Don’t treat your business Facebook account like a pinball game

With the start of the New Year, we like to advise our clients to make a resolution to use the wealth of data available on Facebook to target their marketing efforts.

Treating Facebook marketing like a pinball game — launching balls blindly and hoping they hit a few targets before dropping from sight — is no way to make the most of this powerful marketing tool. While it’s tempting to bask in the easy victories such as “Likes” and “Shares” numbers, Facebook puts a whole world of information at your fingertips to help you make the most of your advertising dollars.

“One of the reasons our Facebook ad campaigns have been so successful for our clients is because of the advanced targeting the platform offers,” says Jan Hirabayashi, BroadBased chief executive officer. “Facebook is continually updating its targeting capabilities, and we’re able to refine our audience to deliver better results and get the most from our budgets.”

Here are some of the steps we walk through with our clients as we develop their Facebook ad plan.

After seeing a spike in click-through rates on a newsletter article for our client Dentistry 4 Children & Teens 2, we created a Facebook ad based on it. The ad was targeted at families with young children around the two office locations, and the website received a 90 percent increase in Facebook referral clicks as a result.

Size up your customers

Who do you think your customers are, and what do they want based on previous responses to your ads? Could there be unexpected trends within that data? For example, are most responses coming from women versus men, Millennials versus Baby Boomers, parents versus singles? Gradually, as you learn more about them in response to each successive ad, you’ll be able to home in on the best marketing approach.

Zero in on location

One sure way to undermine the effectiveness of your marketing is to cast your net too wide. It’s better to identify a market location and target your ads accordingly. Facebook can help you narrow your search to specific zip codes and neighborhoods and clear demographic groups within that geographic area. Once you’ve secured one area, you can think about moving on to another geographic target to expand your reach.

Smaller is better

Here’s an ad for our real estate client La Fontana that we created to gauge interest among residents in the Northeast and Canada looking for a winter home. Targeting an audience based on geography, income, and interests, our “snowbird” campaign has been a huge hit, generating almost 1,000 website clicks per month.

This advice works in conjunction with the previous step. Research has shown that reaching out to a large number of people is more likely to result in a relatively high number of clicks — but only a handful of conversions. So although narrowing your target audience may result in fewer clicks, you’ll get more conversions, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Broaden your audiences

Although it’s better to fish with a smaller net, you should consider fishing in more places. Using your Facebook data, try testing additional small groups that may be interested in your products or services. For example, if you’ve had good results marketing to new moms, trying creating a new audience of pregnant women or new grandparents. This type of testing sharpens your insight as to what your customers and potential customers need and want while identifying sources of manageable growth.

For more information about the ways we can help you use Facebook ads to their best advantage, call 904-398-7279, ext. 17, to talk with Chris Ramaglia about your Facebook strategy.