How to take advantage of the power of Microtargeting on Facebook
– at a crazy cheap price
A while ago, there was a buzz in the CEO of Webtrends and CEO of CoachYu’s offices. One of our employees was trying to get my attention. He did so by creating a Facebook ad targeting anyone who lived in Portland, was 30-40 years old, and worked at either Webtrends or (then)
BlitzLocal. Of the nearly 600 million users (at the time) on Facebook, only 80 people met that criteria.
It cost him only $0.06 to do it.
And for that price, he was able to bombard our people with ads.
The cost of that inventory was a $0.30 CPM, which means it cost $0.30 to show a thousand ads. He was able to send 200 highly targeted messages.
Using the Location section in the ads tool, he entered “Portland, Oregon” which is where BlitzLocal’s headquarters were located.
In the Demographics section, he targeted males ages 30-40.
For Education and Work, he typed “BlitzLocal LLC” and “WebTrends”.
The result ended with an estimated 80 people targeted and the total cost was $0.06.
Sounds less like advertising and more like super–targeted email marketing, doesn’t it? And, in fact, it is, except for this:
You can send these messages without needing someone’s email address. You only pay when someone clicks it (yes, it’s cost per click advertising).
An impression is guaranteed the next time the person opens Facebook (whereas, in sending an email, you can only hope that someone will open it).
Now, imagine that you’re a software company like Webtrends, building relationships with other agencies that resell your social analytics software. The founders of the data visualization agency, JESS3, come to visit, and you’d like to strengthen that bond.
Maybe you spend $5 on a micro–targeted campaign like the one above, but slice it up to put the ad image more compactly next to the stats. You absolutely bombard anyone who works at that firm with your message almost 3,000 times.
If they have 50 people, that’s 60 ads per person. Who cares that we got only 9 clicks (of which, 4 happened to become fans)? The goal is not the click, but the awareness.
While each of these examples might be clever or interesting, the question becomes: How do you scale this? Social media success is about pinpoint precision targets — ultimately, because we’re simulating the one–on–one conversations that friends have among themselves. If you want to have 1,000 conversations, you need 1,000 different ads and 1,000 different landing pages. Who has the infrastructure, staff, or budget to do that?
FOR THE PROS: This is where smart automation comes in. Here’s an example of our scoring platform at work.
We took the Fortune 1000 and ran a script that collected a wide range of data like market cap, their industry, annual revenue, P/E ratio, website URL, homepage pagerank, pages indexed, Facebook page, number of fans, company logo from Google images, and so forth.
Then, we ran this data through our scoring algorithm to calculate their Social Score — how well they did versus peers in their industry. We might say, “Shell, you got a 56 and rank 7 out of 9 in Oil and Gas”, or “Shell, why do you only have 8.1 million fans while others in oil and gas have 184k on average?”
Then, we target people who work at Shell — not just everyone, but those people who have titles of VP of Marketing, Chief Financial Officer, Public Relations, and so forth.
There might be only a couple dozen people, and not everyone puts their information on Facebook; but it’s enough, and you can bet it gets their attention!
They come to a landing page that has their social scoring report, which shows a portion of the metrics that we’ve gathered. They have to click “Like” to see the rest of the report, which is grayed out.
Now, what happens when that person clicks “Like”? Of course, some of their friends and coworkers see it, and as most curious coworkers do, they’ll want to check out what you found to be so interesting.
Then, when these people see our ad, it shows that their friend liked it, which makes our offer of a report that much more credible.
Only you can work the magic at your company. As much as we’d like to sell you some software, vendors like us can only assist you in coming up with the creative strategy that resonates best with your customers, the PR strategy that gets the press talking about you, and a unique way to position how you solve your clients’ pain.
Ultimately, these $5 campaigns, whether you run just one of them or ten thousand of them, boil down to a marketing strategy-- a unique, compelling message that we can multiply out to your customers and get them to spread on your behalf. (Again, if you’re a smaller company targeting just a few potential or existing clients or partners, go for it yourself!)
No matter how small you are, this will work for you since you’re targeting only a few hundred people in your town. As long as your content is solid, this works like a charm.