How To Advertise on Facebook: Facebook Marketing 101

We’re going to shift gears entirely now and really take a look at the power of facebook
advertising. We have been running a lot more direct response and branding campaigns through
facebook because obviously it's a huge medium. It has absolutely mind boggling number of
users and page views. We’re actually going to walk through how to use facebook successfully.
It can be daunting but you really can use facebook and actually turn a profit, actually
see that direct response power. We’re going to walk through a specific example of this.
What makes facebook so impressive beyond the pure reach of it is the targeting ability
is amazing. We’re going to walk through how you can target it but as a little bit
of an aside one of the big things to understand and what makes facebook challenging is it
is fundamentally different from what you find with search engine marketing with using adwords
and advertising on Google. That has to do with intent. When somebody searches on Google
and you have an add that pops up that is somebody that is specifically seeking out information.
The difference number one on facebook is they aren’t showing intent for your product or
service. You need to approach advertising fundamentally in a different way. You cannot
apply what works on Google and adds in Microsoft and apply that to facebook. You have to really
start fresh and take a step back.
The second thing is that people are on facebook to be on facebook. When you go to Google you're
actually going on Google to be connected with another resource and immediately leave Google.
Hitting an ad is very much a part, an integrated streamline part of what your experience is.
On facebook you're specifically not leaving. You’re in there to look at pictures and
to post updates and not necessarily click an add and be taken away from that environment.
We’re going to talk about ways that we're going to address these two issues. That there
is not intent, people are not actively searching for your product and service and they don’t
necessarily want to be connected with information. Those are two really challenging things to
get around. Luckily the way we get around it is we have the ability to do some pretty
amazing targeting via facebook's advertising system.
Our example here that we're going to use is a product called Nox Edge. They’re a client
of ours and this is a workout related product. It gets you buff after you work out. Nox Edge
was actually smart enough to go and actually sign the situation character from the jersey
shore on MTV to be their spokesperson. We’re going to use this as sort of the theme throughout.
This is a screenshot of what you see inside facebook's advertising system for those of
you that have seen this. We’re going to use an example on how we would use facebook
to hyper target and to ultimately sell this direct response product. We want people to
purchase this Nox Edge product.
We’re going to start here and this is the way the targeting works. We’re going to
originally select people in the United States and I’m specifically going to select people
that are, just to show off the targeting, that are exactly 23 years old. These are only
people on facebook in the united states that are exactly 23 years old. You’re going to
see that yields me 5.3 million people that are 23 in the United States. That’s pretty
amazing.
We’re going to go back and we're going to select that they are men and not surprisingly
we're going to see that number drop about in half to 2.5 million people that are males
that are exactly 23 years old. Now we're going to go and enter some interests as an example
of the type of targeting here. For those of you that watch the jersey shore we're going
to enter the interest being the show jersey shore. The favorite activity of the jersey
shore folks gym, tanning and laundry. Let’s throw in gold's gym as an interest and working
out as an interest as well.
Now this is going to significantly drop down our 2.5 million people and we're going to
end up with a 152,000 people. This is a really amazing number. 152,000 individual people
on facebook in the United States that are exactly 23 years old, that are men and that
specifically like and we're going to talk about where this like comes from. The jersey
shore, gym, tan, laundry, gold's gym or working out. Funny aside as it turns out that is exactly
the number of 23 year old men in New Jersey. All kidding aside.
Where did they get these numbers? Where did these 152,000 people, where did this interest
get discerned by facebook? There’s actually a couple of different places and most people
don’t really realize this. We’re going to look at an article on men's health. It’s
the chinup plan for every man and you can see the almost ubiquitous like button that
you've seen really kind of explode all over the internet over the past year or so. If
you click this like button what you're really doing is feeding facebook with the information
that this kind of content, in this case chinup, men's health, workout, etc. is content that
is of interest to you. They’re actually use this to target ads like this Nox Edge
ad to you.
the second way that most people do know is that you can actually specifically in your
facebook profile enter your activities and interests and this case had you explicitly
entered gym, tan, laundry, jersey shore etc. in interests then that would be a very straight
way to target but most people aren’t really entering that many interests. That’s why
facebook rolled out this product and you can see the final way which is pretty interesting
is that they'll actually use facebook status updates not even likes and not even activities
or interests to also help target ads.
In this example here we have reference to jersey shore and the situation. That is something
that could feed facebook's knowledge of your interest and then later allow us to target
an ad for Nox Edge to you. This is an example because we were able to get so specific we
can do a really interesting things with the advertising. We can see here instead of just
an ad like get ripped like the situation. We can actually say hey 23 year old. That’s
a little bit extreme but the point is that we're able to really, really get targeted.
We could advertise to people only who's birthday it is.
There’s about half a million people a day whose birthday it is and to say happy birthday
by Nox Edge. again the power of this targeting gets interesting and you're going to get a
lot more eyeballs staring down into your ad if you don’t something like hey 23 year
old to people that are 23. Now it turns out that you want to advertise to everyone that's
18 to 30. We can have 13 different ads for people 18, 19 20 and so forth and have them
field targeted to all of them.
The other thing that is going to be really important, this goes back, everything is going
to go back to testing you're going to find is to look at different images here. Now these
are all quite stunning images of the situation. The important thing is some of these may work
better than others. We're actually going to talk to about the importance of not necessarily
finding one winner of these that last forever but the actual importance of keeping things
fresh and mixing them up.
One of the biggest issues that you'll find is that things get stale really quickly. The
click through rate of ads really falls off a cliff very quickly because you're reaching
again just 23 year olds who like this. It’s a really defined group. If you're showing
them the same image day after day obviously interest is going to wane. We could sell the
same product but we see to mix up the ads. these all pretty much do the same thing in
my mind but they are visually different and for people that log in to their facebook account
every single day there's going to be a dropoff if you just have the same image showing every
day.
This is kind of just a mock up graph to get the point across, to sort of illustrate this
dropoff but it's important to note here. The point here is that day after day the same
ad is getting a lower and lower click through rate because again you're reaching the same
crowd. What you’re seeing here is that even though we're advertising the same thing week
after week after week just by refreshing the creative, the image, the title etc. We're
going to be able to avoid that really precipitous dropoff in click through rate.
To kind of address that earlier question of the challenges of facebook advertising. The
other challenge as well. People don’t want to leave facebook. When you have an ad where
do you want to send this user? We’re going to switch pop culture gears here and use glee
as an example. You have a couple of places you can send users. You can send users directly
to a facebook fanpage. In this case I’ll pick my demographic and the ad for glee goes
to just the glee fanpage. The problem is that for most people, most of our clients and most
people that we encounter you're not satisfied at just with driving fans. For coca cola they
have millions of fans. That could be a solution. You’re probably selling something. You’re
looking for a lead or a sale. Simply to send people to a fanpage and hope that people click
and they like your brand probably don’t even know what that's worth and I don’t
want to spend a lot of money doing that. That’s not a great option.
The second option is to just move people completely off from the site and send them over to your
website. This has the advantage of course of you control the experience on the website
and they're at a place where they're doing what you want to do. The problem is that it's
really offputting for a user to just be thrown away from the facebook experience and onto
a website. A lot of times you're going to see a really high bounce rate for that or
people just immediately closing that tab that pops up.
the third option and the option that we're finding is really successful for our clients
that we're doing a lot with is when we rollout social media advertising for our clients is
to actually kind of come up with this interim step. This interim step here for glee would
be, we have an action. We actually want people to buy the glee albums but we don’t just
want to throw them off the site from the ads. We’re going to create an interim experience
kind of a halfway point which is a page that kind of looks like a webpage but it exists
still within facebook. We’re not throwing them out on facebook yet. I’m actually giving
the ability to click the buy it now button and sort of start that first step of the process
of a direct response of purchasing.
when you actually buy now at that point it's going to take you off to the shopping cart
on your website but what we've done here is we've created a slightly better transition
of an experience from facebook to a page where your first step of taking an outside action
is still within facebook and then you complete the transaction or the rest of the experience
on your own website because actually you can’t do this completely within facebook.
This sort of answers the question of how do we handle that issue of people they go to
Google to connect with other information. They don’t go to facebook to necessarily
leave and this is a method that we find very successful to get around this sort of built
in limitation.