What Facebook’s Update Means for Brands
The Facebook Update
“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us… At its best, Facebook has always been about personal connections.”
-Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
On January 11th, Facebook announced a monumental change to its platform that will re-prioritize the content displayed in people’s News Feeds focused even more strongly on human connection and engagement.
“I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”
Pivoting from Relevancy to Connection
It’s no secret that Facebook’s advertising platform revolutionized the way businesses market to people. The ability to get laser-focused in audience targeting based on a person’s demographics, location, life-stage, and interests — to name just a few — brought advertising from an exercise of simply picking the right channel to an endeavor of picking the right individual people at scale.
Relevancy has been the key to successful marketing content over the last several years, and a lot of brands found immense success by generating highly-relevant content to a highly-targeted audience.
But this trend in the industry led marketers and brands to a place where a boundary was flirted with between providing content that helped and creating content that clicked. A lot of marketing, in best efforts to spark maximized content engagement, resorted to merely matching content with interests and crafting copy that baited clicks.
Marketing and advertising within Facebook quickly evolved into a game of mathematics and science — and with it, people once again dwindled into numbers on a reporting dashboard.
And so, here we are today with Facebook flipping their algorithmic objectives away from relevancy and back toward social interaction.
Facebook shifted the direction of its platform because it remembered its users aren’t a billion plus in number — its users are a billion plus human beings.
While many businesses and agencies may fear how this change will impact the ROI of their Facebook advertising campaigns — or even their entire approach to marketing on Facebook — this change is good.
The Future Outlook for Successful Brands on Facebook
Those who find future success marketing and advertising on Facebook will do so because they create content and campaigns that deepen relationships with their brands.
But the brands that will revolutionize their impact on Facebook will do so by creating experiences that facilitate the growth of relationships in the context of community — one of customers interacting and connecting with other customers.
In order to orchestrate a campaign on Facebook that will perform such a feat, brands will have to reconfigure much of their approach to marketing.
Brands Must Know Their Customers Beyond Demographics & Interests
First, brands must understand who their customers are beyond demographic and statistical data. They need to know what fundamental beliefs drive their customers, what experiences their problems create for them, what makes them laugh or feel inspired, etc.
Personal connection can only happen when a person feels known.
- Take the time to do a deeper dive into your customer persona than you have previously. Your customer isn’t merely a demographic stat, or interest profile, they are someone that you’re solving real problems for.
Brands Must Rethink the Customer Journey as an Interaction, not a Linear Funnel
Second, truly understanding a customer’s journey in relation with a brand’s funnel will require an understanding that not every customer’s journey is the same, nor is it linear by nature. The customer journey is not a funnel to be hacked, it’s an interaction to be understood.
Thus, architecting a campaign workflow with linearly-progressing offerings primarily focused on the conversion of a customer from one stage in the funnel to the next does not align with cultivating meaningful connection.
Rather, the campaigns that last will stake their successes on a focus of providing the greatest value at each customer’s respective stage in a relationship journey with a brand coupled with an overall experience characterized by service, conversations and expectation-exceeding care.
If a brand can make its customers feel known and valued, it can reasonably expect to see a majority of its customers’ loyalties reciprocated in return.
- Make a user journey that is organic in nature, rather than in the shape of a funnel, your customer isn’t the object of value extraction, but rather a person to add value to throughout their journey.
Brands Must Know What Makes Their Brand Remarkable For Customers
Third, brands will need to create content and experiences worthy of being deemed remarkable. In the words of Robert Stephens, Founder of Geek Squad, “Advertising is the tax brands pay for not being remarkable.”
When brands create something that adds or multiplies meaning in people’s lives, those customers will most definitely become the greatest advertisers and marketers on behalf of those brands.
Those brands that create content on Facebook geared toward adding remarkable value for their customers will draw engagement, enhance social interaction, and cultivate a community associated under the umbrella of the brand.
- Take the time to write out what makes your brand truly remarkable, if you can’t think of anything, neither can your customer.
Above All, Brands Must Realize Their Customers are Human
Facebook wants its platform to propel human beings into communities. Wouldn’t any business also want to take part in sparking a community of brand advocating and brand promoting customers?
Surely such a brand-centric community would exponentially compound a return on value for all parties involved in the brand relationship far beyond the value of even the most successful conversion-driven advertising campaigns.
To simplify the direction brands need to take, focusing on the customers and the customers’ experiences as human beings must absolutely become paramount.
A Human Approach for Brands
At Human Design, our approach to every project and campaign we build has always focused on the core experience of who the product or campaign is built for — people.
At the very epicenter of our strategy, design and execution with each brand we work with lies an idea and a vision around the most optimal human experience that moves human customers into more meaningful interactions and relationships with the humans behind the brands.
All business interactions, when you boil them all down, truly are Human to Human.
Sure, our team has the talent and expertise to design and develop remarkable products and campaigns digitally. But as technology rapidly changes (Facebook’s change being the most recently groundbreaking), we’re able to continuously evolve with those changes because the key to the success we provide our clients is rooted in interacting with people.
The fundamental principles of human interaction, human behavior and human experience remain constant regardless of the newest software, technology and trends of the day.
An Invitation from Human
So in the most humanesque way we know how, we want to invite you to join us in-person at an upcoming Workshop in Boulder, Colorado.
Our leadership team — all phenomenal human beings if I can say so myself — will help guide you through paradigm-shifting ideas and strategies that will dramatically change how your brand builds connection with your customers.
At the end of a workshop with Human Design, you will walk away with:
- An innovative branding & messaging strategy
- A tactical product or service experience roadmap
- An actionable marketing & sales plan
We deeply desire to see more valuable, human-focused interactions between brands and their customers, and it’s our hope that you make strides in that direction. It will completely change your business.
