Social media advertising, when run correctly, can deliver fantastic awareness for a fraction of the cost of classic advertising channels.
Today on Get Social, we analyse one Facebook advert we recently ran for a client to demonstrate the capabilities of social media advertising.
Dawn Of The King Medieval Festival
Dawn Of The King Medieval Festival founder and organiser Donovan Fisher was looking to harness social media to build awareness for what he hoped would be the first of many events.
Donovan had already started his social platforms and built a small following, but he needed to increase his reach substantially in a short period of time on a very limited budget.
Results - $80 Spend for 1000 Engagements
For an ad spend of $80.59, this ad was seen by more than ten thousand targeted Facebook users. Yep, that isn't a typo.
387 reactions, 134 shares, reach of 10,351 and 17,272 impressions.
For well under one hundred dollars, ten thousand people were made aware of Donovan’s event. And not just anyone, location specific, interest aligned and age appropriate people. q(insert screen shot)
I’ve broken the success of this ad into 4 main points:
Ad Image
Copy
Link
Audience Targeting
1. He’s got the look - Ad Image
The main reason for the fantastic performance of this Facebook Ad was this great image of a knight.
Striking, clear and intense, this image is not only excellent quality, but relevant. It is exactly what Donovan's target market want to see.
The quality of your images is hyper critical to the success of your business not just on social, but in the digital space as a whole. I’m aware that I’m stating the painfully obvious, but I still have a hard time convincing some business owners that the images of their business are KIND OF A BIG DEAL.
Potential customers will judge your business wholly and solely on the images they see. They will then compare these images to your competition and make a decision. If your competitor is using professional quality photographs, and you are using pictures from your phone, guess where that customer is going to purchase from!
For Donovan though, this will be the first time he has put on this festival, so he has an image catalogue of zero. We were however able to utilise images of performers who would be featuring in the festival, as is the image in this ad. This is a good hack that many businesses miss completely for content - supplier images.
In many industries, suppliers have promotional images that are free for client use. After all, you are promoting their product. Always make sure of permissions first though.
2. Words that say a thousand words - Copy
The options when writing copy for your advert are endless. Short, medium, long, first person, third person, call to action, story based, the list goes on and on. The copy in this version of the ad was short and concise, designed to grab attention and inspire the user to seek more information.
We then had a call to action and a link. I was pleased with the way we were able to capture the value and scale of the event in a few very short phrases.
3. Never Break The Chain - The Link
I always like to include the link in the ad copy itself.
We have been conditioned to click on hyperlinked blue text since the dawn of the internet and it still holds true today. In any email newsletter I send out, the best performing link is usually the hyperlinked 'CLICK HERE instead of the big red button saying the “Learn More”. Strange, but them’s the numbers and the numbers don’t lie, just like your hips.
Including a website link can be problematic though. What do you do if the link is long and ugly and going to take up three or four precious text lines? Especially on mobile? I have the answer for you - Bitly. Bitly is a FREE program that allows you shorten and customise URL’s. It even allows you to track the clicks on these shortened url’s so you can have multiple Bitlinks on multiple ads and see what link is getting the most clicks. Ingenious!
4. Get To Your Crowd - Audience Targeting
Now we get to discuss the most powerful aspect of Facebook Advertising, Audience Targeting. The level of detail offered by Facebook Advertising is unparalleled in the history of marketing. This may sound like a big call, but it’s not, it’s a fact, and here’s how they do it - user activity data.
You are probably one of those people, as I am, that fills out the bare minimum of your Facebook profile. Hence, you may believe that Facebook knows relatively little about you, and you would be oh so wrong. What reveals more information about a person than they could ever write in a profile?
Activity and engagement.
Facebook knows every single thing you do on Facebook. What articles you’ve looked at, what pages you follow, what friends you’ve blocked and even that weird fetish you only indulge in on Friday nights when no one else is awake. They then utilise this data and are able to offer it to us as marketers i.e. you like and follow and engage with a lot of cooking pages and posts to do with cooking, so you will then be put into “Interest - Cooking” category. There are also very powerful audience targeting tools regarding Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences which we don’t have to discuss now, but rest assured, this is the most powerful targeting we’ve ever had access to as marketers.
For Donovan’s adverts, we targeted by location and interest with broad age targeting. We wanted to build engagement and awareness not just for the festival but for use in future campaigns. Any interests to do with all things medieval were added, ensuring our Donovan’s ads were aimed at people who would be interested in what he was selling.
Moral Of The Story - Engagement & Shares
Ironically, what drives an ad to great awareness focused results like the ad we have just discussed is the organic activity on that ad.
So it's not the dollars spent but the user activity on that ad. Facebook sees that activity and rewards it. The comments, reactions and and especially the shares all signal to Facebook that this is a fantastic ad, people enjoy seeing it, and that it should be shown to more people for a fraction of the normal cost.
Thanks for reading and make sure to subscribe for more analysis, tips, tricks and ideas for your social media and digital marketing, and remember, GET SOCIAL.
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