Pondering Facebook Advertising - Part Three: Making the Connection

This is the third installment on Facebook.
In the first installment, I gave an overview of Facebook advertising and the basic difference between selling products versus services.

In the second installment I talked about positioning your produce or service on Facebook.

So now you've got a landing page for when someone clicks. And you've figured out how to position your product or service so it works well with the mindset of Facebook browsers. All good. Now we get to the juicy good stuff.

How do you connect with your target market on Facebook? How do you find them so you can put your advertising in front of their eyeballs?

Just as with any marketing, you have to figure out what you're going to sell and who you're going to sell it to. For example, are you looking for the basic Zap Data search of 1-25 desktops within 30 miles of your zip code? Or do you want to dig a little deeper?


Who is your target?

As with all advertising, you need to figure out who your market is. The more focused advertising is, the better it works. You "can" advertise to the whole world. But the whole world doesn't care and there's no way to isolate your message. So you need to pick some ideal client and advertise to that person.

When you pick a specific audience, you can send a targeted message. And just because you target lawyers (for example) doesn't prevent you from also having a campaign for accountants. The cool thing about Facebook targeting is that your target audience will see you ad again and again until you wear them down and they click. You only pay for clicks, same as Google, but with Google your ad is only seen when someone goes looking for your keyword.

With Facebook, people see your ad based on their interests, behavior, age, and connections. In other words, Facebook advertising is geared toward who people are.

You can do the standard demographics, but you can also look at the music they listen to, their hobbies, and all kinds of cool things.

If you're at a specific age, you may have seen ads that say (for example) "Most 40 year olds don't have enough insurance." Only 40 years olds see that ad. You could literally create an ad for people aged 41, 42, 43, etc. It is kind of attention grabbing when an ad calls out your specific age. There's even an option to target people on their birthday. Figure out how to tie that in to your ad.

Some likes and interests for targeting include:

- Information from the Activities, Interests, Favorite Music, Favorite TV Shows, Favorite Movies, and Favorite Books sections of the profile

- Names of groups or Pages a user belongs to or is a fan of

- User's political and religious views

- and other demographics, such as occupation and job title


SO the bottom line is to try to figure out what you ideal client looks like on Facebook.


How do you isolate them?

How do you get started with that? Well, one easy thing you can do is to befriend your current clients and see how they define themselves. Then befriend key prospects and review their profiles. Where do you see some common attributes you can target?

If you haven't even looked at the Facebook advertising tool, just scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click on advertising. Tip toe around, create an ad campaign, and play with it. You can set a very reasonable budget and see how it works.

You'll be able to spend as much time as you need playing with the targeting tool.

Note: If your business has a Facebook Page (formerly Fan Page), you can also advertise specifically to people who follow your Facebook Page. This is called connection targeting. You can target anyone who is a fan of your page, a member of your Group, RSVP’d to your Event, or authorized your Application.

You can also exclude these people - so your ad won't be seen by people who are already within your sphere of influence. That will save you money. You have to figure out whether your fan page is primarily watched by people who are prospects or clients. Then either target or exclude.

As for total "strangers" there's another approach. You ad will have to target people and entice them to click.


How do you attract them?

The coolest thing about Facebook ads is that you automatically get to use a graphic. There's a challenge to that, but also a great deal of potential. If you can put up something appealling, then have Facebook present that to your target audience again and again, Resistance is Futile. Eventually they're going to click.

I recommend you focus on the Interests that you are using to target in the first place. If you're looking at doctors who have expressed an interest in Electronic Medical Records, then key in on that. They have essentially self-selected your ad. You might as well complete the connection!

Just remember my comment from the earlier posts on this topic: Your landing page is critical to your success. Once the visitor decides to click on your advertisement, Facebook's job is done. After that you need to make sure the landing page does it's job and delivers a form, a video request, or whatever you've defined as the step in your online sales process.


:-)

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