The problem most businesses face is where to start. Our latest client, who is a national department store faced the same problem. With no social media influence and starting with ZERO Facebook Fans, we helped them take the big step in getting started with Social Media.
Over three months we’ve upskilled the key members of staff on the three social media platforms that their target audience had been identified as spending the most time on. This happened through various workshops with department managers along with a social media policy that can be given to each of the 100+ employees.
Starting from scratch with a company dating back to 1882 was difficult but none the less, a challenge I was willing to take on. Once those who I had been working with felt prepared to take over all marketing comfortably, things started to progress.
I then sat down with the same company for another meeting where they wanted advice on how to promote a huge, instore event coming up. This was the perfect opportunity to build the brand online and connect with their niche target audience.
During the meeting, we agreed on running a 3 day PPC campaign in Facebook in conjunction with a Facebook Offer, focused on growing their brand, getting more likes and generating leads through the competition sign up form which asked for name and email address.
After a difficult conversation with my previous Facebook Competition tool, Wildfire (now owned by Google) stating that to have an account with them, allowing me to run competitions would cost $36,000 per year which is extortionate, we decided to use Wishpond as the 3rd party software to run the Offer in Facebook.
Once we had decided on the platform, we worked with the companies inhouse designers where we had images and text copy along with T&C’s that match Facebook’s T&C’s signed off. We then went into Facebook’s new “Power Editor” tool which is great to keep track on every page post as well as create adverts.
When you are designing images for your campaign, you need to make sure they don’t contain more than 20% text otherwise Facebook will block your campaign.
When it comes to running a PPC campaign, you have a lot of filter options, especially where you target audience are concerned. Make sure you sit down and consider the below things to make sure you are targeting the right kind of customers;
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Age & Gender
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Location
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Likes
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Interest
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Relationship
You can also have a Facebook advert specific to those only using their smartphones if you are only targeting those on mobile.
With a small daily budget and with constant supervision over the adverts and their performance, we found the “News Feed” adverts to convert the best in a specific location targeted at just one gender.
The overall results were impressive with a 583% increase in likes but what was really interesting was that over a quarter of these new likes were organic likes from friends of friends who had click on the paid post. This is not only a great sign for the brand but increased the true value of the CPC (cost per click).
We also noticed that one third of all click came from mobile (not as high as Facebook suggested at 50% but this still shows that mobile is becoming more and more important). At peak, the adverts total reach which is “The number of people who saw any activity from your page including posts, posts by other people, page like adverts, mentions and check-ins” was an astounding 139,340 people (an increase of 54,543.1% from the previous week)… Where else can you get targeted brand awareness in a social environment like this?
Looking at the best time of day for the PPC adverts, day 1 (Monday) at 6PM turned out to be the best for converting viewers into fans but also the last day of the campaign around 9PM also proved successful.
We collected names and email addresses of those who had entered the offer through wishpond which turned into £1,000’s being spent at the event which proved to be an incredible return on their investment.
I would love to hear your success or failures in running a targeted campaign in Facebook.