Welcome to the Raka Weekly Roundup, where we cover the week’s news and trends and tell you exactly what you need to know. This week, we dive into what you can learn from Amazon and Build-A-Bear gaffes, the new additions to the Facebook Ads Manager app, and improved targeted ad buying on Snapchat.
Amazon and Build-A-Bear’s best efforts go awry
In the past two weeks, two marketing campaigns that could have been great wound up going disastrously wrong, leaving a lot of people quite unhappy.
Let’s start with Build-A-Bear. Their “Pay Your Age” promotion was created in an attempt to drive traffic to their stores and let kids get a bear for a deep discount. If the child is three, the bear is $3. Of course, the small type in the promotion pointed out it didn’t include accessories, which is where the costs really come in, but still, it was cheaper than the typical retail price for a “naked bear.” Clearly, Build a Bear did a great job promoting this event as thousands flocked to the stores.
The problem? There weren’t enough bears or hours in the day to accommodate all of the kids. The result? A lot of sad and angry faces for children and parents alike.
Now onto Amazon Prime Day. This promotion was geared to not only increase the number of Amazon Prime members but to also give their already loyal Prime members amazing deals on select products sold by the world’s largest online retailer. Unfortunately, Prime Day was a bit of a disaster.
The problem? People came in droves, but many were greeted with error messages as they were unable to get through to the site. The result? Again, a lot of sad and angry faces.
So, what’s the moral of both of these stories? Be prepared for the best (lots of traffic and sales), but realize it could turn into the worst (exceeds your inventory, bandwidth, or staffing). Certainly, it’s hard to always predict these type of scenarios, but both of these were one-day events so perhaps just extending them to three days or a week would garner the results you’re looking for (and more) AND keep your customers happy.
Also, be sure to test whatever you can in advance of the promotion launch and have a few “what if” scenarios in your back pocket to pull out instead of having a knee-jerk reaction to fix the problem in case of a debacle.
Facebook Ads Manager improves mobile ad creation experience
According to Facebook Business News, they’ve added five new features to the Facebook Ads Manager app to make creating ads on mobile a lot easier. There have been a lot of changes to the Facebook ad platform of late.
The new features include:
- Text Overlay & Text Policy Checker: The text overlay feature allows advertisers the ability to add text directly to their ad. They can choose the font, position the text, and choose the opacity. This addition definitely gives advertisers more flexibility if they need to create ads on their mobile device while on the go. The text policy checker is really helpful because it will let you know immediately if your text is within Facebook’s guidelines. No longer will you have to wait for that fun rejection notification from Facebook saying the text on your ad is “out of bounds.”
- Image Cropper: Being able to crop images is pretty standard practice in many desktop apps as well as mobile apps, so adding it to Facebook’s Ad Manager is no act of wizardry. Facebook has simply added it to help you more easily size your images for your ads and Page posts.
- Templates: Efficiency and time-saving initiatives are always welcome to busy marketers, so templates are welcome additions to Facebook’s repertoire.
- Shapes, Stickers & Logos: This new feature allows advertisers to add their logo, stickers, and shapes to the aforementioned templates. Now, creating ads is both efficient and fun! Who doesn’t like to have fun when they’re at work?
- Color Filters: Just like the color filters available in Instagram and other photo editing apps, Facebook has given advertisers the ability to adjust the colors in their ads to help them stand out amongst the sea of ads viewable in a single scroll.
Making targeted ad buys on Snapchat is…well, a snap
This week Nielsen announced they will be partnering with Snapchat to allow advertisers and agencies the ability to buy inventory on Snapchat using Nielson-branded audience segments through the Nielsen Marketing Cloud.
What does this mean for businesses?
They can now access offline data that includes demographics, buying, and mobile behavior to make better-targeted ad buys on Snapchat. This is not the first time Snapchat has worked with Nielsen to approve their ad buying methodology. In fact, the collaboration between the two companies began in 2014 with Snapchat’s adoption of Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings.
According to Jessica Hogue, SVP of Digital Solutions at Nielsen, “This integration with Snapchat will allow partners to plan, activate and analyze marketing initiatives by accessing the highest quality audience data in the market underpinned by Nielsen.”
Clearly, Snapchat is making great strides to compete with the bigger guns like Twitter and Pinterest, and agencies are looking forward to being able to add this targeted ad buying to their arsenal of options when creating media and advertising plans for their clients.
If you have any questions about this week’s Raka Roundup or need help with your digital marketing efforts, send us an email or give us a call at 603.436.7770.
