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Author: Claire Winslow Brown

Meta AI Advertising: Why Advantage+ Changes Everything | BPM

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

The Future of Meta Advertising: Why AI-Powered Campaigns Are Changing Everything (And What It Means for Your Business)

The landscape of Meta advertising has fundamentally changed. If you’re still thinking about Facebook and Instagram ads the way you did even two years ago, you’re already behind.

Here’s what’s happening—and more importantly, what it means for your business.

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The Shift: From Manual Control to AI Orchestration

Meta has been quietly but aggressively moving toward what I call

“AI-first advertising.” The platform’s Advantage+ suite represents a fundamental shift in how campaigns work:

Old Model (Pre-2024):

Advertisers manually select audiences

Target specific demographics and interests

Control placements and bidding strategies

Optimize based on gut feeling and experience

 

New Model (2024-2025):

AI explores audiences beyond your selections

Your targeting becomes “suggestions” for the algorithm

Automated placement and bid optimization

Machine learning finds patterns humans can’t see

Here’s the thing: This isn’t just an incremental improvement. It’s a complete philosophical shift from human-driven to AI-driven campaign management.

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Why Meta Made This Change (And Why It Matters to You)

Three forces converged to make this inevitable:

1. Privacy Changes Killed Traditional Targeting

iOS 14+ privacy updates eliminated much of the tracking that made precise audience targeting possible. Meta’s response? Build AI that doesn’t need precise targeting—it finds your customers through behavioral patterns instead.

2. Complexity Exceeded Human Capability

Modern Meta campaigns optimize across:

10+ placement options

Dozens of creative variants

Real-time bidding adjustments

Cross-device user journeys

Dynamic audience signals

No human can process this at scale. AI can.

3. Performance Demands Increased

Your competitors are using AI. If you’re manually optimizing campaigns, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight. Meta’s data shows Advantage+ campaigns typically outperform manual campaigns by 20-30%.

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What This Means for Your Business: The Good and The Challenging

The Upside: Better Performance Potential

AI finds audiences you’d never consider – We’ve seen Advantage+ campaigns convert customers that would have been excluded by traditional targeting. The algorithm identifies patterns in behavior that humans simply can’t detect.

Real-time optimization at scale – While you sleep, the AI is testing creative combinations, adjusting bids, and optimizing placements across millions of auctions.

Future-proof against platform changes – New placement? Algorithm updates? Privacy regulations? AI adapts automatically without manual intervention.

 

The Challenge: Success Requires New Inputs

Creative volume becomes critical – AI needs fuel. Advantage+ can test up to 150 creative combinations. If you’re only producing 2-3 ad variants per month, you’re starving the algorithm.

Data quality is everything – Your Conversion API setup, event tracking, and conversion values directly impact AI performance. Garbage in, garbage out.

Less control, more trust – You won’t see exactly who’s being targeted or why certain decisions were made. Success requires trusting the data over your intuition.

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The Question Every Business Leader Should Be Asking

“If AI can run campaigns automatically, do I still need marketing expertise?”

Here’s the answer: You need it more than ever—but the expertise has changed.

Think of it this way: Self-driving cars still need:

Route planning (where are we going?)

Fuel (what powers the vehicle?)

Maintenance (what happens when something breaks?)

Monitoring (is this actually working?)

AI-powered advertising is the same.

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What “Good” Looks Like in the AI Era

Successful Meta advertising in 2025 isn’t about campaign management—it’s about AI performance architecture.

This means:

1. Creative Strategy & Production

Old Approach: Create one ad, run it until it stops working

New Approach: Develop systematic creative testing frameworks with constant refresh

You need:

Multiple hooks and angles tested simultaneously

Video and static creative in various formats

Continuous production pipeline, not one-off campaigns

Partnership with creators and content producers

 

2. Conversion Infrastructure

Old Approach: Basic pixel tracking

New Approach: Advanced server-side tracking, enhanced conversions, value optimization

You need:

Proper Conversion API implementation (not just pixel)

Value-based event tracking

Clean, accurate conversion data

CRM integration for lifetime value signals

 

3. Strategic Oversight

Old Approach: Daily optimization adjustments

New Approach: Interpreting AI performance, diagnosing issues, making strategic pivots

You need:

Understanding when AI is learning vs. when it’s failing

Knowing when to let campaigns run vs. when to intervene

Interpreting black-box results into business insights

Strategic planning that AI can’t do (positioning, offers, seasonality)

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The Businesses That Win vs. The Businesses That Struggle

After managing hundreds of Advantage+ campaigns, here’s the pattern we’ve observed:

Advantage+ Works Brilliantly For: 

E-commerce with product catalogs – AI loves variety and data

Established brands with conversion history – AI needs data to learn

Businesses with strong creative resources – Feed the algorithm

Companies that trust data over opinions – Let AI explore

Scaling proven offers – AI finds new customer segments

 

Advantage+ Struggles With:

Brand new businesses – Not enough conversion data for learning

Complex B2B with long sales cycles – AI optimizes for short-term signals

Small local businesses – Audiences may be too narrow

Limited creative production – Can’t feed the algorithm enough variants

Businesses requiring targeting transparency – “Trust the AI” doesn’t work

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Three Strategic Questions to Ask Right Now

1. “Do we have the creative velocity to compete?”

If your competitor is testing 50 creative variants and you’re testing 3, who do you think wins? AI can only optimize what you give it.

Action: Audit your content production capability. Can you produce 10+ ad variants per month? If not, that’s your bottleneck.

 

2. “Is our conversion tracking actually working?”

Most businesses think their tracking is fine. Most businesses are wrong. If your Conversion API isn’t properly implemented, AI is flying blind.

Action: Run a tracking audit. Test purchases, leads, and key events. Verify data matches between Meta and your analytics.

 

3. “Are we positioned for AI-era competition?”

Your competitors are using these tools. If they’re feeding Meta’s AI better creative, better data, and better strategic inputs, they win—even if their product is worse.

Action: Benchmark your Meta performance against industry standards. If you’re not using Advantage+, you’re likely falling behind.

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The Bottom Line

Meta’s shift to AI-powered advertising isn’t coming—it’s already here.

The question isn’t whether to embrace it. The question is whether you have the infrastructure to succeed with it:

Creative production systems

Advanced conversion tracking

Strategic expertise to guide AI

Commitment to testing and learning

 

The businesses that figure this out first will dominate their markets.

The businesses that ignore it will wonder why their ads stopped working.

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What We’re Seeing

At Best Practice Media, we’ve been deep in Advantage+ campaigns for the past 18 months. Here’s what we’ve learned:

Clients who embrace AI-first strategies see 20-40% improvement in ROAS

Creative production is now 50% of campaign success (vs. 20% two years ago)

Proper Conversion API setup can make or break performance

The “learning phase” is real—businesses need patience for AI to optimize

Strategic oversight matters more than ever (knowing when to intervene)

The agencies and businesses winning right now aren’t the ones fighting the AI revolution—they’re the ones learning to architect performance systems around it.

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Ready to Talk Strategy?

If you’re running Meta ads and haven’t thought about these questions, let’s talk. The gap between AI-optimized campaigns and manual campaigns is only getting wider.

The cost of waiting is measured in lost customers and wasted ad spend.

Drop a comment or send me a message. Happy to share what’s working (and what’s not) in the AI era of Meta advertising.

What’s your experience with Advantage+ campaigns? Are you seeing better performance, or struggling with the lack of control? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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About Best Practice Media

We’re a digital marketing agency specializing in AI-powered Meta advertising strategies. We help businesses architect performance systems that maximize Meta’s machine learning capabilities through superior creative, data infrastructure, and strategic oversight.

#MetaAds #FacebookAdvertising #InstagramAds #DigitalMarketing #AIAdvertising #PerformanceMarketing #EcommerceGrowth #MarketingStrategy

Why ‘Poor’ Ad Scores Don’t Mean Poor Performance (And Why You Shouldn’t Panic)

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

If you’ve ever logged into Google or Meta Ads and seen a bright red warning that your campaign performance is Poor or Below Average, you might have felt a twinge of panic. But take a deep breath: these ratings are not a reflection of your actual results or our agency’s performance. They’re automated, algorithm-driven suggestions that often benefit the platform more than the advertiser.

What These Scores Actually Measure

Both Google and Meta use internal scoring systems to rank how “optimized” your campaigns are. You might see these labeled as:

Quality Score (Google)

Optimization Score (Google)

Account Quality / Opportunity Score (Meta)

These scores take into account factors like:

Ad relevance

Expected click-through rate (CTR)

Landing page experience

Account history

How many of the platform’s “recommended” features you’re using

But here’s the catch: the formulas behind these scores are proprietary and opaque. Even experienced media buyers don’t know exactly how they’re calculated or weighted. What we do know is that the scores are designed to nudge advertisers toward using more of the platform’s automated features – and often, toward spending more money.

 

Why You Shouldn’t Panic When You See “Poor”

A low score doesn’t mean your ads aren’t working. It means the platform believes it could make your ads “better” – usually by adding more automation or expanding your targeting. In many cases, these recommendations would actually undermine your campaign strategy or waste budget.

“Google will often say things like ‘poor performance’ to try to get you to opt into features that give it more control over the ads (and therefore, you and us less control). For example, it wants us to add a bunch of keywords that we know are irrelevant to our current goals. So it is trying to get us to spend more money to opt into those features. Please don’t put a lot of stock in those ratings – we are actively adjusting the ads to make sure they’re working as intended.”

— Kalina Perkins, Media Buyer at Best Practice Media

In other words: a low score doesn’t mean failure. It means the platform disagrees with your strategy – often because it can’t monetize your efficiency.

 

Why Platforms Use These Scores

Let’s be blunt: these scores are part performance metric, part sales pitch. They serve to:

Encourage adoption of automated bidding or targeting features

Increase advertiser budgets under the guise of “improving” campaigns

Create a sense of urgency and dependency on the platform’s tools

Independent advertisers and PPC experts have noted that these “optimization” nudges often benefit the platform far more than the advertiser.

“They put up a ‘New recommendation’ that we PAY THEM MORE to raise our score back up… like a scare tactic.”

— Advertiser on Reddit

 

What Actually Matters

At Best Practice Media, we focus on business performance, not arbitrary platform metrics. Here are the metrics that matter:

Conversions / Leads — Real-world actions and sales. We optimize to increase conversion volume and quality.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) — Measures efficiency. We work to lower CPA while maintaining lead quality.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) — Ties spend to revenue. We track every dollar spent vs. earned.

Conversion Rate (Post-Click) — Reflects funnel and landing page performance. We test creative, copy, and UX to improve this.

Trend Data — Reveals long-term performance. We monitor weekly and monthly improvements, not one-day fluctuations.

These metrics are tied directly to your growth – not to Google’s or Meta’s.

 

How We Handle ‘Poor’ Scores Behind the Scenes

When a campaign shows a low score, here’s what we actually do:

Investigate, not react. We treat scores as signals to review – not commands.

Analyze underlying factors. We look at CTR, relevance, and landing page experience to identify true areas of improvement.

Test intentionally. We may test platform suggestions – but only if they align with your goals and data.

Communicate transparently. If you see a low score, we’ll explain what it means and what we’re doing about it.

Stay focused on results. We prioritize performance metrics that drive your business – not vanity grades from an algorithm.

 

The Bottom Line

When you see a “Poor” score, it’s not a crisis – it’s just the platform asking for more control. Our job is to make sure you stay in control of your ad dollars and that every click drives real results.

A low platform score doesn’t mean poor performance. It means you’re optimizing for your business, not their bottom line.

Next Steps for Clients:
If you see a low rating and are concerned, reach out to your BPM media buyer. We’ll walk you through what it means in context and show you the metrics that actually matter.

Why You Might See an Ad You Didn’t Approve

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

How Meta’s AI tools override creative without warning—and what we’re doing about it

Meta has rolled out a growing set of AI tools that can rewrite ad headlines, generate product images, and create videos using your brand assets. These features are promoted as optional, but they are often turned on automatically. In many cases, media buyers do not choose to enable them. Meta applies them silently.

Even if we manually turn them off, they can be reactivated later.

This is causing confusion, especially when a client sees an ad they did not approve. This post explains what is happening, why it keeps happening, and how we’re protecting brand integrity across every account.

What Meta Is Doing

Meta has introduced a set of creative automation tools across its ad platform. These include:

  • – Automatically written headlines and descriptions
  • – AI-generated product photos with new backgrounds or lighting
  • – Auto-created videos from still images and catalog content
  • – Suggested text changes during campaign setup

You will see these most often in Advantage+ Shopping, App, and Catalog campaigns. They may also appear in existing campaigns that were set up before these features were available.

Here’s the key issue: many of these tools are enabled without notification. If we do not check each box during setup, Meta will begin applying changes to your ad creative on its own.

You Didn’t Approve It. Neither Did We.

When you see an ad that doesn’t sound like your brand or looks off, your first question is usually: “Who made this?” In most cases, the answer is Meta.

We have seen live ads with AI-generated headlines that were never submitted. We have found product photos that were altered automatically. These are not manual errors. They are system defaults.

Media buyers are not notified when these features are activated. Clients are not notified when they go live.

Even when we turn them off, Meta may turn them back on later. This happens without a prompt. It may also happen retroactively in older campaigns that were launched before these features existed.

We check for this constantly. But unless every campaign is audited weekly, these updates can slip in.

What This Means for Brand Safety

Most of our clients care deeply about how their brand appears in the world. That includes voice, tone, product presentation, and visual design. AI-generated creative often disregards those standards.

We have seen headlines that contradict messaging strategy. We have seen product images that look mismatched. We have even seen entire ads built from assets we never approved.

This is not just a performance problem. It is a trust problem.

What We’re Doing About It

We now audit every new campaign for AI creative settings. In most cases, we disable:

  • – Auto-generated text and headlines
  • – Product image and video creation
  • – Suggested copy changes

We also retroactively check older campaigns, including those that may have inherited AI tools after the fact.

When necessary, we document every variation running in the account so clients can see what has been published.

We flag anything that does not match your original creative for review and removal.

We are doing this because Meta does not make these changes visible by default.

Why This Blog Post Exists

This post is meant to clarify what happens when an ad appears that you never approved. It is not a mistake by your media buyer. It is a platform-wide shift toward automation that bypasses manual control.

When this happens, the right response is not blame. The right response is awareness and prevention.

We are holding the line. We are keeping your ads clean, consistent, and on-brand. If anything looks off, we will catch it and correct it.

What You Can Do

If you ever see an ad that surprises you, send it our way. We will confirm what happened and fix it.

If you want more visibility into how your creative is being used, we can walk through every active variation with you.

Our priority is keeping your brand safe, not just keeping the ads running.

🚨 June 2025 Google Core Update: What Agencies & Their Clients Need to Know

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

1. Big alert: Broad core update now live

Google began rolling out the June 2025 Core Update on June 30, 2025 (around 7:34 a.m. PDT), and it will roll out over approximately three weeks across all regions and languages (Search Engine Land).

This isn’t a niche tweak—it’s a broad ranking shift across all types of content and search verticals, including organic search, Discover, and featured snippets.

2. Why this matters for PPC-savvy agencies

Many agencies separate SEO and Google Ads, but a core update—especially one lasting three weeks—can significantly alter organic visibility and traffic flows. If your client only relies on PPC, sudden shifts in organic clicks and SERP real estate can affect:

  • Search volume and keyword competition Changes in who ranks organically can reshape CPCs, budgets, cost-per-acquisition, and dayparting strategies.
  • Overlap & cannibalization A new organic top spot may reduce the effectiveness of your ad placements—or vice versa. Watch SERP placement closely.
  • Content & landing page relevance Google’s quality changes often reflect shifts in user expectations. PPC performance can suffer if your landing pages aren’t aligned with evolving search intent.

3. Early signals and volatility to watch

As of July 2, monitoring tools like Mozcast, Semrush, and visibility scores show initial volatility—some sites already hit, others boosted (Search Engine Roundtable). SEO community chatter confirms:

“I’m seeing surges and drops beginning… for ~4K sites across verticals this morning” — Glenn Gabe

It’s early—but the rollercoaster has begun. Expect peaks and valleys throughout this three-week phase.

4. Big-picture advice from Google

For agencies and clients, the key is to resist knee-jerk reactions and lean on long-term content strategy. Google’s core update wisdom:

  1. You can’t “fix” a core update directly—poor drops don’t necessarily signal a penalty (Search Engine Land).
  2. Instead, perform a people-first content audit:
    • Is your content original, authoritative, and valuable?
    • Does it provide unique analysis or research?
    • Are titles honest and non-clickbaity?
  3. After rollout (give it ~1 week), use Search Console to compare weeks before and after. Assess drop magnitude, query types, and page-level impact (Google Search Central).

Bottom-line: No shortcuts—focus on strengthening content relevance, depth, user experience, and expertise.

5. PPC-specific action plan

Task What to Do Why It Matters
Monitor SERP appearance & query trends Use tools like Semrush, Search Console, and PPC dashboards to spot keyword shifts. Adjust bid strategies early for rising or falling terms.
Reassess ad copy and LP messaging Align ads with trending content angles and intents. Match landing pages to earned new organic successes. Sustains CTR and conversion rates amid content churn.
Watch CPC & quality score Core update volatility might alter ad position dynamics and keyword relevance. Higher CPCs or lower quality scores can impact ROI.
Communicate proactively Brief clients: core updates are gradual, organic swings are expected, and PPC helps stabilize short-term visibility. Builds transparency and sets realistic expectations.

  1. Next steps for agencies & clients

  • Stay calm, create records: Track daily organic and paid traffic performance.
  • Audit top-performing content: Ensure it’s user-first, insightful, and upholds E-A-T (Expertise – Authoritativeness – Trustworthiness).
  • Give it time: Don’t tweak campaigns mid-update unless urgency warrants—changes may swing again.
  • Post-rollout adjustments: After July 21 (three weeks + buffer), reassess SEO and PPC priorities.
  • Embed resilience: Foster evergreen content strategies, dynamic ad themes, and regular content refresh cycles.

Bottom line

The June 2025 Core Update isn’t just another algorithm tweak—it’s a three-week upheaval across organic search that ripples directly into paid strategy. Agencies that anticipate, adapt, and align SEO and PPC in response—not in panic—will help clients thrive through the turbulence.

Sources:

  • https://searchengineland.com/google-june-2025-core-update-rolling-out-now-457731 
  • https://searchengineland.com/google-advice-on-improving-your-sites-ranking-for-future-core-ranking-update-320184 
  • https://www.seroundtable.com/google-june-2025-core-update-volatility-39694.html 
  • https://developers.google.com/search/updates/core-updates 

Top 10 Social Media Marketing Best Practices for Small Business

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

Use these top 10 social media marketing best practices for small business to build your brand and generate a profit using social media.

Every business owner knows that marketing is an essential part of building your brand. Yet, as a small business owner, it can be hard to compete with the big dogs who can pour thousands of dollars into a national marketing campaign. However, traditional marketing is expensive, hard to measure, hard to change, and often a one-way form of communication.

There’s another (dare I say, better?) way to market in the new media age that allows direct, quantifiable, targeted messaging delivered directly to your target audience–social media marketing.

Social media connects your brand with an attentive and relevant audience that is open to your messaging and ready to engage. It also offers cost-effective ways to funnel cold traffic into profitable actions. With a smart social media marketing strategy in place, businesses can harness the power of social as an extremely useful marketing tool.

Here are our top 10 social media marketing best practices for small business:

1. If you build it, keep it up. If you can’t keep it up, delete it.

When first launching your social media presence, it can be tempting to create a profile on every social media channel available to you. Keeping up six different profiles with individually optimized content sometimes is not realistic. It’s better to have a limited, streamlined presence rather than spotty coverage all over the Internet.

2. Focus on 2-3 platforms where your demographic lives.

Not every audience is on the same page–literally.

Knowing where your audience lives online is a valuable piece of information in creating your social media platform strategy . Want to focus on a younger audience? Twitter and Instagram are good platforms to start with. Looking for an older, professional audience? Consider creating a LinkedIn profile. Need to curate your online reputation management? Google and Yelp are where you should live. Being able to tailor your strategy to your audience will save you a considerable amount of time and effort down the road.

3. Google yourself and your company from a private browser. The first page is your current online reputation.

Using Google Chrome’s Incognito mode or Safari’s Private Browsing mode with a single Google search provides a quick snapshot of your online reputation. Don’t like something that you see? Feel like something is missing? Now you know what to work on with your targeted strategy.

4. Research marketing rules of your industry, especially if it’s highly regulated.

Each industry has its own specific rules and regulations governing marketing and advertising. Knowing precedent can save you from various headaches, including getting your ad rejected on Facebook or even possible legal action. Examples of highly-regulated industries include financial services, healthcare, education, government, law, alcohol, and the oil and gas industries.

5. Don’t leave your social media marketing execution up to an intern. Your social media presence is the public representation of your company.

It can be the knee-jerk reaction to assign the young person on the team to cover social media. Though they might be a digital native who understands the difference between Tik-Tok and Instagram Reels, having a more senior member of the team guide strategy and execution will pay off in the long run. Social media is often the first place a potential consumer will encounter your brand, and an experienced team member leading your social media plan can help ensure it’s a good one.

6. Use the “4-1-1 Rule of Marketing” (or similar) to develop a content calendar.

The 4-1-1 Rule of Marketing is:

  • 4 pieces of curated content created by others in your industry
  • 1 piece of self-serving, promotional content to drive sales/traffic
  • 1 piece of original creative content produced internally

For example, using this cadence as a guide for creating a content calendar would include sharing one piece of content promoting an upcoming special offer for your company with a direct call-to-action, one piece of original organic content, such as an infographic or specialized blog post, and four additional pieces of content, including retweets or reposts, industry updates, or article shares.

Whether you use this “rule” or something else, the bottom line is simple: Social media marketing is still about being social and organic social audiences don’t always want to be pitched. Instead, offer them more value by diversifying your content with more exciting and relevant information that builds engagement, connection, credibility–and yes, even sales–over time.

7. Use Facebook Blueprint to gain a solid foundation in social media marketing.

Facebook Blueprint is a library of online courses that allows you to “explore self-paced and step-by-step tutorials that can help you build your digital marketing knowledge and bring your business online.”

Consider it a free online marketing school. Love it, use it, and let it demystify the many facets of social media marketing for you.

8. Use Canva to make simple graphics.

Quality in means quality out. Creating high-quality content is a great way to develop your audience and increase engagement. Using a simple graphic design tool like Canva is an easy and effective way to create content for your feed.

9. If you blog, write for SEO.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the single most important ways to get your online presence noticed. Writing “search engine-friendly” content will help give you a leg up in the competition.

Tips include:

  • Keep content to 300 – 2,000 words
  • Include at least 3 hyperlinks per post
  • Add at least one picture
  • Use keywords regularly, but be careful not to spam your audience.

10. Don’t boost posts without a strategy. Use Facebook Ads Manager to target your specific audience.

Facebook Ads Manager is a useful and powerful tool to help identify and build audiences. Creating core, custom, and lookalike audiences will deliver your content to people who are most likely to interact with it. Knowing your audience’s locations, demographics, behaviors, and interests can inform an audience segment as far-reaching or focused as you need. Keeping these audiences in mind throughout your social media advertising strategy, including any boosts, will help you get the most “bang for your buck” with your advertising budget.

From choosing your key social media platforms to executing your social media plan and reviewing your social media analytics, these best practices can help inform your social media plan, set S.M.A.R.T. social goals, and reap the benefits of social media marketing.

The ABCs of Social Media Platform Strategy

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

From MySpace to Tik-Tok, the social media landscape has a history of fast change, with new platforms entering the marketplace just as quickly as others leave (RIP Vine). Many social media managers, CMOs, and small business owners often feel pressured to take advantage of the hottest trending channel or risk being a late-mover.

But an ineffective social media platform strategy can be costly, demanding, and downright exhausting.

With so many social platforms and evolving digital marketing trends, where do you even start developing an effective social media channel plan that’s still agile enough to maximize future growth opportunities? Just remember your ABCs.

Here are the top 3 considerations for building your social media platform strategy.

A is for Audience.

Where is your target audience already most active and engaged online? To answer this question, use your existing audience personas and social platform demographic data to develop a fact-based channel plan.

For example, if you have an eCommerce brand that appeals to customers under 35, consider Instagram as part of your social media mix. If you’re targeting 18 to 24-year-olds partial to bite-sized video content, Tik-Tok might be your frontrunner. And if you’re a B2B organization that would benefit from engaging with working professionals and taking part in a broader industry conversation, LinkedIn could be your primary platform.

Understanding who your ideal customer is and where to meet them where they’re already consuming social content will help you drive social ROI now and identify potential growth opportunities in the future.

B is for Bandwidth.

Social media has become one of the most effective digital marketing tools, but having a brand page is very different from maintaining an active and profitable online community. When identifying your core social media platforms, it’s important to (honestly!) decide how many channels you can manage at once.

When you need some extra support, here’s an easy breakdown of what a simplified social media team looks like:

  • The Social Media Manager develops strategy, generates content calendars, and oversees content creation, scheduling, and approvals.
  • The Copywriter is responsible for crafting post captions and supplying text for graphics. Sometimes, they’ll implement your hashtag strategy, too.
  • The Graphic Designer creates and curates all social media graphics and imagery using brand standards to ensure a consistent visual identity.

Whether you’re a One Person Show or one of many savvy social media marketers on your team, remember that you do not need to be everywhere at once! Choose 2-4 strategic platforms , set social media goals that translate into real business value, and identify how each team member will contribute to these objectives–then continue on your way to social media marketing success. ✔️

C is for Content.

With the who, what, and where settled, next, you need to figure out what you’re going to say.

Each social channel has a preferred format (or two) for sharing and consuming content, and each one has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, too. As a social media marketer, it’s your job to understand how this platform nuance should inform your channel strategy.

Here are a few common content pillars for some of the most popular social media sites:

  • Facebook: Linked content, like blogs, company or product news, brand marketing, local marketing, including community events and sponsorships, Live video
  • Instagram: Product imagery, carousel (aka “swipe”) posts, social graphics (e.g., Did You Know?, FAQs, Q&A, quotes), User Generated-Content, Behind-the-Scenes or “A Day in the Life,” employee stories or “spotlights”
  • Twitter: Real-time updates and breaking news, customer information and service, media and news, events, including sponsorships, peer or influencer retweets
  • YouTube: Utilitarian videos (e.g., How-To, Instructional, Steps), experiential marketing, customer stories or testimonials, text-based instructional videos, meet the team
  • LinkedIn: Industry news, company updates, employee milestones, press and media, original company data, customer success stories
  • Tik-Tok:Trends or #HashtagChallenges, Before and After, Tips and Tricks

When developing your social media platform strategy, your ABCs – Audience, Bandwidth, and Content – will help you find your audience, establish realistic social goals, and generate platform-optimized content. And who knows, with a smart, data-driven channel plan in place, you may even start looking forward to the next time someone starts a question with, “Should we be on…”

How to Audit Your Facebook Ad Account

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

Performing a Facebook ad account audit is the perfect way to understand your advertising performance-to-date better.

Whether you’ve just joined a company, brought on a new client, or feel like your own campaigns may be lacking something, a Facebook ad account audit is the perfect way to understand your advertising performance-to-date better–and make data-driven choices when optimizing future campaigns.

You can’t fix it unless you know what’s broken, right? During your account deep-dive, identify what’s worked well and what hasn’t really worked at all. Think of the entire account as a split-test to uncover the top performers.

So, where do you start?

How to (easily, quickly, and effectively) Audit Your Facebook Ad Account.

First, audit your Facebook Ads account by taking a deep-dive into your social media advertising performance-to-date.

1. Look at your platforms and placements.

Are the best platforms included in your paid social strategy? Maybe there’s an underperforming platform you can cut. Identify exactly where your ads are delivering and decide if these platforms and placements are doing the best job of achieving your overall social and business goals.

2. Check out your ad creative content and format.

Are photos, videos, and carousels being used? If so, what worked best? If not, what can you test in the future?

3. Figure out who you’ve been talking to.

Are your audience demographics consistent with industry research or proven performance data? How do they compare to Facebook Audience Insights for similar interests or competitors? Your ideal customer avatar?

Are you using a variety of audience types, including core, custom, and Lookalike? Is there a significant amount of audience overlap between similar segments? Are you using data to inform top-funnel targeting with Lookalikes or only relying on core, or saved audiences instead?

Speaking of saved audiences, how do your interest targets look? Have you considered adding in any competitors? Are there other categories that could help find your target audience?

Next, make a list of Action Items.

Your ad account audit is complete–woot!–and you have a pretty good understanding of the who, where, what, and how of your previous paid social campaign performance. As you review your notes, make a list of action items you need to complete before launching optimizations.

For example, do you need to create new or edit existing audiences? Should you develop new split-tests to improve performance? Can you work with your designer to mix up ad creative with new formats and designs? What do you need to create to get a more well-rounded creative bucket?

Finally, take a peek at the competition.

Even though you have a better overview of your own accounts, you shouldn’t stop here! Your next step is to look at what your competitors are doing; they may have a new (or *gasp* better) way of doing things. You won’t have transparent access to their ad content, audiences, or campaign performance like you do for your ad account, but you can still sleuth out a few things that probably work well for them.

Look through their brand pages to see what type of organic content is working well for them (and what isn’t). Don’t forget to scroll through their website and see how it compares to yours–believe it or not, having an optimized website, especially on mobile, can affect your campaigns’ effectiveness.

There is also a helpful tool called Facebook Ad Library, which will show you all active ads for any Facebook page–pay dirt! ? While it won’t provide a full breakdown of things like campaign objective, or audience targeting, Ad Library does give you enough information to understand what your competitors are doing with platforms, copy, creative, calls-to-action, ad format, and more.

From here, you’re ready to move forward by applying what you’ve learned from your audit and competitive analysis to produce the most effective social media advertising campaigns possible. Now, go forth and advertise!

4 Ways to Repurpose Your Social Media Content

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

In a new format, old social mediaposts can find new life. Use these 4 tips tosave time andwork smart whencreating content for social media.

For those of us in digital marketing, it can feel like there are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. And until science catches up with Harry Potter and “Time-Turners” become a thing IRL, social media managers have to find creative ways to build fresh, engaging social media posts on a time crunch.

Luckily, sometimes the best, freshest social media content is actually old content.

If you have a great piece of content — whether it be a compelling photo, info-packed blog, or awesome video — there are countless ways to repackage and put a new spin on it.

In a new format, old content can find new life. You can increase your reach, inspire engagement, and build authority on a given topic — all while saving resources and maximizing your social media content strategy.

Here are four ways to repurpose your social media content.

1. Make a video.

According to Social Media Today, video remains the top-performing content format across the board. Video generates more engagement than still photos on Instagram, and LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to reshare a video than they are any other type of content.

Not all of us are cinematic geniuses, but with the variety of easy-to-use tools on the market, creating good social content with video is easier than ever. Canva has animation features and great stock imagery options that can turn your standard graphic into a video. Lumen5 is super easy (and fast!) to use, especially for info-packed videos. Even turning a collection of photos into a slideshow from iMovie or your phone can be enough to spark higher engagement.

2. Show, don’t tell.

As a copywriter, this one kills me to say, but it’s true: sometimes an image can tell your story better than words. If you’ve got a great blog or piece of website copy, chances are it’ll make an even better infographic!

Distill your content into a few neat bullet points, open up your design tool, and voila! an infographic is born. (This blog itself would make a great infographic, right?)

3. Share a link.

Everyone has different ways they prefer to engage with social media content. My best friend devours true crime podcasts and documentaries, but as a writing-minded person, I learn best by reading. If our favorite brand puts out a podcast or video on their new products, my friend would be the first person to watch — whereas I’m more likely to click on a link and read about it.

Link shares are often one of the most straightforward ways to share content, and they’re also one of the most effective! (Some of us are cool, visually-minded people while others are self-proclaimed nerds who love to read. ??‍♀️)

4. Embrace the throwback.

Sometimes, repackaged content doesn’t even need a new format. Analyze your content reports for your best-performing content and build a best-of series that spotlights everything great your followers might have missed the first time — or would appreciate seeing again.

If you’ve got a great piece of content that’s outdated, you can always go back and freshen it up to be relevant again. Sometimes editing an old blog or infographic is quicker than writing a whole new one!

When you’re thinking creatively with your content planning, the possibilities for any one piece of content are endless. Save time, work smart, and you’ll (almost) never feel burned out on creating content for social media again!

Five Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

Optimizing your website improves the quality AND quantity of traffic going to your website through organic search engine results.

At Best Practice Media, we are HUGE fans of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for big and small businesses. Optimizing your website improves the quality AND quantity of traffic going to your website through organic search engine results. Still not convinced? We discuss five ways we believe SEO will help your business flourish organically.

SEO brings in more targeted traffic to your website

A great SEO campaign can bring targeted web traffic with high conversion potential. This is because SEO is a high-target marketing tool that uses keyword analysis. This lets you know how big a “market” is, how many people are searching for that exact keyword, and just how competitive the industry is, and we can even find the intel behind keyword searches. There is so much you can discover just by analyzing keyword searches alone! (we have been down that rabbit hole many times).

Without SEO, it would be challenging to find websites within a specific business sector using search engines alone. The practice of understanding the intricacies of your industry, relevant trends, and search terms mean that you can fully optimize your website to bring in targeted traffic and the most relevant audiences every time.

SEO improves your website’s user experience

Implementing SEO on your website has an added benefit because it will bring an improved user experience for your site visitors. Of course, you should always have user-friendly approaches at the front of your mind whatever you do to your website! Many SEO strategies align perfectly with this.

An SEO strategy that looks at quality components and meets the searcher’s intent requires a positive user experience. User benefits can include technical aspects of your website, like improving page speed so your website loads faster to creating valuable and engaging content. This provides an improved user experience and can help your website rank better. What’s not to love?

We know that in the past, SEO was seen as a way to improve ranking and nothing more. Still, today, SEO also puts a significant emphasis on providing quality, RELEVANT information to users that actually answers their questions as well. This collates with Google and answers questions rather than just being a search engine. Now, it looks to find the answers to a user’s query via the SERPS (search engine results page). Google wants users to experience fewer clicks and get the information they want quickly and effectively. These days, customers and site visitors know exactly what they want when typing in their search queries, so if your website doesn’t cater to what your audience is looking for, Google will know, and you may get left behind.

SEO increases leads, traffic and conversions

As mobile traffic continues to rise and dominate, local search has become integral to any small or medium-sized business’s success. Local SEO looks at optimizing your product or service for a specific vicinity so that people wanting that product or service in your area can find you quickly and efficiently when they search online. Local SEO will focus on particular towns, cities, regions, and even states to establish the best medium for your brand messaging on a local level.

The goal of any great SEO strategy should be to drive more qualified traffic to your business’s website and generate leads and conversions. A good plan will increase your ranking in the search results and improve the odds of a potential customer finding your business and getting them to click through to your website. But you don’t want any old traffic. You want the right traffic for your service or product.

So how do you get the best traffic? We need to be strategic with your keywords and other parts of our SEO strategy. Rather than focusing on generic and broad keywords to be seen by the most people possible, we spend time researching and determining the right keywords that will be the most relevant and effective for YOUR business. Getting the right kind of traffic means that when users click on your website, they get what they want and are, therefore, more likely to convert.

SEO is more affordable than ads

While SEO optimization is not free, we can all agree that all the best things cost…something, right? SEO is a relatively inexpensive means of benefiting your brand in the grand scheme of things. More importantly, if done right, the payoff will be considerable (and that’s where we come in!).

You should try to see SEO as more than just a marketing cost. It is actually more like a business investment. You see, SEO done well will hold water year after year, and like many things in life, it will only get better the more attention and investment it gets

Not only that, but SEO is just as quantifiable as ads and paid searches. You can measure it with analytics and tracking. We use this data to keep you fully informed of how your SEO is performing because, at the end of the day, it’s a given that data never lies. SEO done right is a long-term strategy that isn’t a quick fix. It works hard, and it works well long-term to bring target traffic to your website day after day, year after year.

SEO builds brand loyalty, trust, and credibility

If you think about it, your website is often the first thing your online audience sees. This is where you get your chance to shine and generate valuable leads, sales, and other essential conversions. It is where you can show your audience your expert knowledge and build trust and credibility through your content and user experience. This cannot be made overnight; authority and credibility are earned and built over time (just like in real life) and is part of your long-game strategy.

Any website that ranks highly on search engine results will typically be considered trustworthy and high-quality by search engines, which then, in turn, boosts the credibility of your business. Authority can be accrued over time because of factors such as:

  • Positive user behavior
  • Machine-learning signals
  • Natural links
  • Optimized on-page elements and content.

Establishing that your brand is an authority on a particular topic/industry or product takes patience, effort, and commitment. It also means offering a service or quality products that allow your customers to trust your brand. You also have to ask how often you make it past the first page on a Google search results page. Most of us rarely do, so it is essential to climb your way to in search result rankings which will, in turn, add more trust and credibility to your brand.

Is SEO right for your business?

Have we managed to convince you that SEO is right for your business? It’s a no-brainer, right? We believe your business will benefit from SEO because organic traffic is inarguably the most prominent traffic source for any website. Then take a search engine-optimized website, and it stands a much better chance of making use of all this traffic and potential conversions than a website that doesn’t use SEO. By implementing SEO best practices in the short and long term, you create a better user experience, a more significant brand reputation, and greater visibility in search engine results.

5 of The Best Tools for Marketing Creativity

Posted on by Claire Winslow Brown

No matter whether you are creating graphics or creating memes, you want an easy-to-use tool that helps you to create the very best images and graphics for your business.

Finding a great design app or website where you can get creative is essential when it comes to your brand and your social media strategy. Whether you are creating graphics, editing photos, or creating memes, you want an easy-to-use tool that helps you create the best images and graphics for your social media posts. Below are 5 of the best-hidden creativity tools you can use for non-designers and designers alike that you may want to try and why:

VistaCreate

Pros – Free and paid subscriptions are available. Very easy to use.

Cons – They don’t have as many templates, fonts, and graphics as Canva.

VistaCreate is an online graphic design platform perfect for small business owners. It can help your brand create professional visual content for social media and other marketing channels. You don’t need any design skills to make full use of VistaCreate. There are over 10 million users across 192 countries, with over 100 million created designs and 5000 new templates added monthly. There are many templates to choose from on any topic and theme, as well as royalty-free videos, vectors, and images. There are some useful editing tools, such as background remover and logo maker. Social media scheduler and a resizing tool, to name but a few!

VistaCreate comes with ready-made design presets that you can customize. It also comes with various design formats for digital use, marketing, social media, print, video, documents, and letters. In total, there are 78 design formats to choose from.

You can use VistaCreate as both a mobile and web application, and you can edit projects that you started on the web app on the mobile app and vice versa. You can use VistaCreate for free and VisaCreate pro, which gains you access to all of its features.

Sketch

Pros – License payment once per year. Great for exporting graphics in multiple formats.

Cons – It is for Mac users only.

Sketch is a vector-based graphics editor app that is made for macOS specifically. Many consider it a competent alternative to Photoshop. It features thousands of WordPress themes and plugins, UI elements, web templates, and more. You gain unlimited access to a growing variety of millions of web and creative design assets by having an Envato Elements membership. You pay for the app once, and then you can use it as much as you like without any further costs for a whole year. You can continue to use the app after the year, but you will not receive any new updates unless you repurchase the license. Being vector-based means that every shape you draw can be resized in any dimension without losing sharpness.

Gravit Designer Pro

Pros – Has a free version and also comes with a free trial. Easy to use the all-in-one tool. Great cloud storage capacity. Can use on any browser,

Cons – Needs more vector image choices. The offline version requires a pro plan.

Gravit Designer Pro is a cloud-based vector graphics app that can help your business create anchors, built-in web pages, styles, and symbols to create wireframes and mock-ups. Everyone on your team can manage editing photos, adjusting colors, adding filters, blending, and creating lighting effects. It also comes with vector illustration tools so you and your team can create shapes, points, lines, and other elements. You can ensign and export multiple file formats, including JPEG, PDF, and SVG, and it has a built-in asset library. Great for social media posts, it means you can add stickers, frames, icons, emojis, and illustrations across many graphics to create unique and engaging posts.

Pixlr

Pros – It has a free version and a photo editor, and you can purchase individual templates.

Cons – the free version has many adverts. Some of the filters are not of great quality.

Pixlr features three parts, Pixlr C, where you can create many design projects; Pixlr E, for advanced photo editing; and Photomash Studio, where you can create visual assets. There are many professionally made templates to choose from, and you can create Instagram stories, resumes, YouTube banners, presentations, and more with thousands of free templates. A bonus of Pixlr is that you can animate any design with just a few clicks! You can edit photos, remove backgrounds in a single click, and create collages from pre-made templates. It is free to use, and you can sign up for their premium software for as little as $7 a month. There is a 30-day free trial to see if you like it first. You will notice that the free version has ads, but if that is something you don’t mind, the free version is excellent for social media posts! You will see that some of the templates are premium users only, but it allows you to buy individual templates for $1 rather than having to commit to going premium.

Figma

Pros – Free-to-use graphic editing software that works in any browser and operating system.

Cons – Some find it hard to use if not already knowledgeable about vector-based software. Doesn’t have as many features as other vector-based software.

Figma is a web-based app where you can edit graphics such as designing social media posts, mobile apps, wireframe websites, and much more! It works differently than many design software as it is web-based, so you can use any computer or platform to use it, and you don’t have to buy multiple licenses. It also has a free plan where you can actively create and store three projects simultaneously. This is great for small teams, and you can learn, experiment, and work on smaller projects, all for free. It is also suitable for new designers as you can make templates from scratch, but if your design skills are limited, there are pre-made templates and plenty of other resources to get you started and grow more confident. The Figma website also has many video tutorials to teach design exercises, especially if you are new to UI and UX design.

There are many more hidden tools that are fantastic for creating designs, these are just some of our favs! Look out for our next hidden tools series for more great apps and software you can easily use for your marketing team!