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When Facebook Falls, Don’t Let Your Business Go With It

October 4th’s Facebook Outage Shows Businesses the Importance of a More Diverse Digital Marketing Strategy

Love it or hate it, Facebook is one of the best places to advertise and grow your business. 3 million businesses advertise on Facebook to an audience of over 2.14 billion people, and a lot of these users are customers who use Facebook to find information, ask questions, and stay connected to businesses. Nearly 67% of Facebook users will visit a local business page at least once a day looking for information. With numbers like that, Facebook has become essential to most businesses, especially small and local brands.

It may be tempting to put all of your eggs into Facebook’s basket, but what happens when Facebook is no longer accessible?

On October 4th, 2021, Facebook (and Facebook-owned Instagram) shut down for almost 7 hours. It might not have been a big deal for you personally, but for the millions of businesses that rely on those social media sites to conduct business, 7 hours can cause a lot of damage.

If it happened once, it can happen again. Is your business able to stay operational without platforms like Facebook and Instagram? If your answer is “no”, or even “maybe”, it may be time to focus some of your marketing efforts elsewhere.

A Facebook Page is NOT a Website

Somebody had to say it: a Facebook page is not a website.

If the most important information about your business is only found on social media, you are missing out on potential customers.

While Facebook—or any major social media platform—has remained a tremendous tool for growing your brand and reaching new customers, you would be shooting your business in the foot by relying on it as your sole internet presence.

Social Media Drives Business, Websites Do Business

Billions of people have a Facebook account, but that doesn’t mean they are using it to make buying decisions. Most people will Google your business looking for a website to back you up. If the only thing they find is a Facebook page, your brand loses both credibility and professionalism.

During an outage like Facebook’s, you’re abandoning the audience you already have and giving them no way to find information about your business. This is why websites for your business are essential. With a website, as long as your customer has internet access, they have access to your business.

This is not to say you should ditch Facebook altogether—you certainly should not. However, any social media should only be a supplement to your digital presence. Facebook will help you to grow an audience, but a website is where you build brand recognition, credibility, and conversions.

Diversify Your Marketing Strategy

A smart investor would never place all their money into a single stock. So why would you conduct business on a single, volatile platform?

Facebook offers a large audience, but it is not a fully comprehensive one. To reach a more diverse and complete audience, it is important to diversify your marketing strategy.

Allocate some of your marketing budget to other platforms such as Google and YouTube. You should also consider email marketing which can help you stay connected to the audience you already have, and gives you a means of communication during Facebook blackouts.

Get Noticed

When you finally get your business’s website up and running—or if you’re looking for ways to improve your existing website—make sure it breaks through the noise. Fortress provides a free marketing audit, which will identify areas of improvement within your website’s SEO, social strategy, Google rankings, and overall marketing performance.

Don’t have a website yet? We can help with that, too. Start a project with us, and let’s work together to set your brand up for success in an ever-changing world.

It’s Just a Website, Bro

A while back, I was out on a Saturday in the city with one of my clients while we had another project scheduled to “go live” over the weekend. With that project in mind, I couldn’t focus on enjoying the beautiful day, the table on the water, the food or the drinks. My mind was on the new project launch and resulted in me not being the best dinner guest. The group I was with could see that I was preoccupied, especially when I got news from our development team that they were hitting a wall, and something was breaking down during the migration. I apologized to the group and explained that I had to leave so I could get back to a computer to oversee the rest of the process. My client, who is in the medical field, remarked “It’s just a website, bro. It’ll be okay”. I was taken aback by that comment, since as an existing client I thought they should understand the level of work we try to provide. I laughed it off and left.

The fact of the matter is that it isn’t just a website to us, “bro”. It’s not just an app. It’s not just marketing. It’s not just an ad. It’s not just web traffic. Our clients aren’t just our clients, often they are friends that we have real relationships inside and outside of the workplace. We put our blood, sweat and tears into every project that we handle. Our work isn’t taken lightly and we want to ensure that it is great. Not for our sake, but for our clients. Our clients trust us with something major: their brand image and the potential growth of their businesses. First impressions matter, and we need to make sure every interaction is as flawless as possible.

As a result, our team started printing off posters of some of our favorite projects and hanging them in our office. Everyone who worked on the project signs it and we display it proudly for our team and our clients to see. The simple lesson in it is that anything we touch, anything we create, anything that comes from Fortress should be so good that we are proud to put our name on it. For a client in the medical field, where one mistake can mean life or death, our project problems may seem minor in comparison. But, while lives may not be on the line when we launch a site, an app, or go live with a new client, livelihoods are. And, that is something we hold to the highest degree.

What is Google’s New Marketing Platform and What can it Do for You?

Earlier this week, Google hosted a live web broadcast announcing their new ad service rebrand. AdWords has become Google Ads, DoubleClick has become Google Analytics 360 and they all fall under Google Marketing Platform. A lot seems to have changed but, being a copywriter, I don’t interact much with the backend of advertising and most of the broadcast went right over my head. I sat down with our Director of Digital Strategy, Eric Lucas, for a simplified breakdown of Google’s new services.

What exactly is the update?

Google’s new “Google Marketing Platform” will act as an umbrella service to house: Google Ads, Google Analytics 360, and Google Ad Manager. This is a one-stop-shop for all the front-end and back-end marketing services that Google already had in place including: the research, setup, measurement and optimization of a campaign. Now, marketers won’t have to integrate the separate features to make them work together, but, instead, Google Marketing Platform will allow them to easily toggle between features and allow the features to “talk to each other.” In addition to the bundling of their services, Google Ads will now have “smart campaigns” which use machine learning to optimize ad headlines and descriptions (which are getting a character boost too).

What does this mean for marketers?

Marketers like Eric will now be able to do their job better and faster. With all of Google’s suite of marketing tools in one place, the research, set up, measurement, and optimization will all be in one place. Google Marketing Platform will cut down on set-up time so that marketers can start delivering reports faster and be able to see how effectively your ad budget is being used. There will be better visibility of where the budget is going and what returns on investment are coming back to you.

What does this mean for brands?

Ad campaigns will be much more effective. The new platform will cut down on set up time which and reduce errors that could have occurred before from integrating separate platforms. Measuring and attribution will be easier because the services are better connected. The clarity of results will also improve significantly. For smaller businesses who don’t have a huge ad budget, they may require less long-term professional help. If you don’t have a marketing background, you still might want to consult an agency like Fortress. Business owners will be able to more clearly see what the results are saying about the success of their campaign. The responsive ads that use machine learning will help you to optimize your budget by more quickly assessing which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. While the platform is more streamlined, if you don’t have a marketing background, you still might want to consult an agency like Fortress.

Will consumers see any change in their ad experience?

The biggest change will be the ability to turn targeted ads on and off. Google will still show you ads, but your data won’t be used to decide which ones you see. Eventually, search ads will become more relevant to you (if you allow targeted ads). Google is allowing marketers to use more characters in the headlines and descriptions which will give you a clearer idea of what the ad will lead you to. This may result in search ads giving you more relevant results than before.

Overall, Google’s marketing rebrand will make life much easier for marketers by integrating all their services into one platform. And, although Google has streamlined the process of paid ad marketing, you should still consult an agency. We’ve taken over several campaigns where the client started it themselves and couldn’t clearly see their results or wasted their budget trying to figure it out. In either scenario, we could quickly overhaul and revamp the campaigns to run more efficiently and maximize their budgets. Google has been the leader in paid digital advertising for a long time and is only getting stronger. Check out the recording of the broadcast here if you want to learn more in-depth about the changes happening in the world of Google Ads.

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