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Christine Williams

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Fox School of Business

Taking an Agile Approach to Social Media Advertising

August 5, 2019 By Christine Williams Leave a Comment

Agile has been a prominent topic throughout this semester. However, I struggled to understand how I could relate it to my daily role. How could I, as a marketer, use an agile approach in my job? Christine May’s presentation on Agile Marketing hit home for me.

Christine showed us how at PMI they are working in small teams with people from different disciplines to ideate, build, run, and test campaigns rapidly. I was inspired by their ability to learn fast and make changes quickly.

I decided to start implementing the strategy at my organization. Instead of immediately changing our whole process, I wanted to start small. I decided to do it for our next social campaign.

Agile in social media ads

We have always tested a few different ads, but never at scale. This time, we decided to take it up a notch and add in more testing and learning and make adjustments accordingly.

We were putting together an ad campaign that would span across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The ad was promoting a whitepaper and a video. Our assets included:

  1. A landing page
  2. 4 different image options
  3. 4 different copy options
  4. Video

Instead of just putting copy with one image, we took all 4 versions of the copy and created ad sets with each image. This gave us 16 different ad combinations. Half of the ad sets we drove to the landing page, and the other half we set up with lead forms on the ad. We then did 4 different versions of copy on the video.

The plan was to run all of the ads for 3-4 days and review the success based on CPC, form submissions, and demographics. At the end of the testing phase, we would turn off the ads that weren’t performing and make any adjustments to the ads that were performing well.

This diagram shows our general process:

 

Our Findings

Videos vs. Images:

In the initial test phase, we found that the video was not effective. It was not converting leads, and the ones that did convert had a cost per lead that was 20x higher than the images. This was contrary to what I would have predicted. So, after the learning phase, we turned off the videos.

Landing page vs. lead forms:

While people were clicking on the ad to the landing page, they weren’t filling out the form on the landing page. However, the majority of people that clicked on the ad with the form on the platform (which auto-fills your information) were downloading the paper. After the test phase, we switch gears and enabled all ads to have lead forms.

Images & copy:

We found that 2 of the images were performing drastically worse than the other 2 images. The same was with 2 versions of the copy. After the test phase, we ended up with 2 ad sets. Each had two images and two versions of the copy.

By using this agile approach, we were able to make quick adjustments, turning off ads that weren’t performing and then increase our budget to maximize the ads that were delivering results. With this campaign, we’ve had 10x more submissions, and the demographics are in line with our audience.

Needless to say, agile is my new best friend :).

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