It’s Like a Plague that Won’t Go Away

If you’re currently advertising or spent money on Facebook ads, chances are you’ve received an email from one of “Meta Marketing Pros” encouraging you to book a call with them. The email goes into additional detail pertaining to what they can do for you, assist with your advertising campaign and will probably explain that they’ve got some tips and tricks to improve your performance.

But what exactly is a Meta Marketing Pro, what’s their underlying purpose and what goes down when you speak to them on the phone?

What are Meta Marketing Pros?

The Meta Marketing Pro team, according to Facebook’s definition:

Allegedly, the Meta Pro Team offers complimentary customised guidance for a range of business challenges, giving you the right type of service to stay ahead of the competition and reach your full potential to grow your business online – with Facebook and Instagram.

You get:

• Personalised guidance on optimising your campaigns
• Help on demand with all things advertising
• Support designed to guide you in connecting with your customers

Sounds great, right? Free, helpful advice to help improve your advertising campaigns.

But, there has to be a catch.

Should you speak to a Meta Marketing Pro?

The reality is, the meta marketing pros aren’t just there to provide amazing support and guidance.

They’re predominantly a sales team. Oftentimes, an outsourced call centre with little training. Whilst doing some research for this article, I came across someone on Reddit who claimed they worked as a marketing pro. They commented:

“We spent 3-4 weeks of training learning marketing fundamentals and literally 1 day on Ads Manager with no explanation on anything.”

They went on to say that out of the 140 colleagues they had, none of them had actually run a campaign before.

If you’re a brand new advertiser to Facebook, and you’re having issues adjusting to the learning curves, then go for it and book a call. You may get connected with someone who’ll be able to walk you through all of your advertising options.

But what if you know what you’re doing, or if you already have an agency running your ads?

Should your advertising agency speak to a Meta Marketing Pro?

In short, no. When you hire an agency, you’re hiring them because they are experts. They should be well versed with the Facebook platform and get the best performance for your campaigns without having to speak to a marketing pro.

Your agency should know the platform better than the marketing pros and should be able to spend your budget where it’s best suited – rather than where Facebook wants you to spend it based on their goals.

Occasionally, we have clients forward us emails from Meta Marketing Pros asking us whether or not we think it’s of value, and should we be in touch with them pertaining to the said campaign(s). Well, not really — it’s not worth the time.

What transpired on a Meta Marketing Pro call?

It usually goes something like this:

“Hello Mr [name], have you tried running Instagram Reel ads? I definitely think Instagram Reel ads would help improve your performance.”

What goes down on the call simply depends on what Facebook needs at that moment in time. And we’re speaking from experience having scheduled a call with a so-called Meta Marketing Pro recently at the behest of one of our client.

Here are some of the things they may encourage you to do:

• • Increase budget – They’ll tell you that you need to increase your budget to improve performance. Rarely is this actually the case. They’re simply asking you to increase your budget to improve their ad revenue! I did tell you they were salespeople!
  • Broaden targeting – They’ll tell you that your target audience is too small and that you should expand it to target everyone. Broader targeting is definitely the way to go these days, but without understanding how it works is dangerous and you could end up wasting a lot of money.
  • Use the less popular placements – They’ll often suggest you run ads on the less-popular placements (such as Audience Network). This is because Facebook only has a limited amount of ad inventory available, and if they can get people to advertise on less-popular placements, it means more revenue for them.
  • They often don’t know their way around Facebook ads – We’ve often found they don’t know their way around the Facebook interface… and we’ve had to explain some of the features to them.
  • The calls are scripted – Like any call centre job, the people you speak to are often just following a script… which isn’t the most effective way to provide you with specific business help.
  • Learning phase – If something isn’t working, they’ll often just blame the learning phase… telling you that you need to keep running the ads until you exit the learning phase. Again, there is an element of truth in this, but not to the extent that they say. If your campaigns aren’t performing, it’s likely a bigger issue than simply still being in the learning phase.
  • Try new mobile-friendly creatives – with the rise of TikTok, the marketing pros are now pushing the importance of mobile-friendly ad creatives. This is good advice, but I think it’s more about competing with TikTok rather than sharing best practices from the kindness of their heart.
  • Optimise campaigns for landing page views – This one is just simply wrong and I have no clue as to why they suggest it. If you’re looking for conversions, you need to be running a conversions campaign, optimised for the event you’re trying to achieve (ie. purchases).

So, the bottom line is … if you’re new to Facebook advertising, and you need a little help, go ahead and schedule a call once you’ve received an invite from them. It’s free advice anyhow and at least there’s someone contracted by Facebook to guide you along the way (sort of). However, if you know your way around, you have access to some online assistance in the form of technical guidelines, know-hows, videos or even tutorials, skip the call. If you’re already working with an agency, don’t fret too much about this. They should have your bases covered by now.

This article first appeared on We Are Yatter. Adapted for use.