to complement national advertising efforts through local advertising dissemination. 

It’s easy to deploy a single national campaign. Anything more can be enormously time consuming without the right tools, and you may be missing out on not only happier consumers, but better performance too. Separate local campaigns and marketing tactics can offer marketing flexibility, such as when an insurance brand uses its corporate website data to retarget consumers through a local agent campaign or when digital brands leverage the locality of their partners to distribute their message into particular locales. “Going Local” is about building holistic, responsive strategies that connect consumers to buying paths and speak to consumers more personally, in recognition of where they live and shop. Beyond a closer consumer connection, local marketing can very much also be a means for brands to enable and empower their retail, merchant, and account partners who they rely on to sell their products. 

Let’s talk about a local strategy that best fits your brand. Contact us today!

Chris Mayer, a Solutions Engineer at Tiger Pistol, specializes in helping digital agencies, SMB resellers, and global brands build scaled Facebook advertising solutions with an emphasis on local activation.

Facebook Campaign Performance Playbook

Posted on by Tiger Pistol

Running Facebook ads can be tricky business, and it really doesn’t take much for your ad to get bitten by the underperformance bug. Achieve campaign success with ease. Check out our 5-step playbook for creating or troubleshooting campaigns. Read it now.

Get the Playbook!

Should I Stop Worrying So Much About Facebook Placements?

Posted on by Blake Simpson

So you’re creating a Facebook ad, and you’ve done all the hard work. You have compelling imagery, persuasive copy, and a cohesive message that will entice your audience, but you’re just not sure where to best display the ad. You know there are plenty of display options, but how are you supposed to know which placement will give you the most performance? While this might sound like a difficult decision, Facebook’s Automatic Placements option actually makes it one of the easiest steps in the entire ad creation process.

When you run an ad on Facebook, the platform’s algorithm will continuously optimize the delivery of that ad to get you the best results, and this kind of optimization is also available for placements. Facebook themselves state that Automatic Placements will concentrate your budget on the combination of placements that is most likely to get you the best overall results, and they recommend it as one of their advertising best practices. Let the algorithm do all the hard work of figuring out where to show your ad; you just focus on making sure the ad itself is as high-quality as possible.

Utilizing Automatic Placements also allows you to cast your advertising net as wide as you can without the risk of spending too much of your budget on an ineffective placement. Your ads might perform extremely well under a placement that you would’ve otherwise ignored, and even if you include a placement where your ad doesn’t perform particularly well, Facebook will realize this and optimize your budget for a different, more effective placement. Automatic Placements can be especially useful if you’re advertising at a large scale where individual manual optimization would be a daunting and extremely time-consuming task.

You might be a little wary of relinquishing control of your ad placements for things like Brand Safety and absolute peak campaign performance, and there are valid reasons to turn off Automatic Placements in those scenarios. However, unless you see hyper-specific trends in terms of engagement on one particular platform, it’s usually best to try and spread your ad out across several different placements instead of putting all your advertising eggs into one basket. Facebook also offers Brand Safety controls so that you can block any apps, websites, or Facebook Pages where you don’t want your ads to appear. This allows you to continue taking advantage of Automatic Placements while still adhering to your brand’s important safety guidelines.

Automatic Placement is an extremely powerful tool that every advertiser should consider putting in their Facebook advertising arsenal. It saves time, money, and can even reveal trends in your targeting audiences that would’ve otherwise gone undiscovered. Depending on your situation, it might be worth it to consider Automatic Placements and take the guesswork out of your advertising.

Unpacking Facebook’s New “Leads Center”

Posted on by Chris Mayer

Facebook announced a new feature on Business Pages called Leads Center. With this new feature, leads collected on Facebook through Lead Generation campaigns now auto-populate inside the Leads Center. New tools also make managing leads easier: 

  • Set reminders to follow up, assign an owner to your leads, or add notes to their contact information
  • Filter by category, owner, label, or date
  • Create Custom or Lookalike audiences based on how you categorize your customers
  • Directly email leads from the Leads Center

While Leads Center introduces some lightweight CRM-like management options of leads, data has shown that the primary success KPI on leads is response time:

  • Contact and qualification rates drop dramatically in just minutes and continue to decrease over the next few hours (Harvard Business Review)
  • Sales Conversions are 391% Higher in the First Minute (Vendasta)
  • 78% of Customers Buy from the First Responder  (Vendasta)

Facebook’s Lead Center solution does not entirely solve for response time, especially for SMBs and businesses that prefer to call leads directly. Doing so quickly is paramount, so the immediacy of follow-up is most important.

The Leads Center is a great place to organize and manage leads, but if you are most concerned with response times, it doesn’t offer much additional help in that area. Users are still reliant on Page notifications, or self-directing into Ads Manager, Leads Page Management, and the like to grab leads as they come in.

Tiger Pistol’s lead delivery system prioritizes immediacy, and offers advertisers flexibility across multiple different lead management systems. 

  • Automatic Lead Notification Emails : Our Platform immediately recognizes a new lead coming through on a campaign and emails the specified account contact(s) the lead information instantly, enabling businesses the ability to immediately reach out to leads when they come through. End-users can also customize the cadence and frequency of these notifications from instant, to once daily, or a weekly summary. 
  • Leads Webhook : For delivering leads securely into external and third-party systems, Tiger Pistol also offers a webook that can send leads anywhere using a callback URL in real time. This means that leads can also simultaneously be sent into CRMs such as Salesforce, Zoho, or custom built applications.

In truth, the best lead management solution is multi-faceted. With instant notification, you solve the most important issue of responding quickly. This is where Facebook Leads Center comes back in and can provide added value to advertisers regularly managing leads. Facebook Leads Center centralizes all leads collected and allows for aggregate lead management options, outside of the immediate first follow-up, such as a view of all historical leads, allowing you to categorize them or even build custom audiences to use in future campaigns. 

Tiger Pistol’s lead delivery options complement Facebook’s Lead Center, just as they complement connections into external systems. You can gain the response benefits of immediate notification plus a solid management solution with almost no barrier to entry. For SMBs looking to take more control of their leads, the Leads Center is sure to become a valuable tool. Yet tagging and categorizing leads will only take you so far. Their value is still very much concentrated on your ability to respond to them quickly and convert them.

Chris Mayer, a Solutions Engineer at Tiger Pistol, specializes in helping digital agencies, SMB resellers, and global brands build scaled Facebook advertising solutions with an emphasis on local activation.

How Brands Can Empower and Revitalize Their Reps & Independent Contractors

Posted on by David Delaplane

Skate to Where The Puck is Going

Brands rely on their representatives and independent contractors (agents, dealers, consultants, advisors, etc) to build personal relationships with their customers, support their services and sell their products. With COVID, brands have been faced with a unique challenge to respond to the changes in the marketplace as consumer behavior shifts. 

The roles and responsibilities of their staff went from in-person sales and service support to socially distanced meetups, strict cleaning guidelines, and virtual live streamed events. While some companies have already relied on digital transformation to support their growth, many brands were not prepared to integrate digital technology into their work streams.

For example, network marketing brands have had to evolve through continual changes on Facebook in addition to having to respond to quarantine and stay-at-home orders because of COVID. The forced social isolation undercuts the interpersonal nature of consulting-based selling and has placed new importance on digital tools, such as empowering reps and contractors to connect through messaging, and providing them with personal websites as a means to drive online sales.

In response to these new challenges, comes an opportunity for brands to enable their network of contractors and reps with new tools to promote their products and services online. However, the need to maintain brand consistency and voice remains a vital role with any national or global company.

How Technology Can Breed Innovation

The most critical need is to bring your company into the 21st century with digital advertising. Since the arrival of COVID restrictions in March, Americans have been spending more of their lives online. According to a recent study by Apptopia, Facebook usage has increased nearly 30% since February, and that trend hasn’t subsided. Now more than ever brands need to shift their advertising efforts to where their customers are spending their time.

The tech giants of the likes of Facebook and Google are taking note and providing free tools to small- and medium-sized businesses to usher in change as the world adapts to our new reality. For example, Facebook announced that any Facebook or Instagram Business Page will have new features enabled, allowing brands to create fully established e-commerce experiences. Most recently, Facebook announced the launch of Paid Online Events, “a free product that enables “businesses, creators, educators and media publishers” to set up paid events or classes online and keep 100% the revenue themselves — except on iOS, where event hosts must give up the 30% “App-Store tax,” as Facebook called it.”

How Do We Move From Here?

With some industries, such as Hotels and Hospitality, finding the ability to bounce back relatively quickly has been easier with the boost of summer holidays, though most verticals will take much longer to achieve pre-Covid foot-traffic.

Relative Foot-Traffic By Industry

Source SafeGraph

Here are some examples of how industry leading brands are accomplishing this:

  • Giving their team an advertising option to help them continue to drive social connections – Read Case Study
  • Re-establishing the essential role their brand plays in fostering engagement, connections, and product satisfaction through digital marketing – Read Case Study
  • Acclimating their brand message by the state or city level to respond to the ever- changing customer preferences and local government mandates – Read Article
  • Creating more synergies between sales and their brand team to pivot with the right technology

The Right Tool For The Job

Just like a locksmith wouldn’t come to a job site with one tool – brands have a vested interest in cultivating a marketing technology stack that is right for their business. Often brands wildly underestimate the number of marketing technologies they need to deploy in their organization. My advice to you: Keep things simple. Add new tech only when you are truly ready to execute on it and decide on a strategy before you go in search for the tool. The latter of which is the most important.

For the last 5 years of my career I’ve worked at SaaS companies and I have to say – I utterly hate this phrase. The reason being is that buyers or clients are not just in search of a software as a service. When someone at your organization is looking for a software, they are not just looking for a few cool features and a support email address. The truth is that your leader is looking for a new approach to their business problem. 

Elon Musk said that “Great companies are built on great products,” and if you are looking for a new path forward in these unprecedented times, you must continue to challenge, evaluate, and test new solutions. By providing new resources to your reps and contractors alike, you can align your team with the core values of your business no matter how large or small the use case.

As we have seen with other brands, when they provide powerful digital tools to their consultants and reps. The results are virtuous, driving success for the rep and their business, in addition to promoting the brand’s products at the same time.

If you’re looking for more than just new software, but a new way of thinking to enable your network of contractors and reps, I encourage you to contact Tiger Pistol to learn more about how we can help.

David Delaplane is a Regional Sales Director for Tiger Pistol. With over 9 years of experience in SaaS and paid media, David demonstrates his passions for strategic thinking and problem solving by delivering innovative and custom solutions for his clients. 

Tiger Pistol Named to Inc. 5000 List

Posted on by Tiger Pistol
Tiger Pistol Ranks No. 1425 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Revenue Growth of 311.4%

Inc. Magazine recently revealed that Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, is ranked No. 1425 on its Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. 

The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.

“We are honored to be recognized not only as one of the 1500 fastest growing private companies in the country, but also in the top 150 in the advertising and marketing segment,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “Our team takes immense pride in delivering huge impact, driving efficiency and speed to market for our global brands, agency, and reseller clients. Our hyper-local approach to advertising has truly taken on new meaning in light of COVID-19, as advertising has narrowed its parameters from region to region or block to block to actual individual businesses, many of whom are relying on local advertising in their recovery efforts.”

Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent, and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years.  

“Continued focus on deepening our product offerings and expanding into new industry verticals and emerging markets have allowed us to grow our existing customer relationships as well as build new ones, which has resulted in significant year-over-year growth,” said Anthony Antonelli, Vice President of Finance, Tiger Pistol. “Additionally, we’re proud to be one of few companies of late continuing to grow and invest in our team, with open positions ranging from technology engineers to client-success specialists, who are regularly helping our clients solve problems, and client managers, who build and own the relationships with our clients.”

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/inc5000. The top 500 companies are also being featured in the September issue of Inc., available on newsstands August 12. 

The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000.

This is the second recognition for Tiger Pistol by Inc. Magazine. Earlier this year, Inc. Magazine ranked Tiger Pistol in the Top 100 on the Inc. 5000 List of Texas’s Fastest Growing Private Companies and in the top 5 among advertising and marketing companies. 

About Tiger Pistol 

Tiger Pistol is the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local. For nearly a decade, the company has been obsessively focused on building the world’s most effective social advertising platform for global brands, resellers, and agencies who realize the power of local activation at scale. As a preferred Facebook Marketing Partner and the largest third-party publisher of social advertising for local, Tiger Pistol creates, deploys, manages, and optimizes high-performance Facebook and Instagram ads at unprecedented scale, with over 800k Facebook and Instagram campaigns published to date. Tiger Pistol’s first of its kind technology delivers meaningful and measurable business impact for brands, resellers, and agencies alike, helping to unlock value and efficiency through innovation-led social advertising automation. Tiger Pistol is the most awarded and recognized social advertising platform of 2020.  Visit TigerPistol.com, or follow on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

About Inc. Media

The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multi-platform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit www.inc.com. For more information on the Inc. 5000 Conference, visit http://conference.inc.com/.

Playbook: Social Advertising at Scale for Financial Services

Posted on by Tiger Pistol

Learn how you can provide your agents/advisors with simple tools that allow them to create and publish on-brand, high-performing Facebook and Instagram campaigns with little to no experience in Facebook Advertising. See how you can enable your agents/advisors to drive leads and increase brand awareness with a mobile optimized solution that and can be accessed, anywhere, anytime.

Get the Playbook

Global Analysis: Tracking Facebook and Instagram CPMs Alongside Covid-19 Active Cases

Posted on by Tiger Pistol

Several weeks ago, Tiger Pistol’s Paul Elliott, CEO, began tracking a global analysis of the weekly growth of active COVID-19 cases in eight countries to determine how they correlate with the average Facebook and Instagram CPMs during the same time*, all to discover if CPMs could be a leading indicator of economic recovery.  Since then, we’ve been closely monitoring the trends outlined in Paul’s original publication and will be offering  insights as they arise in the data.

Updated August 6, 2020

With July over, the formal #StopHateForProfit boycott has ended. As a refresher, more than 1,100 advertisers paused advertising on Facebook and Instagram for July. Some advertisers have doubled-down on their commitment to their customers and will continue to freeze spend on the platform for the foreseeable future.

Despite the boycott, Facebook reported a 10% year-over-year increase in advertising revenue, which isn’t as surprising as it seems, seeing as most of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from small- and medium-sized businesses. 

From a health perspective, things have escalated across the globe, some more rapidly than others. Notable highlights include:

  • In the United States, the number of active cases grew week-over-week, while CPMs rose and fell. 

  • In Australia, a “state of disaster” has been declared for the state of Victoria due to a steep increase in cases. Our friends in Melbourne are now under a curfew for the foreseeable future due to a “Stage 4” level restriction in the area. CPMs for July rose and stabilized at the end of the month.

  • Spain saw a large increase in cases towards the end of the month, but experienced a recovery in CPM after experiencing a small drop mid-month.

  • Canada, on the other hand, realized an 80% decrease in its active cases week-over-week in a stunning change, while only seeing a small drop in CPM. An article in the Washington Post contributes Canada’s success to a number of factors, most notably, “The Canadian people have been less divided and more disciplined. Some provinces and territories could have locked down sooner, analysts say, but once measures were announced, they were strict, broadly uniform and widely followed.”

It’s clear that Facebook as a platform is a major outlet for advertisers big and small. With audiences engaged more than ever, it makes the decision to continue an advertising boycott dedicated to a single technology even more difficult. With fall quickly approaching and school shopping on the horizon for us in the U.S., absence from an ads platform could cause a considerable revenue hit for many companies’ forecasts.

Updated July 17, 2020

Halfway through July, we’re still seeing surges in the United States and Brazil. Australia has seen a shocking increase in cases from the start of the month. It’s fair to say that there is a loss of correlation between cases and CPMs, most likely because of the inconsistency of closures and pandemic guideline messaging. In countries like the US, Australia, and Canada, where national economic reopening is continuing, CPMs have risen even as active cases rise.

In Spain and Brazil, where active cases have also risen, CPMs have done the opposite and fallen, a conundrum.

Even more confusing, Germany and Italy have seen active cases dropping, but their CPM has also dropped by 22% to 32% week-over-week.

We intend to keep tracking to keep abreast of any trends that may emerge, revisiting the data monthly during the pandemic and recovery to identify correlations.

Updated July 10, 2020

We’re officially in the second half of the year, and cases are still rising in countries like the United States and Brazil, with numerous U.S. cities posting daily records. From a medical perspective, in the United States, multiple states are beginning to mandate residents wear masks in an effort to slow the spread and businesses are moving back to partial opening or closure.

We’re also nine days into the #StopHateForProfit campaign, which saw a 32% drop in CPMs week-over-week in the U.S. Whether this drop is connected to the shift away from Facebook spend or the rise in cases remains to be seen.

Canada saw the steepest drop in CPM with 42% week-over-week.

Germany is the outlier in this week’s report. They’ve not only seen a drop in cases this week, but their CPM is the only one to rise this week. 


Updated July 2, 2020

A few days ago, we hit 10 million global COVID-19 cases, a milestone we didn’t think we’d see a few months ago. Now entering the third quarter of 2020, we might begin to see some fluctuations as governments enact long-term plans for the safety and well-being of their citizens.

Overall, we’re seeing cases spike in the United States and a continued rise in Brazil.

In other countries, a slight uptick in cases, but the same sort of fluctuations in CPM from week to week. Within July, we may also begin to see effect of #StopHateForProfit on Facebook advertising, but this might only affect US CPMs. 

Curiosities:

  • Italy has made the biggest comeback, with their CPM regaining strength this week to the highest level since before we began tracking.
  • Canada & Spain are also seeing CPM strengthening.
Updated June 26, 2020

This week’s overarching message can be stated in a word: Instability. Some countries are trying to decide “is this over?,” while others are clearly not out of the woods. 

We’re still in Wave 1 in most places, and a case could be made for Wave 1.5. Studies are showing that being in enclosed places (restaurants, bars, etc.) increases the likelihood of contracting the virus, which leads to a lot of businesses having to make the decision whether or not to reopen or stay closed. Through the end of Q1 and beginning of Q2, it’s clear there was stability in most of the countries.

United States/Canada: Three of the largest populated states in the USA have begun experiencing a rapid spike of cases within the last week, leaving governors to decide to continue or halt phased openings. June as a whole saw an increase in overall CPM, after an initial dip at the start of the month, but with the uncertainties surrounding freedom of movement during the summer, we’re predicting CPMs may drop again in July (as seen in the last week). 

EU: The EU ramped up opening its borders, with most of the countries listed below open to travelers on the continent. Spain has seen a resurgence in cases and while they reopened their borders, a mandatory quarantine is in place and CPMs – while overall had steadied, plummeted the first weekend of reopening. Italy, similarly to Spain, has seen a sharp rise and fall of CPMs in a 3-week period, but have not seen a rise in cases (except for a new set of cases in the southern part of the country). Germany is all over the map, with sharp rises and drops, garnering attention as while the country was set to reopen fully, officials were forced to put that on hold due to a case flare up.

Australia: Australia managed to deal with the outbreak pretty swiftly, with a short spike and then drop off of cases. This has led to a steady rise of CPMs for the region.

Late outbreaks:

Brazil – Brazil as a country is really struggling, drawing eyes not only from a public health crisis perspective, but also from a “discount” perspective. CPMs remain steady since their drop in Q1, as the country has yet to see a drop in cases.

For continued updates, be sure to bookmark this page. To learn more about Tiger Pistol and social advertising at scale for SMB resellers, agencies, and global brands, contact us today!