Speaker: Dan Thut, Rocketer, attempts to demonstrate how to use Facebook ads to grow the volume and efficiency of a PPC campaign, using a case study.
Chris McDonagh, webcast producer/moderator of searchmarketingnow.com introduced Marc Poirier, the CMO of Acquisio. Poirier talked a little about their software and introduced Dan Thut of Rocketer.
The question many ask is can we use Facebook for lead generation? The implied answer was yes, though it was left hanging.
Facebook advertising can have some pitfalls:
You can spend a lot of money very quickly, with not much to show for it
Many challenger brands are adopting Facebook advertising at a rapid and commendable rate, so they are eating away at big brands market share because they are getting to grips with this new advertising strategy faster than the big brands are.
You need an agile team and lots of tools to handle everything thrown at you from this new medium. (This was the beginning of a subtle sales pitch).
One overlooked way that Facebook advertising can be beneficial is that a well managed Facebook ad campaign can help established a PPC campaign deliver more value and more volume.
CASE STUDY:
Increased monthly conversions from 8k to 21k
CPA – cost per acquisition – dropped from 23 UK pounds to 13 pounds
34% increase in ppc brand searches
47% increase in direct-to-url traffic
Rocketer already had some data that suggested that people who clicked on a Facebook ad later transacted via a comparable Google PPC ad, but they wanted to test it. They carefully chose a client to work with and made sure they had total control of client’s marketing, to ensure the numbers would be accurate and not skewed by other factors.
They tested a lot of ads, and managed them closely.
They targeted UK men aged 16-45. (12 million)
How many different ad variants are needed for 12 million users?
They broke the group down into smaller groups. 113 counties x 25 sporting interests x 15 newspaper readerships – splits the 12 million users into tens of thousands of different niche interest groups!
Obviously, to manage tens of thousands of groups, each using at least a hundred different ad variants, you need technology to handle it all. (More subtle sales pitching here).
The process: build ads specific to each niche user group, get the right message to the right person at the right time, identify the successful ad types, but don’t stop there.
It only takes one rotten apple (ad) to quickly spoil the rest. Facebook ads can degrade very quickly (CTR drops / bounce rates rise), so their quality scores get worse. That one bad infects the others in the group quickly, and a lot of bad ads can infect the entire advertising account. Within 24 hours, a few bad apples can destroy all the ads in your account.
Since Facebook doesn’t tell us the quality score of ads, we have to gauge it ourselves, which is both important and difficult. So we need to watch the successful ads like a hawk and remove the degrading ones before they affect the others. Obviously, a tool is necessary to analyze thousands of ads and alert us when bad ones crop up. (I bet you know that this refers to the sales pitch, right?).
Although the presenter showed a graph indicating that PPC spend decreased while the Facebook ad testing was going on, I can’t say he ever really explained the correlation. I don’t know how or why one affected the other, so I’m not sure I would know how to duplicate such success.
In any case, this was really more about subtly selling software than it was about educating me on how Facebook ads can augment a PPC campaign. I don’t want to imply that they overdid the sales pitches, because it really was pretty subtle, but at the end, all I really got out of this presentation was that I need tools to manage large Facebook ad campaigns.
This Facebook song video I originally saw on the Small Business Internet Marketing Blog of Julie Weishaar (@NewHorizons123) is the perfect example of content that will go viral and be spread far and wide.
This video is better than anything I’ve ever seen put out by Facebook. I have only seen a couple of videos that I found as entertaining and that made me smile.
One was the United Breaks Guitars Video I wrote about on GrowMap that has 9,822,277 views and the other was the Wedding Dance video that got 60,582,511 views.
The Facebook video below is up to 7,675,500 views.
If you want to get viral marketing working for you, it is very likely that you will not be able to produce these kinds of videos yourself. You need someone with a track record and real talent to produce viral videos. Read the rest of this post »
So you have a nice new Facebook Page for your business. But how can it make your cash register ring?
Here are a few steps to get started:
1. Place a Facebook “Become a Fan” button on your website, so your site visitors can find your Page.
2. Ask all of your Facebook friends, employees and family members to “Fan” your new business Page on Facebook. Post a link to your new page on your personal profile and ask your friends to post it on their profiles.
3. Tell your customers “Fan us on Facebook!” (Share news of your new page with your customer email list.)
4. Once you get 50 fans, ask Facebook for a “vanity” URL (or link to your page). Here’s why. When you first create your Facebook Page, its link is long and full of numbers and symbols. A “vanity URL” that looks something like this — www.facebook.com/mybizname — is much easier to share and remember.
5. Offer some generous coupons on your Page so your fans will be motivated to share them with their friends. Theis can generate traffic and new customers.
6. Consider advertising on Facebook. This may be the fastest way to reach new customers. You can target Facebook users by the words they’re using with friends (“spa,” “facial,” “baggy eyes”), by their age, their interests and more, combined with very precise geographic terms — within 1, 2, or 5 miles of your store address, or where you know your best customers live. Steer them to your website to book some services, or to your Facebook Page to collect monthly special coupons.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat — cha-ching.
250 Million users and growing… Facebook has more users than Indonesia (the fourth most populous nation on the earth), has people. So how can a B2B marketer pull in prized customers from this vast ocean of prospects? More importantly, how can an advertiser reach B2B customers while they’re posting photos, chatting, and playing Mafia Wars? Wouldn’t ‘reaching’ them be considered an interruption? Facebook’s Advertising Department is so confident they can reach B2B types they invited me and a group of fellow advertisers to its headquarters a few months ago. Though I remained skeptical I began the journey to Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto one drizzly August morning with an open mind.
Researching Facebook’s site was the most fun I’ve had at work in a long time. I wasn’t nearly as familiar with Facebook as some of my friends. The site is so addicting I’m not sure I want to know it too much better than I do now… Some of my Facebook savvy friends had hundreds of friends and were sending me Mafia Wars weapons, IQ Quizzes, and cause invitations before I even ‘friended’ my wife and daughter. The quizzes are entertaining, the games are worse than crack, and the ability to re-connect with long lost friends sucked me in. The site combines the best features of classmates.com, linkedin.com, Picasa, (photo sharing) chat, charities, fan clubs, causes, and games. Additionally Facebook brings all the best features of these sites to a new viral level. But the one thought that kept nagging at me was: folks on Facebook are not there to research products so how can we reach them while they’re socializing on this site? The marketing challenges seem insurmountable:
Finding my B2B audience among the 250 Million
Getting their attention while they’re ‘playing’
Not interrupting or peeving them in the process
Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto have all the trappings of a typical Silicon Valley start up: high ceilings with exposed ventilation ducts, a gourmet kitchen open all hours, and a virtual United Nations of employees all spread out in desk areas without walls. None of them appears older than 28, and some are moving about on skateboards and razors on smooth concrete floors. Our conference room was a candy colored assortment sofas that swallow your bottom surrounding a 60-inch LCD TV serving as our demo screen. Despite the trendy trappings, Facebook had much more substance than met the eye.
One of the mid twenty somethings presented to us that Facebook an incredible lineup of user demographics and can target them on no less than 19 different parameters including:
Country
State
Age
Gender
Interests
Activities
Music
TV Shows
Education
High School
College
Major
Workplace
Relationship status
Books
Moms/Parenting
Small Business
Pet Enthusiasts
Sports
Demographics didn’t quite convince me but I was getting warmer. Facebook connects more than just people to people; it connects:
People to companies
People to organizations
People to products
People to classmates
People to social groups
People to causes
People to hobbies and interests
People to brands
While all this reconnecting/socializing/chatting/sharing/gaming is going on, the viral aspect of Facebook is also thrown into the mix. Word of mouth is powerful.
For example, when someone goes out to eat, buys a car or any product or service for that matter, do they trust the reviews they see on Yahoo!, Cars.com, or Amazon? No disrespect to these fine websites, but I don’t trust their reviews any more than I trust restaurant reviews from TV “Phantom Diners.” Disappointing sushi shops are more the rule than the exception when I believe American restaurant critics who purport to know something about sushi. The fact is, I trust my friends, especially my very meticulous Japanese friend’s sushi restaurant recommendations. So when I’m connected to friends on Facebook and one of them recommends a good sushi shop, they’ll usually tell a friend. That friend tells friends and soon the word on the best sushi shop spreads around like a virus.
Now let’s take that virus and multiply it. Let’s say the sushi shop we’re raving about runs an ad on Facebook with a $10 off coupon. My friends are more inclined to click on the ad because of my recommendation. CTR and Conversions increase because the social context increases the probability of intent to purchase, (by a multiple). Ok, I’m getting warmer, but it’s still a B2C example. What about B2B?
Through Facebook’s Pages, businesses can create a page to connect with customers and create a community. Company X can, through Event Ads, let its community know that it’s attending the next Comdex or E3. The company can run an ad on its corporate page with a lottery for a prize to be announced at its booth. Company X could have speaker announcements on its Facebook Page. Why would a company want to do this? Company Fan Sites or Corporate site Pages are Voices – 1/3 of your fans will see what you put up on your site. 30% of your fans will read what you’ve launched on their individual home page. If they comment on that announcement on their wall, it’s seen by all their friends following their comments. How’s that for reach?
Engagement Advertisements
On the right side of the home page, (Engagement Ads) “become a fan,” Ads can be video, static, Users can comment on ads or video on the user’s profile page.
Celebrities and Industry Experts
Company X can capitalize on its unique content and celebrities. If Company X has industry experts who’ve published technical articles and how-to application notes, it can feature these experts as Celebrities on Facebook. If your company has a celebrity or expert who can create fresh content for you, that content can be launched as an update on the corporate Facebook page or the expert can have his or her own Facebook page.
Favorite Pages Application
The Favorite Pages Application can be used as a corporate sponsor. The Afflac Duck fan site posts photos of the Duck visiting famous places all over the world such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the pyramids of Giza. All the photos posted on the site of course are taken from the Duck’s perspective, i.e., from 1 foot off the ground.
If Facebook is the social networking site where everyone is, why not take advantage of the fact by becoming part of it? The B2B aspect became clear: start a corporate Facebook page, populate it with useful unique content that users can’t get anywhere else, and make sure the content drives traffic to and from the corporate web site. Facebook Profiles enable brands to connect with fans. Videos, Comments and interactions get organically put back on users sites. Companies can ask users for feedback. They can make an offer once a day and make a pitch in the voice of a character
Papa John’s Pizza gained millions of impressions and 130k fans in 24 hours
They thanked the fans with exclusive offers – and the redemption rate was higher than email offers
Built brand loyalty
I’m convinced. Now can I convince my colleagues at work?
Meanwhile, I’ll just have some fun.