Digital Marketing Insider (151): 5-3-24

Hey Digital Marketing Insiders!

Excited to delve into the intricacies of Meta ad targeting for financial services?

Get prepared to unlock the secrets of maximizing your ad spend on Meta! As we navigate the evolving landscape of digital marketing, discover how to effectively target your audience amidst changing privacy policies.

From leveraging first-party data to adapting to new ad restrictions, let's explore the innovative strategies that are reshaping the way we approach Meta advertising.

This week, our insights come straight from the expertise of our VP Sales & Marketing, Josh Muskin. Stay tuned for invaluable tips and strategies to elevate your Meta ad campaigns!

Get ready to dive deep, learn, and thrive in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing! 🚀

Better audience targeting for Financial Services: How to profitably run millions in Meta ad spend.

The landscape of financial services marketing has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last 12 years of my marketing career. In particular, since 2021 the shift in audience targeting strategies on platforms like Meta (formerly Facebook) has presented both challenges and opportunities for marketers in this sector.

A changing landscape for Meta (Facebook) advertising in Financial Services

In the early days of Meta (Facebook) advertising, marketers could pinpoint their audience with remarkable precision. Age, gender, interests, household income, and geography were all fair game. However, as concerns about privacy and discriminatory practices have grown, the ability to target specific demographics on Meta has been reduced.

This change has been quite impactful for financial services, such as debt consolidation and management firms. These companies previously thrived on the ability to target niche audiences with specific financial needs. With the removal of such targeting capabilities, the challenge has shifted from crafting the perfect campaign to ensuring that the right audience sees it.

Navigating Meta ad restrictions: Turning around a broken campaign and making it generate millions

In response to these changes, marketers have had to think outside the box, and at WebMechanix that happens to be our specialty. The reality of losing both third-party data and the ability to use cookies has forced the marketing arms of financial services companies to rely on first-party data. This data, provided directly by potential clients, has become the new cornerstone of audience targeting.

The significant challenge now lies in interpreting the information provided. Here’s how we met the challenge for our client working in debt consolidation and management.

The set up:

Already a leader in the market, this client had been running successful campaigns on Meta (Facebook) and Google for years. Spending around $100K a month, they were utilizing pinpoint targeting, demographic information, and essentially saying to these platforms, “I want someone with nine credit cards open and not that much income” and finding them. Then these successful campaigns stopped working!

Suddenly we're able to target people less and less compared to what we used to do. A lot of that has to do with the rising awareness of privacy and changing discriminatory practices using targeting based on age, gender, or zip codes. These platforms are adjusting and marketing needs to adjust too.

Solving the problem:

The real problem was not the “Mad Men” challenge - coming up with the perfect campaign. We already had the perfect campaign but the ability to put it in front of the right people vanished. Without really good targeting anymore, what exactly could we lean on? The answer was using the first-party data this client already had on the people they served and the few data points (e.g. where they lived and how much they said they had in debt) that we were legally allowed to collect. This first-party data was fed back into the Meta ads and Meta now used this data to build a model that said  “if people meet these criteria, they're probably going to be pretty good. If they don't meet these criteria, we can probably ignore them.”

Now, for Meta, for Google Ads, or for the other advertising methods that they were using, we didn’t have to punch in combinations of demographics information. We’d already found that. Instead we said, “Here's a data point that we want you to use. Every time you get this data point from us, we want you to go and use that to find other people like that.” A shift from really narrow targeting to the perfect audience to “people in the United States over 18 years old…and have a pulse” makes any sane person believe that the marketing efforts would get worse, not better.
But when we accompanied that with this very specific piece of data that we were giving these platforms, we actually saw the opposite effect. Now, when you brought in an audience, your cost to reach that audience went down significantly.

The results:

To read the rest of this article and to get Tracey’s full thoughts on SEO go check out our WebMechanix Blog. See you there!

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