Facebook Advertising

sandin

I posted something along these lines in a thread during the recent server problems on boards and the post disappeared after the server update.

Facebook advertising - big response for small money.

My target market is female 20+

Since July, I cut all marketing spend except Facebook.

My spend on Facebook has been about 15k since then (last year we spent over 50k in advertising from July to December). Sales for the 6 months are 12% up - we just did a final clearance of xmas stock campaign in early January, total cost for boosting over all pages we run was under €200. Total increase on turnover from same 2 days last year is 40%+ (you're talking almost 20k extra!) and extra staff had to be called in!

If you get to understand Facebook and your target customers, then its a brilliant way of advertising. - I've learnt plenty of tricks too! - Best one is to have large plain background with smallish text placed very strategically to avoid their text in image rules.

With paid "likes" campaigns and boosting posts to people in your areas, you can build up a very large target audience - we're at over 70k likes between 5 pages (different pages target different cities).

In the advance options of facebook you can really target your market - e.g. Women in Portlaoise age between 25 & 40 who are married. You can also decide if you want people within 10/15/20 etc miles of your town for yur campaign.

Your first part is to create your page and populate it with interesting stuff - not always stuff about your business, sometimes interesting snippets about fashion or home decor (target your specific market) can get more views.

Once you have your page populated with articles (plenty of photo sets too), you can start buying likes. - We spent about €5 a day over a 2 month time frame per page and got each page to the 3,000 level - we then did a campaign (article boost) to target both those who liked us and their friends - after a few €20 campaigns we were up to about 4k likes for each page. A few more weeks of targeted "like" campaigns and we had each page at 5,000 - 7,000. Our main company page is at 30,000 (but that's international).

Some may say 5k likes is not a lot, but if you have 5k women age 25 - 50 in the immediate area of your store and they are your target customer - its 24k gold. They are opting in to hear from you - they are potential / current customers, they WANT to hear from you.

Once you have your likes built up you need to create and boost your posts.(don't expect 5k immediately - I have a strong brand name, I'm building a campaign for an unknown company as a favour and it has taken 3 months to reach 2k likes - but its 2 k very targeted likes),

This is where facebook make their millions (or billions) - those who "like" you will probably have "liked" another 50+ pages and will have approx. 200 "friends" - so you put up a post and its lost off the page in a matter of minutes.

Therefore you have to "Boost" your post - this means your post will be one of the things those who like you and their friends will see the next time they log in to facebook. A "boost" of a single post will cost anything from €15 to €200, my own experience shows €20 - €40 will get you a decent response.

A post can include a photo or image - the image / photo can only have 20% text based on facebook's own "grid" - https://www.facebook.com/help/468870969814641/

But creativity comes into play and exact positions - for a sale, you could have a totally plain red background and place the "sale" text strategically so that it is under 20% - you have your sale image and your text will give the info.

Also, be careful when you post, Tuesday - Thursday is best, Saturday before 4pm quite good, never Friday afternoons / evenings or saturday evenings - too much chatter on facebook then, or Monday mornings - again too much rubbish to fight against.

Facebook themselves give loads of info about how to do this - (thats how they make their money) - and it is well worth learning and experimenting.

Hope this helps and if anyone in facebook wants to give me some free adverts for this free publicity, I'll accept them!

jimmii

Excellent post! We only started using the advertising in November and are upto 3100ish likes now as you say if those are your actual target market it makes a huge difference I see so many "larger" pages than ours who have a talk about number less than half ours as they have a load of random (or possibly bought likes) that just aren't really relevant to our page. Even with 3100 likes our page is pretty busy we often get 50+ likes on posts it varies massively on the type of post for us its "behind the scenes" type stuff people like to see whats going on behind the curtain!

Are you able to show an example of this:

sandin wrote: »

Best one is to have large plain background with smallish text placed very strategically to avoid their text in image rules.

We basically started by trying a huge range of adverts and seeing what worked I think we made 20 and then after a day stopped the ones that weren't having as big an impression and kept on with the ones proving to be good value in the end we just went with one which was a picture of a cushion with a cat in a hat on it which was proving 90% of the new likes!

Atomico

sandin wrote: »

I posted something along these lines in a thread during the recent server problems on boards and the post disappeared after the server update.

Facebook advertising - big response for small money.

My target market is female 20+

Since July, I cut all marketing spend except Facebook.

My spend on Facebook has been about 15k since then (last year we spent over 50k in advertising from July to December). Sales for the 6 months are 12% up - we just did a final clearance of xmas stock campaign in early January, total cost for boosting over all pages we run was under €200. Total increase on turnover from same 2 days last year is 40%+ (you're talking almost 20k extra!) and extra staff had to be called in!

If you get to understand Facebook and your target customers, then its a brilliant way of advertising. - I've learnt plenty of tricks too! - Best one is to have large plain background with smallish text placed very strategically to avoid their text in image rules.

With paid "likes" campaigns and boosting posts to people in your areas, you can build up a very large target audience - we're at over 70k likes between 5 pages (different pages target different cities).

In the advance options of facebook you can really target your market - e.g. Women in Portlaoise age between 25 & 40 who are married. You can also decide if you want people within 10/15/20 etc miles of your town for yur campaign.

Your first part is to create your page and populate it with interesting stuff - not always stuff about your business, sometimes interesting snippets about fashion or home decor (target your specific market) can get more views.

Once you have your page populated with articles (plenty of photo sets too), you can start buying likes. - We spent about €5 a day over a 2 month time frame per page and got each page to the 3,000 level - we then did a campaign (article boost) to target both those who liked us and their friends - after a few €20 campaigns we were up to about 4k likes for each page. A few more weeks of targeted "like" campaigns and we had each page at 5,000 - 7,000. Our main company page is at 30,000 (but that's international).

Some may say 5k likes is not a lot, but if you have 5k women age 25 - 50 in the immediate area of your store and they are your target customer - its 24k gold. They are opting in to hear from you - they are potential / current customers, they WANT to hear from you.

Once you have your likes built up you need to create and boost your posts.(don't expect 5k immediately - I have a strong brand name, I'm building a campaign for an unknown company as a favour and it has taken 3 months to reach 2k likes - but its 2 k very targeted likes),

This is where facebook make their millions (or billions) - those who "like" you will probably have "liked" another 50+ pages and will have approx. 200 "friends" - so you put up a post and its lost off the page in a matter of minutes.

Therefore you have to "Boost" your post - this means your post will be one of the things those who like you and their friends will see the next time they log in to facebook. A "boost" of a single post will cost anything from €15 to €200, my own experience shows €20 - €40 will get you a decent response.

A post can include a photo or image - the image / photo can only have 20% text based on facebook's own "grid" - https://www.facebook.com/help/468870969814641/

But creativity comes into play and exact positions - for a sale, you could have a totally plain red background and place the "sale" text strategically so that it is under 20% - you have your sale image and your text will give the info.

Also, be careful when you post, Tuesday - Thursday is best, Saturday before 4pm quite good, never Friday afternoons / evenings or saturday evenings - too much chatter on facebook then, or Monday mornings - again too much rubbish to fight against.

Facebook themselves give loads of info about how to do this - (thats how they make their money) - and it is well worth learning and experimenting.

Hope this helps and if anyone in facebook wants to give me some free adverts for this free publicity, I'll accept them!

Hi Sandin,

How did you track your return on the Facebook spend, i.e. the 12% increase in like-for-like sales?

sandin

jimmii wrote: »

Excellent post! We only started using the advertising in November and are upto 3100ish likes now as you say if those are your actual target market it makes a huge difference I see so many "larger" pages than ours who have a talk about number less than half ours as they have a load of random (or possibly bought likes) that just aren't really relevant to our page. Even with 3100 likes our page is pretty busy we often get 50+ likes on posts it varies massively on the type of post for us its "behind the scenes" type stuff people like to see whats going on behind the curtain!

Are you able to show an example of this:



We basically started by trying a huge range of adverts and seeing what worked I think we made 20 and then after a day stopped the ones that weren't having as big an impression and kept on with the ones proving to be good value in the end we just went with one which was a picture of a cushion with a cat in a hat on it which was proving 90% of the new likes!

click the link in the post and facebook themselves show you what to do. - I simply did a large red square with the work "Sale" in white and played arround with the positioning of the text to get under the 20% level.

Atomico wrote: »

Hi Sandin,

How did you track your return on the Facebook spend, i.e. the 12% increase in like-for-like sales?

Impossible to track exactly, (can you track any retail advertising response perfectly) but we did do promotions in some location and not others on some weekends and those locations saw a higher than normal turnover. We did absolutely no other advertising except for texting and email in the period. (forgot to say getting email addresses and mobile opt in from customers is another very cheap form of advertising) Local papers and radio that we used to use were not happy at all.

Customers would also mention the promotions.

We would also have a lot of comments from customers (pages manager installed on phone and ipad) and we would always answer within minutes up til about 11pm. Some posts would get 100+ comments - some can be a pain in the ass, but you have to bite your lip. Anyone that make stupid or scurrilous comments simply get their post deleted.

but best way of knowing is the spike in turnover when you do a concerted campaign - as with any marketing, you do need to have a good offer too.

One thing that I did not like was the "like and share" competitions - there's a huge number of people who do nothing but "like and share" anything and everything if there's a potential for a prize, but I do run competitions every few weeks for those who already like the pages and also give local staff permission to post local news / events.

jimmii

sandin wrote: »

click the link in the post and facebook themselves show you what to do. - I simply did a large red square with the work "Sale" in white and played arround with the positioning of the text to get under the 20% level.

Yeh that was what I was after! Going to give that a try nice and simple and its going to grab attention!

Agree on those like & share comps I hate those shame Facebook relaxed there policy on those I think they should have started to stamp down on them.

Peterdalkey

Glad you reposted this sandin.

It gives great clarity as to how to maximise social media advertising for certain types of businesses, in B2C. It is important to note that these precise strategies evolved from actual testing of various models and you target your campaigns demographically (age/sex)and geographically to align with your stores. You know who your target market is, and they do spend on your products and that FB is largely used by this group. I am sure each campaign has a particular marketing “hook” and a clear “call to action” . It is also clear that you have invested a huge amount of effort to craft these campaigns, so real dedication and persistence are vital to try to emulate your success. Your sharing of this will be of great help to many who are able to use this medium to grow their businesses at a very modest cash spend.

Clearly FB offers huge opportunities for certain types of businesses selling to consumer markets but sadly for some of us it has the potential to be a huge waste of time and resources...., particularly those selling B2B products and services. You really do need to know a lot about your target market, including their habits and preferences to make this work for you, plus you must be able to tick ALL the boxes outlined in sandin’s roadmap.

terryhobdell

Peterdalkey wrote: »

Glad you reposted this sandin.

It gives great clarity as to how to maximise social media advertising for certain types of businesses, in B2C. It is important to note that these precise strategies evolved from actual testing of various models and you target your campaigns demographically (age/sex)and geographically to align with your stores. You know who your target market is, and they do spend on your products and that FB is largely used by this group. I am sure each campaign has a particular marketing “hook” and a clear “call to action” . It is also clear that you have invested a huge amount of effort to craft these campaigns, so real dedication and persistence are vital to try to emulate your success. Your sharing of this will be of great help to many who are able to use this medium to grow their businesses at a very modest cash spend.

Clearly FB offers huge opportunities for certain types of businesses selling to consumer markets but sadly for some of us it has the potential to be a huge waste of time and resources...., particularly those selling B2B products and services. You really do need to know a lot about your target market, including their habits and preferences to make this work for you, plus you must be able to tick ALL the boxes outlined in sandin’s roadmap.

there is a very interesting technique on Facebook where you can directly focus on people who visit your website and are on Facebook, and advertise directly to them based on what they browsed
It seems a bit creepy in some ways but if handled correctly could be very powerful.