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How much money have you poured into EDDM, door hangers, brochures, newspaper ads, and god knows what else (although truck wraps are always a good investment) without seeing the returns that justify the outlay?
Sometimes it feels like marketing and advertising is just taking your money and time and throwing it into a great big black hole in the sky, hoping to randomly hit an asteroid full of gold. Return rates of 0.5% are considered normal. There’s got to be another way.
Well, there is. And some of them even work. Here’s one.
Facebook, that all-seeing eye that has a captive audience of a billion daily users, offers advertising. Being who it is, with everything it knows, it doesn’t just offer advertising: it offers incredibly targeted and really affordable advertising.
Last year they partnered up with a number of online ad companies with specific niches, and when they put their data all together it looked very much like a portrait of North America, down to the individual blocks.
According to Adweek:
Advertisers can create ad-targeting parameters such as “home owners who are retired, own a Ford pick-up truck, buy over-the-counter allergy relief medication and take cruises.” They can also target “dentists who live alone, own a BMW and buy big-and-tall clothes and diet foods.” Or “people who live in a million-dollar home housing four people including a military veteran.” Or “mortgage borrowing homemakers who own a minivan and buy baby food.”
Okay, so that’s insane. It’s also selectable by towns, neighborhoods, and even zipcodes. You can decide how much to spend to reach how many people in your target demographic in your target area, and never spend a cent to reach anyone outside of that.
Keep in mind that, unlike the people you get from Adwords, people on Facebook aren’t doing searches. They’re just puttering around talking to their friends, liking pages, joining groups, and sharing things. The ads they see in their sidebars are based on those interests, not on search keywords per se. You need to put yourself in that kind of frame of mine, an accessible, kitchen-table frame of mind, to write an effective Facebook ad.
Your ad can link either to your Facebook page or to your own website. Which you choose is up to you, but people tend to be more comfortable staying on Facebook rather than being bounced to an external site.
All of Facebook is very much a “Hi neighbor” situation, and your Facebook page should be personable, professional, informative, and a great representation of your business. Have all of your contact details right on the landing page, and a call to action. It needs to act as an independent agent of your actual website. They need to have the same message, the same branding, and (IMPORTANT!) the same pricing.
With proper targeting, knowing in advance who you want to contact, Facebook marketing can be a great opportunity for a localized business to connect with the potential customers it really wants. And compared to designing, printing, and distributing a flyer, it takes no time at all.
Track your marketing efforts and their results easily using MHelpDesk’s built in ad tracking features. This allows you to decide what’s working and what’s not, whether it’s a Facebook ad or a cardboard sign on the off-ramp. It’s easy to use and is, above all, hyper-efficient, showing immediately where you’re wasting money and where you are making it.
The post Laser-Targeting Neighborhoods With Facebook Ads appeared first on Mhelpdesk.