Getting the Biggest Bang For Your Buck: Social Media Offers the Greatest Targeting Abilities
By Lauren AlexanderMay 14, 2014
The main reason many companies are active in social media is because of the fact that “everyone else is doing it.” Their social media strategies consist of anything from creating a brand, a community voice, interacting with consumers, and of course, generating likes, shares, and other social dialogue. The result is often a massive amount of resources being thrown toward immeasurable goals, little-to-no clarity in measuring results, and very little actual revenue being generated by these efforts. But with a comprehensive customer acquisition strategy in place, Facebook can be a powerhouse for delivering measurable results for marketers.
Recent changes to Facebook’s ad platform have given marketers a very powerful and unique tool that no other ad channel can offer: the ability to segment advertising by demographics, behavior, and interests. The platform’s unmatched targeting capabilities empower marketers to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time in the right location.
This combination of access to demographics, interests and behavior allows for very agile campaign planning. If you know what your ideal customer looks like, you can dissect the Facebook audience in as much detail as you’d like. Along with gender, age, geographical location and a number of other basic demographics, an advertiser can add interests, technology preferences, shopping habits, etc. to create a defined crowd. Knowledge of what the consumer likes (TV shows, books, movies, music) offers insight into the content and ad images that might garner the desired action from the consumer such as clicks, likes, shares and landing page visits or conversions, to name a few.
The most effective place to use this information is in the Facebook News Feed. Ads in the News Feed are non-invasive, and offer the highest click-through-rate on Facebook. This is a tremendous advantage over other marketing channels. Within traditional media- search or even display ads- once the creative is out there, it’s often impossible to know how the audience is responding to it, beyond a click. Within Facebook ads, the campaign manager can optimize their ads in real-time using likes and shares as a metric. Even more helpful are the comments. The open dialogue created by ad comments constantly helps marketers build better, more pertinent ads for their clients based on feedback from the desired consumers.
Yet another benefit of the demographic analysis Facebook offers is its Lookalike audiences. Once clicks, shares, likes or page conversions begin occurring within a target audience, Facebook’s platform has the ability to use that data and create a lookalike audience based on the common denominators of all consumers within that data. As a result, more topical ads will be shown to an ever-growing pool of highly-targeted consumers. This is a win/win situation for both the consumer and the advertiser.
Ultimately, the business objective of any company is to find the best customers. Whether it’s expanding the current client base, or exploring new markets, Facebook offers the ability to analyze data to find the best customers and the tools to generate dynamic campaigns in a cost-effective manner. Facebook is the center of social media, and its ad platform is a powerful tool.
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Lauren Alexander
Lauren Alexander
http://www.undergroundelephant.com
As Chief Marketing Officer for Underground Elephant, Lauren Alexander is responsible for the company’s marketing initiatives including branding, customer acquisition, marketing operations, revenue management and product marketing. During Alexander’s tenure at Underground Elephant she has brought to market several key new products that have created significant revenue streams for the company. She has nine years of in-depth experience driving strategic initiatives through online and print advertising.
