The Robots Are Coming for Your Marketing Team. Get Excited.

Disruptor Direct-to-Consumer brands are no strangers to challenging the status quo. Right now, the best are embracing a transformational change in direct-response marketing, where signal-based machine learning delivers and optimizes ads in ways that are drastically better, and more efficient, than human marketers ever could.

Proven marketing tactics, powered by machine learning, are creating better performance, accelerating scale, and freeing marketers to focus on their most strategic efforts. It is the future of marketing, and you can get there fast. Let’s see how.

Overcoming the growth plateau in Disruptor marketing

In recent years, Disruptors have become really good at manually hacking their way to success in their direct-response marketing efforts. By learning a lot about their customers' demographics, they’ve been able to target highly-specific audiences, find pockets of efficiency and relish in the success and control they have to manually optimize their campaigns. This was all good for a time. But times have changed, and this approach is no longer best-in-class.

The fact is, this manual, reactive approach just isn’t sustainable anymore, and it’s never been scalable in sustaining long-term growth. The problem is that audiences become very saturated with the same messaging, and gradually, marketing performance starts to plateau, and Disruptors’ growth begins to decelerate.

That’s because Disruptors have created campaigns that are so granular there’s no room to further test or identify new customers. Many marketers have simply optimized themselves into a box, and it’s limited their potential to grow their businesses in a big way.

Luckily, there IS a much better way. Many marketing activities can be simplified and performed through machine learning. Through automation and algorithms, machine learning is simplifying account management, driving better campaign performance, and scaling business quicker by finding new growth opportunities across different channels and placements.

Why Disruptors must let go of the status quo

The new path to success on Facebook is to leverage as much signal data as possible, not as much targeting as possible. Your marketing team will simply never be able to pull levers or act on intent signals the way an algorithm can. It’s time to put your trust in machine learning.

That means letting go of the reactive approach to marketing where your teams manually perform reporting and optimization. It means replacing it with automation that optimizes campaigns in real time based on hundreds (if not thousands) of intent signals and user behavior to put the right ad in front of the right person. Here, machine learning is simply better and faster when it comes to gathering insights, testing your ads, learning what works, and optimizing for the best result.

The fastest growing companies are combining what they know about their customers with Facebook's machine learning capabilities to match the right message to the right user at the right time. It’s unlocking new phases of growth at scale by automating advertising, audience selection, and placement for the best possible result.

But you’ve already got a marketing team to do optimizations for you…right?

Whether you run marketing in-house or through an agency, consider all the time your marketers spend analyzing and reporting campaign results. Not to mention manually refreshing creative for ad products, building out separate ads for each placement, allocating ad set budgets or creating redundant ad sets.

All of this effort can be eliminated by letting machine learning do the work. A better question to ask is, “what could your marketers be doing in place of this extensive manual effort?”

They could focus on what they are great at: building a better brand, launching new creative, improving the consumer UX and expanding into new international markets. And machine learning can handle what it’s far better at: finding new audiences, optimizations, placements, and allocating campaign budgets. Unlocking your marketers’ time has a multiplier effect that increases value because they can now be more strategic in nature.

Embrace machine learning with Facebook’s Power 5

We've looked across more than 100 of our top disruptive advertisers and identified the 5 marketing tactics on the Facebook platform that are driving the best performance. We call these the Power 5. Each uses machine learning, and each is impactful on its own.

Though, when used together, they are accelerating the growth of our top Disruptor advertisers, driving better account performance, boosting ROI and lowering CPA's. Here’s the Power 5, and a few (of many) examples of how they are transforming direct-response efforts:

• Automatic Placements: Deliver the right ad to the right person at the lowest possible cost across all Facebook & Instagram placements. For example, a language-learning platform, busuu, drove 39% lower cost per install and 21% higher ROAS. Learn more.
• Campaign Budget Optimization: Maximize campaign results and spend less on underperforming ad sets. For example, an air purification company, Molekule, enabled 19% lower cost per purchase and 1.25X higher ROAS. Learn more.
• Auto Advanced Matching: Accurately attribute conversions and increase audience size. On average, companies are seeing around an 8% increase in matching Facebook users to purchases made online. Learn more.
• Dynamic Ads: Show the right products to people who have expressed interest from your site, app or elsewhere. For example, a kids clothing retailer, Primary, created 2.8X higher CTR and 60% lower cost per purchase. Learn more.
• Account Simplification: Simplify your ad account structure to improve efficiency. For example, a community-focused sock eCommerce company, Bombas, achieved 2X increase in product purchases and 23X increase in sales per ad set

?Drive breakthrough results for your business

The hard fact is that if you don’t embrace machine learning now, you’ll always be behind the curve and will have a very hard time ever catching up. We can help you succeed. And we’re seeing the best marketers in the world prove it by achieving:

• Better performance across ROAS, conversions, CPA, user relevancy and more.
• Real-time optimization that leverages intent signals (which marketers otherwise couldn’t act on) and uses them to test, learn, and optimize campaigns.
• Rapid scalability by finding new growth opportunities across different placements and audiences.
• Simplified reporting by having fewer campaigns to check.
• More time to focus on bigger strategic initiatives instead of being stuck in the weeds.

To learn how you can achieve breakthrough performance with machine learning (and a whole lot more), read our Disruptors Annual Report, Build to Break: The State of Disruption.