10 Tips for Building Fans via Facebook Advertising
What are the interests and demographics of the people who already love your brand?
What are the interests and demographics of the people who already love your brand?
Managing Google campaigns can be immensely complex and if you really want to make them work, they have to be nurtured and optimized in real time. Ad copy, bids, targeting selects, and keywords all have to be constantly tested and manipulated based on ROI results and changing marketing conditions. Well, guess what, the same applies to Facebook advertising.
Making pay-per-click (or pay-per-like) Facebook ads can be even more complex because you’re not just dealing with simple keyword-targeted ads (the first mistake people typically make when looking at Facebook). For example, if you want to sell life insurance on Google, you use the keyword “Life Insurance.” But on Facebook, no one is searching for life insurance or has necessarily listed life insurance as an interest or like. However, lots of people have expressed interest or listed themselves in certain categories such as age group, getting married, having babies, etc.
The second big mistake is that people list all the demographics and interest categories for their target in one giant selected group and then they run just two or three ads for that group for the duration of the campaign. They treat it like a display campaign, where the creative is launched, the optimization is done on the creative level, and the results are tabulated. So the same people start seeing the ads again and again and the ads rapidly burn out.
This simple approach hardly comes close to the real-time nurturing and optimization that is actually required and typically applied to say, a Google AdWords program.
In this column I want to list some tactics and best practices related to getting fans via Facebook advertising. The first thing you have to think about is what are the interests and demographics of the people who already love your brand. That is what we are trying to accomplish with building our fan base in the early stages. They are the lowest hanging fruit and will be a) the most engaged and b) the most likely group to become advocates. Real-world fans who become Facebook fans.
So how do we get those real-world fans via Facebook ads?
One of the challenges of Facebook is its continual innovation and modifications to its ad offerings. But for an optimization-focused marketer, this is great because it increases the options that can be tested. So a final tip is to make sure you are up on all the current targeting selects and ad formats. They change very often, so keeping a change log and option menu is advisable.
So those are the big tips for now. As always, please comment and share any tips you have with the readers of this column.
Harry is off today. This column was originally published on July 19, 2011 on ClickZ.