Have you ever fancied trying a Facebook advertising campaign but not quite known where to start?
Or did you even know you could advertise on Facebook at all? Well, I guess you did as you see lots of incredibly relevant or incredibly irritating adverts popping up as you are scrolling through seeing what everyone else is up to.
Over half of the UK population is on Facebook. Ponder that for a moment. Every other person you walk past in the street. Or try a show of hands in a meeting.
This can be profoundly cost effective advertising. It is especially good if your business is customer facing, but can also be a great medium for business to business in the right circumstances.
When you think about it, Facebook is pretty clever. Everyone VOLUNTARILY tells Facebook huge amounts of personal information about themselves. It is a marketer’s dream. They say how old they are, where they live, how many kids they have, what their interests are. It goes on. So what is not to like about a free database which you can segment and target to your heart’s content?
You can choose geographical areas for your ad, and target age groups and you get a count of your potential number of targets as you go along. Call me a data nerd, but it gives me a warm happy glow just writing it down.
If the adverts you see are deeply irritating and irrelevant, it is because someone has not targeted their data very well. Lesson to be learnt there.
You can spend as much or as little as you like. You can run a campaign for £1 a day if you like. Some of our clients just have one bubbling away in the background to direct a flow of people to their page.
Even happier from a marketer’s perspective, you get some xray specs analytics to see precisely how your ads are performing. How many people have seen it, liked it, which devices they have been on when they have seen it… Big Brother really is watching.
There are some downsides, of course there are.
Some people lie. But since there are around 36 million people on Facebook just in the UK, and nearly 1 billion worldwide, a small percentage of fibbers is not going to make your data significantly less reliable than any other data source. It is all a numbers game at the end of the day anyway.
Some people are alleged to have duplicate accounts. Personally, I think it is unlikely to be 18 million of them, and even so, that is a big enough number for me. It is still a numbers game.
It can be a minefield. Facebook would obviously like to part you from your money, so make sure you double check how much you have said you are going to spend.
You don’t get to say much, so you need to make it count, and your Facebook page needs to look the part if people go to visit. You don’t want to look like Billy No Mates with nothing happening. More seriously you need to reflect your brand and your brand values.
And of course, just when you have got the hand of everything nicely, Facebook go and change everything.
We have run many Facebook advertising campaigns over the years, so if you would like some help getting started, give me a call to discuss on 01482 860244.
Lindsay
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