The importance of closed captioning
If you’re creating video content for Facebook, you’re probably well aware of the fact that many users don’t watch videos with audio.
Cranking up the volume at home is one thing, but blaring sound from your phone on the bus or in the middle of the grocery store is another. Because of this, captions are crucial to make sure your content is accessible for all users.
Fortunately, Facebook has an AI tool that will auto-generate captions – but you’ll get some weird results if you’re not using it correctly. Check out some of the tips about captioning that the company shared yesterday:
- Captions aren’t just for people who have difficulty hearing. Though captions are great for reaching people with hearing difficulties, they’ll help expand your audience overall, too. This is a cardinal rule for most advertisers – include captions!
- Make sure Facebook’s AI can actually hear you. Don’t blame Facebook’s AI tool for generating bad captions if your audio sounds like it was recorded in a submarine in the 60s. The clearer your audio, the more accurate Facebook’s transcriptions will be.
- Clean up your audio. If your initial audio isn’t quite what you expected, Facebook recommends running it through a compressor or other software that can clear up background noise and make the video more clear.
Having top-notch audio in your content is a must: Users who are listening with audio get a crisp experience, and those listening without can access accurate, AI-generated captions.
ADVERTISING
Is advertising affecting your organic search traffic?
Every good marketer knows that advertising isn’t a silo. The way you market your brand on one channel can affect the way it’s perceived elsewhere, and your ad campaigns can have effects more far-reaching than just a couple of sales.
One of the most overlooked influences of advertising: The effect it has on organic search traffic. Tom Lambert at Bark London just put together a piece that outlines some of the data regarding Facebook Ads on brand search – let’s check out what he found:
- As Facebook ad spend scales, so does your revenue from organic traffic. If you’ll allow us to put on our nerdy math hats here, the correlation coefficient (R) between ad spend and organic revenue was 0.92 – which is really, really high.
- When you scale down (or shut down) your advertising, you’ll see a similar decline in organic traffic. Sean McGinnis from Kuru Footwear mentioned on Twitter that when Kuru shut down their Facebook Ads completely earlier this year, they saw a 10-15% drop in organic, branded search.
The Crew’s take: As obvious as this might seem on the surface, it’s important to remember that what you do on one platform can affect your metrics on another. This applies to more than just Facebook advertising, too – you will likely see similar effects on Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms.
Plus: if you’re in SEO and your client is worrying about a recent drop in organic traffic, ask them if they’ve lowered their ad spend!
SPONSORED BY BUYERTOO
Experienced Facebook media buyers use this tool to save 1060 hours and 40 minutes of work… without using AI, automation or any optimization rule
If you’re wondering what tool – the answer is BuyerTool!
It saves you time and money by integrating all your Facebook ad accounts into one single dashboard. This turns into a long list of benefits:
- With one refresh, you can see exactly what’s happening in all your accounts, and those of your media buyers.
- If you have multiple accounts for one client, you can aggregate all the data under one client profile.
- Scale up, scale down, start or pause campaigns, ad sets, and ads from BuyerTool’s dashboard.
- It aggregates all of the clients and ad accounts under each media buyer.
- And works even when Facebook’s UI is buggy.
And here are some results achieved by BuyerTool’s users:
- A media buyer managing 5 ad accounts uses BuyerTool to save 4 hours and 5 minutes of work per day (1060 hours and 40 minutes per year). You can see the breakdown here.
- BuyerTool connects to the Facebook API so you can identify problems, notice trends, and take action right away. This helped a user make an extra $10k from a campaign that was already performing well – in one hour!
Companies like Agency Y, DFO Global, VerveGlobal and Standard Conversions rely on BuyerTool.
Find how you can save time and earn more too
COPYWRITING
“Great ads are like great horror stories…
… You can’t look away.”
It’s the feeling you get when you’re watching a Stephen King movie. You’re scared as hell, but you still want to see how it ends.
What if you could inject the same amount of intensity, anticipation, and suspense in your ads?
Actually, you can. And Alexander Lewis here shows us three principles inspired by horror stories that copywriters and marketers can use to craft compelling ads.
No, you won’t have to scare your customers into buying… Instead:
+ Make sure that the stakes are high. The worst scary story endings are the ones that cancel out all progress or torment that took place within the story. They make the reader feel like they wasted their time. Same for your products. You’re never just selling a product or a service. You’re selling the emotions behind the reader’s search for a solution.
And here’s an example reported by Alexander Lewis: He had to come out with a headline for a tech recruiter’s website. Instead of saying “Hire top candidates for your role,” he wrote:
“Stop missing out on top candidates.”
Can you catch the difference?
+ Tease something valuable: Every protagonist in a horror story has an experience, treasure, or outcome that causes them to keep going, no matter the fear or odds.
They have a purpose (at least in good horror movies, that is). Otherwise, they only exist to be the victim of a monster.
Likely, if you readers get at the end of your landing page and think “so what?”, you’re missing something.
Alexander takes personal finance as an example.
It’s normally just a dry and calculated topic. However, the reasons that push people into buying these kinds of products go far beyond a spreadsheet.
+ Use sentences of varied length: One of the first things that copywriters learn is to use short sentences. However, if you stretch out your sentences, you build anticipation for the reader. Not only this, but sentences of varied length add rhythm to your prose.
You can read tons of books on copywriting. But often, the best lessons are hidden in the stories people crave and consume every day.
Today’s topic was learning emotional impact from ghost stories. Maybe, next time: persuasion lessons from The Simpsons?
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SNAPCHAT: City Painter, a collaborative AR project from Snapchat, is now live on London’s Carnaby Street. Put simply, AR lenses allow you to paint over your surroundings – it’s a pretty cool concept.
MARKETING: Chelsea FC is killing the game with their fan loyalty, and it’s all because of a smart mobile app strategy. Check out this article from MarketingWeek to learn how!
GOOGLE: As part of a larger blog post yesterday, Google announced that data-driven attribution is now available to more advertisers. Conversion Lift is also now in beta for YouTube campaigns.
BRAIN TEASER
I move without wings, between silken strings, I leave as you find, my substance behind. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
How much would it take?
How much dough would it take for you to post videos on TikTok attacking some of the biggest brands in the world?
If that answer is $20k or less, you might want to check this website out. It’s the latest project from creative group MSCHF, which we mentioned back in August for a creative WikiHow knockoff project.
In short, the website is called the Anti Ad Ad Club (which is definitely a riff on the Anti Social Social Club), and they’ll pay you to attack big brands on TikTok – if your videos get enough views, that is. Here are a couple of the brands they’ll pay you to attack:
- You’ll get $10 if you attack TikTok for content suppression, as long as your video gets more than 5k views.
- You’ll get $10k to attack Purdue Pharma for profiteering, but only if you can rack up more than 5M views.
- Think you can get more than 10M views? Then attack Palantir for working with the U.S. government, and you’ll get $20k sent to your bank account.
Whether or not you agree with the claims made by the Anti Ad Ad Club about these companies, it’s a creative concept that’s already garnered plenty of media attention.