With over 12 years of combined PPC + SEO experience, Veronika Höller has a trick or two up her marketing sleeve. In this chat, she shares expert insights on her upcoming brightonSEO’s Paid Social talk: “Create Impactful Meta Campaigns With Less Data.” If you’re still working in marketing silos – here’s your cue to integrate. Here’s her Meta slide-deck.
Tell us about your topic, Create Impactful Meta Campaigns With Less Data, and why you chose it.
I have been working for a company in the health sector for two years. We have the exciting task of running successful campaigns – but many legal requirements bind us. Especially here in Germany, data protection is very tough. As a freelancer, I gained experience in the health sector and the challenge of working with few tracking options. Meta then closed the lid when iOS decided to give users more privacy. It wasn’t a shock since I’ve had to work with little tracking data for several years. That’s how I chose the topic. We have so many options to run successful campaigns despite data protection and the end of third-party cookies; we just have to be a little more creative.
My talk will guide people about why they need to get out of their silos, be creative and courageous, and test, test, test to create powerful campaigns. Even if you sometimes have to break new ground, such as creating test campaigns without targets.
Could you give us an example of how you used this strategy to help one of your clients? How did you go about it?
As a freelancer, I supervised a great startup that brought healthcare software onto the market. The challenge was introducing a completely new product, which should get brand awareness as quickly as possible, should appeal to investors, and, of course, should be sold.
Unfortunately, GDPR already existed here, and we couldn’t use every tracking tool we wanted. Therefore, to gather data, it was clear that we had to launch PPC and social paid campaigns as quickly as possible.
However, since the target groups were so different, doctors and clinic staff, commercial employees, investors, and clinic managers – I had to find a creative way to collect these insights.
“I worked out the different personas, then developed creatives and messages and set up test campaigns without special target groups – just to see who clicks on the ads and how exactly the target groups engage with the content on social media.”
The best thing about social media is that you’ve identified your personas and can visualize them based on their profiles and interests. Beforehand, I looked at the competitors and read the comments from dissatisfied users – perfect for pimping my ads because my software can do better.
Pro-tip: At the beginning of the campaigns, we had a lot of wastage, but after a while, we got more and more insights and data and scaled fantastic campaigns tailored to individual target groups. We analyzed the data and found that brand awareness had increased so much that we were targeting investors in addition to our buyer persona. After that, we decided to scale our campaigns by setting up a special campaign for investors. With the clear objective of finding as many investors as possible for our start-up. And it worked. They came to us. Normally we would not have addressed this target group digitally. We thought it was too impersonal. But we learned from it that investors could also be caught up online. It is only important to collect data once, accept wastage and then scale your campaigns. I’ve documented everything in detail, all failures and successes, so we can now run pretty good campaigns without much effort. And it works!
The algorithm learns, and we, as social media marketing managers, should learn to trust the algorithm and its target group. And that’s exactly what my speech is about.
What presentations are you most interested in attending/speakers you are most interested to hear and why?
I like listening to topics that I rarely deal with in everyday life. Machine Learning, Python, or organic rankings on social media platforms. My favorite speaker is Sarah Sal. I love her way of presenting social media topics – she is hilarious. On the PPC side, I love Pauline Jakober and Navah Hopkins because they are both amazing PPC marketers.
Do you see any trends specific to PPC reporting in 2023?
Due to the limited tracking and the end of Analytics UA, we have to start interpreting and merging data better to have a good basis for reporting successes and deriving optimization measures from the data.
“In 2023, we will have to invest more time in reporting, because we have less data available, and we have to work on the reports across platforms.”
Personas have been used successfully in SEO for years – and that’s exactly what we’re doing now in paid social. So it’s important to:
- Know your persona
- Know your Unique Selling Points (USPs)
- Use a lot of ad texts and claims
- Build on your messages and creatives
- Create test campaigns without target groups – trust your creatives and messages
- Use this data to scale your perfect meta campaigns
We may no longer be able to track everything correctly, but our target groups and advertising messages remain the same. For example, if an ad comes up on Facebook that I don’t like, I don’t click on it. But if I’m interested in that product, I click on it. This way, the algorithm learns to offer me topics that interest me without us having previously made any special settings in the campaigns.
Who are your go-to people/ resources for beginners in digital marketing?
- If you want to improve your PPC marketing skill set, I recommend Google’s Skillshop.
- The Microsoft Advertising platform also offers a lot of possibilities for everyone who wants to promote apps.
- Then there is, of course, the Apple certification program
- For SEO’s Aleyda Solis and her Newsletter SEOFOMO
- Hubspot Digital Marketing Certification is also a good resource
What are the top 5 tools or apps you use daily and why?
I see all data in one view: rankings, conversions, Ads, etc. And when needed, I can directly optimize client campaigns.
What advice would you give yourself when you first started digital advertising?
That’s a good question. I would advise myself to calm down and that it’s not a problem to make mistakes. You should always remain dynamic, creative, and willing to take side paths that lead to success. Not letting yourself be put under pressure – trusting your own intention and experience and following this path. More self-confidence and belief in yourself; above all, celebrate your successes!
Veronika is a Global Senior SEO Manager and has worked in SEO and PPC marketing for 12 years. She continues developing her PPC and SEO marketing skills and encourages folks to leave the silo mindset.
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Kernwoorden: Paid Social, PPC, SEO
