If you’ve spent any 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 will explain that they’ve got some tips and tricks to improve your performance.
But what is a Meta Marketing pro, what’s their purpose and what goes down when you speak to them on the phone? Should your agency speak to them?
Let’s dive in…
What are Meta Marketing Pros?
Before I get into my opinion of the Meta Marketing Pro team, let me explain what they are, using 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 campaigns.
Well… it’s not so bright and rosy.
Should you speak to a Meta Marketing Pro?
The reality is, the 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.
But I don’t think the programme is all that bad for everyone.
If you’re a brand-new advertiser (and you don’t know the platform), then go for it. Book a call. You may get connected with someone who’ll be able to walk you through all of your advertising options.
It can also be useful to take a call and build a relationship with a “marketing pro”. If something ever goes wrong in your account, you’ve got someone to call. For example, if your ads are rejected or your account gets restricted, you’ve got someone you can reach out to.
In short – if you’re a complete beginner with no internal contact with Facebook, go for it. Book in a call, hear what they’ve got to say, ask some questions and build that relationship.
But what about if you know what you’re doing, or if you have an agency running your ads?
Does your agency need to speak to the Meta Marketing Pros?
In short, no.
Or at least, I would hope not…
When you hire an agency, you’re hiring them because they are experts. They should know the Facebook platform inside out and should know how to get the best performance from your campaigns without having to speak to a marketing pro.
Your Facebook ad 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).
At Yatter, we often have clients forward us emails from Marketing Pros asking us whether or not we think it’s of value. Nine times out of ten, it’s not worthwhile.
What happens on a Meta Marketing Pro call?
It usually goes something like this:
“Hello Mr Yatter, have you tried running Instagram Reel ads?”
“Yes, I have done for years…”
“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.
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).
Wrapping Up…
So there we have it – should you take the calls from Meta Marketing Pros? I hate giving this answer… but it depends. If you’re a new advertiser with little experience, go for it. However, if you work with an agency, don’t worry about it. They should have it covered.
If you’re looking for an agency to manage your Facebook ad campaigns, don’t hesitate to reach out. At Yatter, we’ll set up, manage and optimise your campaigns using our years of experience – which is going to get you results much faster than relying on the Meta Marketing Pro team. Book a complimentary call here to get started.
