3 Tactical Tips for When Meta Advertising Hurts Your DTC Business

Meta madness is still afoot: accounts getting suspended, blown budget re-comp missing, and things breaking everywhere. Here are 3 tactical things you can do to support marketing efforts if you’re still affected.

1) Invest your time in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

99.9% of us working in ecommerce rely on paid advertising for brand awareness & customer acquisition — but that’s only one part of the customer journey. So many brands focus on heavily on top of the funnel efforts: ad placement strategy, ad copy, creative, and so forth. But neglecting to consider the consumer’s experience after that ad is clicked in a major goof.

Optimizing your ecommerce site is critical for a variety of reasons. Not only can it improve your sales/ROI, but it also helps improve the customer experience with your brand, often leading to stronger customer retention. And of course, digging into CRO data can also unlock broader business insights.

Wondering how to work on your CRO, even if you aren’t an expert? Here are a few starting points:  

• Refresh social proof, reviews, & ratings
• Audit & simplify your checkout process
• Implement personalized product recommendations
• Audit your site speed
• Revisit pricing strategy, bundling, etc.

2) Invest your time in Creative Strategy

Creative Strategy has, unfortunately, become one of those opaque phrases in the world of DTC, just because it can mean so many different things. To hyper-simplify, creative strategy is the process of analyzing data, then developing ideas and concepts for implementation in a variety of marketing mediums.

While some teams have one or more catch-all creative strategists that work on projects across the brand, others have one dedicated to specific formats (ex: paid advertising), and some brands have no dedicated creative strategists at all!

Whether you realize it or not, likely yourself -- or someone on your team -- is engaging in creative strategy efforts. Creative strategy is essential for effectively communicating your brand’s core messaging, engaging your target audience(s), and achieving your campaign objectives.

When ad platforms are giving brands trouble, I encourage them to use this “down time” to review their data and ideate for the future. This can include actions like:

• Digging deep into historical ad performance
• Digging deep into customer data
• Analyzing your customer reviews, CS tickets, etc.
• Brainstorming new angles for creative testing
• Brainstorming new formats for your ads

3) Invest this time in better understanding your consumer.

The biggest, best, and most profitable brands all have one core thing in common: they are very in tune with their customers. Understanding your consumer is more than just having a generalized persona with gender, location, and income bracket data. Consumer experts explore beyond physical or surface-level attributes to fundamentally understand what inspires consumer purchasing behavior at the root. This knowledge moves beyond the demographics and into the psychographics.

Psychographics = The study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research (Oxford Dictionary).

I encourage all brand owners and marketers to explore their customer data, conduct surveys or interviews, and seek to understand the answers to at least the following questions:

• What does my customer need?
• What does my consumer want?
• What are my customers’ fears?
• What delights my customers?
• What angers my customers?

You've Got This.

At the end of the day, remember that any challenge you’re facing with your advertising account is simply that: a challenge.

Know that you’re a full person, and this is just work. It’s one piece of your life. We all survived the iOS14 madness; we’ll make it through this,too.

Sending good vibes & positive ROAS,

A.