Facebook Ad Campaigns - Get Viral! A Guide for Developing Facebook Campaigns

WHITEPAPER / FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGNS Get Viral! A Guide for Developing Facebook Campaigns WHITEPAPER / FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGNS 1 SUMMARY With consumers spending more time on Facebook than Google or any other website, marketers are jumping at the opportunity to reach them. In fact, users spend four times as much time on social networks than they do email. It makes sense that marketers are rushing to build a “social” presence on Facebook. Not only are consumers spending more time on the social network, but Facebook users are also extremely engaged with both friends and brands, sharing activities and interests sometimes multiple times a day. So, where do you begin? We have pulled together tips to help marketers get Facebook ad programs on track. SOCIAL IS BOOMING AND FACEBOOK IS THE LEADER There are over two billion users on the internet. Facebook, with it’s 500 million users, has a quarter of the internet population. So if you are looking for a place to reach a broad section of customers, there is no better source than Facebook. With advertising, marketers are still in the early stages of understanding how to best use the Facebook platform. Despite Facebook’s sizeable and growing ad revenues, marketers are still limiting their ef forts to testing on Facebook to evaluate performance. While ad budgets are lagging for social, that is not going to be the case for long. Social advertising is going to increase by 30% in spend, reaching over $4.6 billion in 2011, and Facebook is expected to be about 41% of that total industry. We have seen this pattern before and have a history here we can learn from, looking at the trends which have occurred in the search industry beginning several years ago. The charts below show the overall growth in search over the last seven years and the actual percentage of growth. WHITEPAPER / FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGNS 2 PPC is a concept introduced to the market by Google in 2004. It saw tremendous growth in 2005 with 40% growth; in 2006 it saw closer to 70% growth; and in 2007 over 30% growth. Those years were very significant growth years for the market, and we are in that exact same space with social right now. In 2012, we will see more significant growth and even more growth moving into 2013. This is a very good time to be in this space, especially the next three years because that is where all of the opportunity is going to be. SOCIAL MARKETING Paid & O rganic Search makes a good comparison for another trend that is going on in social: the split between paid and organic. Until recently the majority all conversation around social marketing has been around organic. This includes share of voice, how many mentions are you getting, and the sentiment around that. A lot of techniques around how you try to earn media and grow your share of voice in the market is through listening and monitoring. You still want to use those methods, but a new trend has emerged with paid social. Paid social marketing is very similar to the types of marketing we have seen in the past, but it of fers some slightly dif ferent ways we can target and deliver the experience. Similar to what happened with search, organic was the first thing that hit, and if you were in the market in 2003-2004 you will remember exactly what happened when PPC advertising and Google AdWords really came online. The reality is that paid now dominates the revenue for search marketing, and it is going to do the same for social marketing because you have the easy ability to turn that investment on. You have very clear measurable value that you can track, and it is highly scalable. Because of those reasons, businesses are going to gravitate more and more to the paid aspects of social marketing and will likely represent the majority of spending in the industry. T he S ocial A pproach Since we have done some references to similar trends that have occurred in search around the growth of the market and the way paid and organic disciplines have emerged, it is worth pointing out the dif ferences in the way the social approach works compared to how the search approach works. In search you have a typical advertising workflow and the first thing that happens is the customer types in a search term they are looking for. They are served an ad that most likely has that exact same term in the ad and linked away to a website where they are likely to participate in some level of the transaction. WHITEPAPER / FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGNS 3 With social, you are targeting people based on their interests. In the example above you have a television show called The Biggest Loser. They are showing an ad which is the right fit for the perfect woman. Then that ad is driving someone to a Facebook property, in this case the fan page. This is a custom tab which is giving the consumer a place where they can begin to engage. In this particular campaign it is all about figuring out which fit is right for you. It is taking more of the sof t sell approach. In both cases you are doing targeting, delivering an ad, driving that to a landing experience. With search you are more focused on demand fulfillment, and with social you are more focused on creating demand generation. Another key thing to note is that the targeting you are using in the advertising is dif ferent. In search it is all about key word lists. In social it is all about interest lists. Interest lists rarely contain the keywords, so you can’t just take keyword lists from your search marketing programs, copy and paste them into your social program, and expect them to work. This is a big dif ference in how you approach social and the messaging you provide. AUDIENCE TARGETING U nderstand Your A udience With over 500 million users on Facebook there are likely a lot of consumers you’d like to target. but where do you start? By now, most organizations have built some type of social presence and have organically attracted fans. Marketers find a surprising amount of insightful information from users who already “like” their page. If your company already has a Facebook page or application, it can be a great way to understand the seed audience that will perform well for your ads. On the “Insights” page you can see the breakdown of your fans by age, gender and location. Use this information to understand your demographic and apply these parameters to target uses similar to your current fan base. WHITEPAPER / FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGNS 4 Target Your Fans and T heir F riends Marketers should take advantage of users that already “like” their page or app. Especially for well-known brands with an established presence on Facebook, your fanbase is likely already a strongly performing audience; they might just need that extra push or reminder from an ad to make a purchase. Fans are the best users inside Facebook for you to be able to reach. Facebook did a study across their network and they found that the Facebook user that clicks the “like” button consume over 5 times more URLs from Facebook than those who don’t. The average number of friends a person has on Facebook is 130. People who click the like button have almost 2.5 times more friends. In other words, people who click the like button have more connections and consume more content on Facebook. Those are the people you want to reach. Also, friends of connections are a great way to expand your audience to reach people likely to convert. User’s connections tend to be of similar age, status and location so that puts them in your target audience. Moreover, when you target Facebook users’ friends, your ad will mention their connection, giving it increased credibility and relevancy to the audience Last but not least, fans don’t regularly check your page. If you think about your own use of Facebook and how many pages you have become a fan of, how many of those do you just go check out to see if there is something new and cool? That is probably not a very big number. You have to figure out how you are going to re-engage your existing fan base. Once someone is a fan of a particular product or brand, send them targeted ads. This type of targeting is really powerful and something you can only do in Facebook: the ability to target people based on their interests and based on things people self-selected to say they like among your products. CREATIVE I mages are I mportant The audience you are targeting on Facebook is on the social network to interact with friends, share their photos, and play games, not to look for products and services; so ads need to grab their attention. Facebook users are inundated with content and typically scan text and images quickly to find what interests them, but there are tricks to attracting attention in the Facebook world. Marketers need to focus on creative that first captures consumers’ attention, unlike in search where they are already seeking information about a topic related to your product.