Facebook is a great way to target consumers with advertisements to grow your business. They offer an extensive targeting program based on demographics, interests and behaviors. But first you must know who you want to target.
All too frequently I ask a business owner to describe their core customer, their best customer...
"I know exactly who I want to target - a short, tall, male, female, from 12 to 112, living somewhere on earth. Oh yeah, with money,. Everybody loves us!"
And now you know how most advertising dollars are wasted. Currently within the Toledo, Ohio market, Facebook reaches 440,000 individuals on a regular basis. We could reach each of these individuals for our clients, or we could ask questions and drill down to understand who the client is currently reaching and doing business with.
I loved a conversation I had with a client in the healthcare industry recently who knew exactly who they were trying to reach.
"We have two target audiences. We are looking for African American males between the ages of 18 and 24. And senior citizens over the age of 60. Both of these are prime at risk groups. And we only want to target Lucas county."
Perfect. Now I know who we targeting. So the next step is to use the tools available in Facebook's ad managment and see how we can shrink the audience of 440,000 Facebook users.
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Geographic Targeting. By zip codes within Lucas county
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African American men between the ages of 18 and 24. Seniors +60
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Target by Interests including Entertainment, Sports and Food & Drink
We have now shrunk the projected audience down to 65,000 individuals. There are two reasons this targeting is important. First, few businesses can afford to be all things to all people. An accurate description of the individuals who are predisposed to use your services or buy your products increases your conversion rate.
Second, it allows you to dramatically increase your frequency rate. Very few businesses tell us that the budget is unlimited. "Figure out how much it will cost to market to everyone and we will increase our budget to match it." Actually I have never had a business tell me this...
Everyone works within a budget. The mathematical side of advertising is as simple as Reach and Frequency. The Reach is the size of the audience you want to expose to your message. Frequency is the number of times they see your ad. The tighter you reduce the reach, the more budget you have to increase the frequency.
Hypothetically, if your budget allowed you to spend $1 per prospect, your budget would equal $440,000 and you could afford to advertise to eveyone in Toledo one time. And the odds are that your campaign would fail miserably.
This is one of the reasons so many DOTCOM companies failed in the DOTCOM bubble in 2000. All In Advertising. "Let's spend all our advertising on The Super Bowl. 50 million people will see our ad and since everyone loves us and wants to be a customer, we will make millons." Sorry. It doesn't work that way. Name a single DOTCOM company that advertised in the 2000 Super Bowl. Name any advertiser. Name three advertisers in the 2015 Super Bowl. As you see, we have rather short memories, especailly if the message is of little interest to us.
Frequency is far more important than reach. It is called The Law of Familiarity. The more familiar a person is with your business, the more likley they are to do business with you. Research shows us that it takes multiple exposures to an advertising message before it penetrates our consciousness and registers an impressions.
In our hypothecital $440,000 Toledo budget, by reducing the reach to the 65,000 individuals identified as qualified prospects for the healthcare client, our reach grows from 1 per person to 6.8 times per person using the same hypothetical budget.
As you can see, accurately identifying your target audience allows you to stretch your advertising budget and increase your conversion rate.
Here is a list of e-Companies who did not make it. Pets.com, Epidemic.com, Lifeminders.com, OurBeginning.com, Netpliance.com, E-Stamps.com, e1040.com, OnMoney.com, EDS.com. Read more.
If you would like to know more on how Thrive can help you with your marketing efforts, give us a call at 419-776-7000 or email me at jeff@thriveim.com.
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