Facebook Ad Transparency

Facebook made ad transparency open to the public in May 2018. The Ad Library is a searchable database of all ads that are currently running on Facebook and Instagram. The Ad Library allows anyone to see the ads that are being run by businesses, organizations, and individuals, as well as the targeting information that is being used to reach those ads.

The Ad Library was created in response to concerns about the use of social media for political advertising. In the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, there were concerns that foreign actors were using social media to spread misinformation and propaganda. The Ad Library was intended to help people understand who is paying for political ads on Facebook and Instagram, and how those ads are being targeted.

The Ad Library has been praised by some for its transparency, but it has also been criticized for its limitations. For example, the Ad Library does not include ads that are run by political campaigns, and it does not include ads that are run by foreign actors. Additionally, the Ad Library only includes ads that are currently running, so it does not include ads that have been run in the past.

Despite its limitations, the Ad Library is a valuable tool for understanding the use of social media for advertising. It is important for people to be aware of the ads that are being run on social media, and the Ad Library can help people to make informed decisions about the ads that they see.

Here is an example when searching on the keyword phrase "environmentally friendly sunscreen":

Example of ad in Facebook's Ad Library

Account-Based Content Marketing

These are just a few examples of account-based content. The key is to create content that is relevant and engaging to your target account. By doing this, you can build relationships, educate them about your products or services, and ultimately drive them to take action.

• A white paper that addresses a specific challenge faced by your target account.
• A case study that highlights how your product or service has helped a similar company to your target account.
• An infographic that provides valuable insights into your target market.
• A webinar that features a thought leader in your industry.
• A blog post that answers a frequently asked question about your product or service.

Tips for creating effective ABM content:

• Start with a clear goal in mind. What do you want to achieve with your ABM content marketing? Do you want to generate leads, build relationships, or drive sales?
• Target your content carefully. Make sure your content is relevant to your target accounts. Consider their interests, needs, and pain points when creating your content.
• Use a variety of channels. Don't just rely on one channel to distribute your content. Use a variety of channels that are likely to be used by your target accounts.
• Track your results. It's important to track the results of your ABM content marketing campaigns so that you can see what is working and what is not. This will help you to improve your results over time.

Lead Scoring

What is lead scoring and how can it help my marketing campaign performance or making the handshake between a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL) better? I imagine this comes up quite a bit because this list of topics comes up from a simple browser search for lead scoring.

• Definition
• Best Practices & Examples
• Systems & Software

Definition. Lead scoring is used to identify a prospect or customer's inclination and interest level towards a sale of your product or services. A customer downloading a whitepaper or case study from your website is an indication of interest; though just one touch point is not enough for you to make a sale. Scoring methodology typically comes with more robust email marketing and marketing automation platforms, such as Pardot/Salesforce Sales Cloud, ExactTarget/Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Marketo, or Eloqua. Lead scoring gives marketers a way to rank, prioritize, and measure sales leads in order to close a sale. It is typically packaged with email marketing since prospect or customer interest is easily gauged from opens/clicks/interactions/and other web-based actions.

Best Practices. Is there a best way of setting up your lead scoring models? Some platforms only allow one model to run at any given time (looking at you Silverpop). While other platforms use a combination of a numeric and letter scores to attribute rank to leads; with an automated numeric value and/or letter grade that indicates a prospects need or interest in speaking with sales. Aside from the technical setup, speaking with your sales team on what creates the Ah ha! moment for a customer may help you identify when a lead goes from cold to warm to hot. 

Simply creating a campaign that drives prospects to sign up for a demo of your product might not be a best practice; but a marketer's campaign follow-through with additional messaging about how the demo was, when and if a prospect is willing to purchase the product after demoing it is a necessary step to making this action a best practice. Marketing could certainly say that they generated 5,000 SQLs this quarter and it's not their fault that Sales couldn't close a single one. This is why speaking with your sales team is an imperative step in creating best practices for your marketing campaigns.

The unicorn in this scenario is a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) that covers all of what sales is looking for before starting to close a lead...a prospect's BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timeline). Lead scoring can certainly help you identify who these people are in your database. For every marketing question that a prospect responds to in some positive way, there should be an attributed numeric value that adds to a prospect's lead score.

A cleaner view of who the prospect is (+1 point for each completed field):

• Contact Name (First, Last, Salutation)
• Contact Phone (direct or mobile)
• Contact Title or Contact Role
• Contact Postal Address
• Contact Company
• Contact Email Address
• Contact Web URL

For most contact records, this will already have a starting score of 1-5 when a prospect joins your database through a web form for a demo, webinar, whitepaper/case study, or general inquiry contact us form.

I'd recommend at least +5 points for any of these firmographic fields:

• Industry
• Number of Employees
• Annual revenue
• Number of locations
• Sales cycle stage
• Decision maker(s)
• HQ or branch location

And, +50 to +100 points for these types of customer hand raising:

• Prospect downloads a Demo
• Sales call to setup/walkthrough product/service demo
• Prospect's BANT

Basically, the higher the lead score, the more likely they are going to purchase from you. If you use a progressive web forms, a feature of both Pardot and Hubspot, you can gradually get all the contact or firmographic information you want from a prospect who repeatedly comes to your website for content and/or information without having an epic long web contact form at the start.

However, giving a negative score for prospects who are not ready to buy is not the way to reset a prospect's score. An example of this: a K-5 math software company's lead scoring method was to give -100 points to prospects who didn't purchase after a product demo instead of resetting a prospect's score to 0 or some lower number below 50. This made it impossible for prospects who had gone through a demo (but didn't have the budget) to ever get back onto sales' radar.

Systems. You are unlikely to find a lead scoring system outside of email marketing software made for demand or lead generation such as HubSpot, Salesforce/Pardot/ExactTarget, Marketo, Act-On, etc. These are all comparable with each other in terms of triggering marketing or sales messaging, or alerting sales professionals, of a prospect's lead score when prospects take hand raising actions.

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are metrics that are easy to track but don't necessarily tell you anything about the performance of your business. Here are some examples of vanity web metrics:

• Pageviews: The number of times a page on your website is viewed. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how engaged visitors are with your content.
• Unique visitors: The number of different people who visit your website. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how often visitors come back to your website.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. This metric doesn't tell you anything about why visitors are leaving your website.
• Social media followers: The number of people who follow you on social media. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how engaged your followers are with your content.
• Likes and shares: The number of times your content is liked or shared on social media. This metric doesn't tell you anything about how people are interacting with your content.

It's important to note that vanity metrics can be misleading. For example, a high number of pageviews could simply mean that your website is easy to find, not that people are actually interested in your content. Similarly, a high number of unique visitors could simply mean that people are visiting your website once and then never coming back.

Examples of vanity metrics for email marketing:

• Number of subscribers: This is the total number of people who have opted in to receive your emails. While this is an important metric to track, it doesn't tell you anything about how engaged your subscribers are with your emails.
• Open rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who open your emails. This metric is often used as a measure of the success of your email campaigns, but it can be misleading. For example, a high open rate could simply mean that your subject lines are eye-catching, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.
• Click-through rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who click on a link in your email. This metric is also often used as a measure of the success of your email campaigns, but it can be misleading as well. For example, a high click-through rate could simply mean that your links are well-placed, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.
• Conversion rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, after reading your email. This is a much more important metric to track than open rate or click-through rate, as it tells you how effective your emails are at driving results.
• Unsubscribe rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate could be a sign that your emails are not relevant to your subscribers or that they are being sent too frequently.

It's important to note that vanity metrics can be misleading. For example, a high open rate or click-through rate could simply mean that your subject lines are eye-catching or that your links are well-placed, not that your subscribers are actually interested in the content of your emails.

Starbucks Rewards Ratio Changes Yet Again

Two things come to mind when I think about Starbucks' loyalty rewards: a) 3rd party rewards are getting expensive to fulfill, and b) customers are still gaming the reward system. But, on the latter point, it's because Starbucks allows such things to happen with their current reward system which includes tasks such as:

• Double points day (basically 4x points for a purchase, excluding tax)
• Buy item x and item y (and sometimes item z), and get 10, 20, 50, 75, or 125 extra points
• Buy any item three times for x-bonus points
• Buy any item on three (up to 5) consecutive days for x-point

Which Part of the Funnel Should You Focus On

What do you have control over? If you don't have any input into how SEO/SEM works for your company or maybe inbound leads are driven by a 3rd party, you should probably not fret over the top of the funnel where potential buyers coming into your marketing+sales cycle.

Scenario:

Zoho: Lead Funnel example

You don't have any problem with inbound leads. In fact, there are so many, it makes you want to not care about all these marginally interested people who want to check out your website. But, you should care if your industry has a finite number of prospective decision makers with budget authority.

After a lead converts to becoming a prospect, where the prospective buyer has expressed some sort of hand raising (e.g., downloading a white paper, signing up for a sales demo, setting up an appointment with a sales rep, or scheduling an on-site consult), that's when it gets tricky to a) define the handshake sign-off between marketing's lead nurturing (MQL) and sales' rationale for considering a prospect as a sales qualified lead (SQL).

In reality, many leads get stuck in the middle of the funnel. The only part where a marketer can really focus on first is the middle with tactics such as marketing automation to help further entice the customer to give out his/her BANT (budget, authority, need, and timing).

You can only write and deploy so many touchpoints before a prospect marks your communications as spam or simply unsubscribes even though they were so close (according to their lead score) to becoming a paid subscriber.

Hey Alexa, tell me about the weather...

I bought a 3rd generation Echo over the holidays because it was on sale. Though, I thought it would help me learn how to build an Alexa skill. I do not, however, feel comfortable about how it's listening all the time (when plugged in) and that it is not really a smart speaker at all. Nor how you can't connect Alexa units that belong to separate households of the same family. 

It's sad to say that most of the 85,000 skills that Alexa now knows how to do, thanks to Amazon's holiday contest push for new skill submission, are one trick ponies.. that is to say, you ask Alexa to open <whatever> skill and it performs a single task (e.g., reads you news headlines, perform basic math but not compound algebra calculations, tells you what a single stock price is and not how your portfolio is performing). Boring. 

From where we were with voice activated desktop computer commands to this incarnation of Alexa skills, we have gone backwards into the Dark Ages of technology potential. Thirty years ago we could already tell a computer to do one task skills (open a program, play music, open a website, play a game). Now Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have unleashed what used to be in the domain of a software developer to anyone with the time and patience to read, write, and experiment.

Smart device? No, not really. My Alexa is still dumb as a brick.