Quick Tips for Facebook Advertising

Facebook is a great advertising tool for a number of reasons. Regardless of the controversy surrounding how Facebook plans to use the personal information the social network collects, it’s still used by millions and millions of people around the world. At the end of the day, the ease of setting up a campaign and the targeting options available make Facebook a great place to advertise online.

• Don’t trust the estimated cost per click rate until your campaign is live – it’s almost always higher than advertised. Some will say that your new ad entering the marketplace forces the cost per click rates up, which is true to a degree, but I’m consistently seeing cost per click price increases of more than 20%. Make sure you factor this in to you campaign expectations.
• You don’t have to accept the cost per click you’re being charged – a little trick that works for me from time to time is to change your targeting ever so slightly. For example, instead of targeting people 40+ years of age, target people 39+ years of age. I’ve personally seen cost per click rates drop 10 cents by using that exact technique.
• Create as many ad variations as you can think of, and then create some more! Facebook advertising is half advertising, half market research. Create different ads for different products, use a variety of photos and think outside the box! You never know what you might learn, and the most successful ads may not be what you would expect.
• As a follow up to the last point, use what you learn with Facebook advertising in other marketing efforts. Or even use Facebook to research a specific demographic if you’re looking at a bigger advertising buy elsewhere. What type of message/imagery should you use in that new magazine that reaches a demographic of 45+ green thumbs? Why not target the same general audience with Facebook and run 10 ads with different flower imagery, different headlines, different angles to your pitch. It may not be a completely perfect comparison, but it’s far better than guessing!

I can’t give away free tactics without following it up with my own sales pitch, so my 5th tip is simply send me an email and I’ll take care of everything for you!

Graphic Design Crowdsourcing

I was reading the local newspaper the other day and discovered a local start-up website called DesignTourney.com. While this is probably the first time a local newspaper article inspired a blog post for me, it reminded me about something I often bring up while working with clients looking for certain design work.

The process is fairly simple. For example, if you need business cards or a logo you simply fill out a form to post your project. You come up with a prize ($250 cash will do) and you post your project with whatever specific requirements you might have. The design community will then submit their creations and the owner can then choose the preferred design, awarding that designer the $250 cash. With this process, DesignTourney.com has entered the world of crowd-sourced graphic design which already has big players like crowdspring.com and 99designs.com.

I see crowd-sourced graphics as both good and bad for the graphic design industry. If you operate a small business and you need a logo, stationary or website, crowd-sourced graphic design is a great option. You’ll be able to set a fixed budget and hopefully you will receive a number of designs to choose from. It’s a serious contender if you’re looking for a quick, appealing design within a strict budget. However, there is a very legitimate reason why crowd-sourced graphic design won’t be turning the entire graphic design industry on it’s head. Chances are you’re looking for design work because you’re not a designer yourself – as soon as you enlist the creative abilities of a crowd you loose the knowledge and experience a design agency brings to the table. You might receive 60 different logo variations and fall in love with one, opting to use that logo for your new business or for your re-branding effort, but there’s no professional advice from an experienced agency helping you see that just because you like a certain design doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your company. There’s no way to place a finite value on experience and knowledge within a field – but when it comes to your brand you want to be careful and make sure you can live with the decision you make for quite some time to come.

My opinion on crowd-sourced graphic design is let the crowds do the fun stuff – perhaps it’s a postcard for your clients on a holiday, or a new version of your business card. Just leave the brand sensitive stuff to the professionals that pull from years of experience. If you’re looking for that experience locally here in Kelowna, I’m consistently impressed by Touchpoint Agency – someone to consider!

As for DesignTourney.com, they have their work cut out for them. I haven’t had a chance to meet the founders to learn about their goals, but the success of their website relies on the crowd itself. In this case, the crowd is graphic designers that already use CrowdSpring and 99Designs to generate some extra income. And with brands like LG and Nissan using CrowdSpring, DesignTourney is going to have to host some decent projects to gain the same momentum the other players already have. Personally, if DesignTourney was my project, I’d play the regional card. Running a small business myself, I prefer supporting local talent and if I’m going to award a random graphic designer $250 – $5000 for a graphic design project, I’d like to keep that local, or at least within the country.

An SEO Experiment

In early January 2010 HSTinCanada.com went live after some educated estimates and two weeks of design & testing with a single goal in mind – obtain visitors from search engines. After operating for two months with 50+ articles and a variety of links from other websites, the website has cracked the first page for a handful of key search phrases in Google. What is unique about HST in Canada as a topic in general is that it’s going to receive plenty of news coverage for an extended period of time. Back in the summer of 2009 I launched a quick website for a news topic that was in the news headlines for a week. With $15 dollars invested for hosting and the domain name, www.westkelownafires.com launched and recorded 7000 page views over the course of a few days, with 90% of the web traffic coming from search engines. Ever since that SEO Experiment, I’ve contemplated the potential for what might be called “opportunistic web development”. Then the next opportunity presented itself…

Starting from scratch with a brand new domain and using the wordpress platform, a website was born with the intention of being a neutral resource for a hot topic with varying opinions and feelings. The proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is coming to British Columbia and Ontario on July 1st 2010, and while it has a number of implications for businesses and citizens within these provinces, it presented a unique opportunity for a website. It was going to be on people’s minds over the next several months, and the media coverage it will receive will only intensify as groups, businesses and governments become more vocal.

For starters, any successful website must serve a valuable purpose. In the case of HSTinCanada.com there was a distinct gap in available information online. The provincial government’s in support of HST have the pros related to the HST explained on their websites. The anti-HST government websites & groups have all of the negative aspects of HST explained. There was no single source that talked about both the pros and cons of HST, so the content strategy for HST in Canada was easy to establish. Secondly, as the goal was to obtain search engine traffic, an assessment of the competing websites and an estimate of how much search volume exists was undertaken. Overtaking the competing websites isn’t insurmountable and the number of HST related search engine queries is promising.

After being live for nearly 2 months, HSTinCanada.com is on track to serve approximately 30,000 ad impressions in March 2010. With further improved search engine rankings, this topic has the legs to serve 1 million ad impressions from search engine traffic alone before July 1st, 2010.

The message here is two fold. For web publishers and businesses of all kinds, a niche website built around a current event or relevant topic optimized for search engines can gain a strong audience over the course of  a few months. Think outside the box – sometimes your current website isn’t ideal when reacting to an evolving situation. Web development is more accessible now than ever, and a ground-up website build might not cost as much as you think. Perhaps a tax advisory firm or an accounting office should have launched a website like HST in Canada – once you obtain the audience you can display whatever ads you want, even your own. Not only that, publishing web content around a certain topic solidifies your identity as an authority on the topic – trust = sales. Forgive me, but the second part of this message is blatant self-promotion – if you think there’s an angle you can use to amass an audience related to your business and want some advice on it’s potential and how to execute, please get in touch! I love doing this stuff!

Do you want to be microfamous?

There is an excellent article in Wired’s February issue addressing social media and how it can evolve into, well, something quite introverted. The article uses an example of a Ms. Evans. She started using Twitter as a grad student – with an interest in poetry her updates were topical to what she was interested in. As such, her following grew slowly with people who were interested in similar things. Interaction is frequent, people comment on posts, ask questions, Ms. Evans replies – it’s a tight little community.

Then Ms. Evans gets the idea to post a short, 140 character recipe. Next thing you know she has 13,000 followers interested in food – a slight diversion from her original use for Twitter. As the following grows, something interesting happens. When you see a person with 100 followers on Twitter they seem more approachable. You see a person with 20,000 followers, if you do in fact have a question, you tend to presume the person wouldn’t reply to your question if you did happen to ask it. So you don’t…and social media just becomes, well, media.

The concept applies to Facebook as well. Amass a group of 500 ski enthusiasts and you can talk about the best mountains, the best days, post photos, share stories, etc. Let the group grow to 15,000 and suddenly people are selling ski equipment, posting “lost and found” information, etc. Ironically enough, the Facebook group starts to take the form of a dynamic newspaper! The founder of the group questions how he or she should interact with this new organism – there’s no way to cater to everybody!

Take a good look at your social media presence and ask yourself what direction you want to go in. Is it really that valuable to reach 10,000 Twitter followers if you no longer receive feedback? Do you really want to be “microfamous”? After all, celebrities are constantly complaining about all the attention they receive. Popular Twitter users might not make the television news, but one consistency remains,  the larger audience will always be the less forgiving audience.

Social media advertising strengths

On September 1st comScore released some information stating that social media websites, like Facebook and MySpace, are responsible for over 20% of online display advertising in the USA. As an online marketing consultant living in Kelowna, which is a relatively small town in British Columbia, Canada, social media sites are an extremely valuable tool to make use of when targeting ads to a small region. Smaller cities don’t always have that go to website. The newspapers that still exist often don’t grasp the strengths of the Internet entirely, or haven’t priced their ad rates according. For radio, a website is typically there to  support the station, and in many cases, are often reiterating news based off of partnerships with newspapers.  In a general sense, neither of these mediums have really stepped up to the plate to deliver a powerful online component. TV stations are improving as video becomes more feasible online, but, at least here in BC, local television is struggling.

So if you want to drive local visitors to your website, where can you turn? Facebook has a number of ad targeting features, such as target by connections, or target by birthday, to name some of the newer options. These targeting features can often provide insight into your business. For example, tracked properly, you might find that a specific age group tends to spend more time on a specific page than another age group. To speculate, let’s say you own a flower shop. You run ads targeted at men and women separately, and I can guarantee each group would treat your website differently. The men might be more inclined to look at pre-made bouquets, or may be interested in signing up for “important day reminders” as a safety net, just to prevent forgetting that special day two years in a row. Whereas the women might want to build a custom bouquet, because they already know exactly what they want.

Or maybe, as the flower shop owner, your website only has 1 of these functions. You built a great system to promote your pre-made bouquets, and you notice men from Facebook are converting at a higher rate than women. Not only are social media sites a great way to target your ads to a specific geographic area, but it’s easy to see how targeted advertising can drive sales as well as help your website progress and evolve over time (with the right insight).