How Are Privacy Features Affecting Facebook’s Relationship With Digital Marketers?
Facebook has been one of the surest social media platforms for businesses to connect with customers. With its ability to precisely target exact audiences, Facebook attracted lots of companies, which are promised to generate higher sales with lower customer acquisition costs, to advertise their products there.
However, that may no longer be the case.
When Apple introduced the new privacy feature for mobile devices that gives users the choice of whether to allow apps to track, things have changed. According to the analytics data, US users choose to opt out of tracking 96 percent of the time in the wake of iOS 14.5. With such new features, while users' privacy is being more secured, the privacy change hits the heart of Facebook’s business with digital marketers.
Brows by Bossy, an eyebrow stencil maker, for example, used to spend up to $7,000 a day on ads distributed on Facebook. As Apple’s new privacy feature was released, ad prices “started increasing, tracking was clearly not accurate any longer and the performance decreased,” said Amanda Siebert, co-founder of the e-commerce company, in the interview with the Wall Street Journal. Lots of other companies, especially the small businesses, which rely on Facebook for e-commerce, are also suffering the increasing costs to acquire new customers.
At the same time, Google’s announcement of its own proposal to reduce tracking of users across apps on Android devices last week also potentially exacerbates Facebook’s challenges.
As those platforms are changing the rules, it becomes even harder for Facebook to continue its remarkable attraction on ad spending by small online businesses and e-commerce companies. Earlier this month, Meta said it expects a roughly $10 billion hit on sales in 2022 as a result of the Apple change. Companies that once depend on Facebook for advertisement now shift their investment to other social media platforms such as Tik Tok, Snap, and Amazon.
Well, as the new privacy change is posing more challenges to both social media platforms and e-commerce businesses, I personally believe it should be a good thing in the long term. Personal privacy is of great importance to every individual. Even though having the access to personal information allows companies to know customers well and grow quickly, it should not be done without the awareness and permission of customers. Thus, the challenge for digital marketers now is how to reach target customers without violation of their privacy.
So, here are a few suggestions for digital marketing:
- Increase the SEO efforts.
Marketers can enable their content to be placed on top positions on web pages by having keywords that are relevant to their business, so they don’t have to rely so much on PPC advertising to drive traffic to their site. In addition, users also prefer organic search results to paid ads.
2. Be more creative and create video content.
Among many types of content, video content does a relatively better job in attracting audiences’ attention. Incorporating videos into landing pages, blog articles, and social media posts will help to increase engagement with audiences.
3. Improve quality content
While social media platforms are means, the content itself is crucial for digital marketing. High-quality content is not only helpful for search engine optimization (SEO), but it is also important for web design, social media marketing, brand differentiation, and so on.
In a nutshell, although the new privacy changes may make Facebook a less effective marketing platform for small businesses, shifting focus to more creative digital marketing strategies with greater respect for customers’ privacy will benefit the growth of business in the long term.
