By Zoe Menendez, Senior Digital Media Manager for Simplicity Lone Beacon.
Digital lead generation has been largely misunderstood by much of the financial community and it’s costed us. We at Simplicity Lone Beacon have been innovators in this space and have demystified digital marketing, and have been able to generate unprecedented and empirical results in the process.
We owe much of our success to being a step ahead of the many functional and algorithmic changes made in the digital world.
To that end, you should be aware of a new rule by Meta that has changed the way you can market your firm. The rule requires all advertisers who run ad campaigns about financial products or services to distinguish yourself within this “special category”, which can significantly change the effectiveness of your advertising.
What comes with this new Special Ad Category?
When an advertiser selects this Special Ad Category, it comes with quite a few targeting restrictions. These include: the inability to target by age and zip codes, the loss of Lookalike audiences, and a limited amount of detailed interest filters.
This sounds scary and like a huge change to the way you expect your marketing to function. But don’t fear! Simplicity Lone Beacon is here to shed some light on how to handle this to ensure your campaigns are still generating the results you want.
Step 1
It’s likely that your ads are offering free downloadable content or an educational event, so technically you’re not advertising a product or service, and you don’t need to use this Special Ad Category. In addition, be sure to write your ads using language that stresses the educational aspect of your offer. We find doing this in our own ads helps us successfully target within the guidelines.
Step 2
If you’ve tried to write your ads with educational language but you’re still getting hit with rejections and seeing your results take a hit, you have no choice but to select the Special Ad Category. But as people who work with the retirement demographic, the inability to target by age with this new rule is a hurdle we must overcome. Our solution? Use conditional formatting in Facebook Forms.
This feature allows you to create a form that changes based on how the lead answers the questions, and you can also filter out people who you deem “non-leads.” For us, as seen in the example below, we’re starting with an age question.
As you can see, if a lead answers “yes” to the age question then they will be allowed to fill out the rest of the form. However, if they answer, “no,” that would mean they aren’t eligible for this offer or this advisor’s services and therefore won’t be allowed to fill out the rest of the form. And just like that, we can still ensure leads of our desired age go into our system without technically being able to target by age!
What else can I do to make sure my campaigns still perform well?
Since this new rule makes Lookalike audiences nonexistent and limits the number of interests filters you can use, building your first party data is going to be crucial. This includes making sure your prospect database is up-to-date and constantly growing, so you always have a solid list to retarget to. This also means making sure you have a Meta Pixel on your website so you can retarget those who visit it.
This rule may make it seem like advertising on Meta is a thing of the past for financial businesses, but that is far from the truth. With some small adjustments, you can get back to running successful campaigns that lead to increased production – and Simplicity Lone Beacon is a step ahead to help you along the way!
About the Author: Before Zoe came to us she worked with two well-known New England advertising agencies where she honed her skills at digital marketing serving both local and national accounts. She attended Johnson and Wales University where she won two national collegiate advertising titles and graduated with a BS, as well as an MBA in Advertising and Marketing. Zoe is a native New Englander and grew up in New Hampshire, but happily for us left for the city life in Boston where she resides and is a proud mom to her cat, Winston.
