We must think differently about Facebook Advertising
Anybody working in the digital marketing industry can’t have failed to notice the intense interest in Facebook paid advertising, and how it compares with search and display. Of course seeing how the different channels stack up is very important, but what about the unique potential of the Facebook ecosystem? The advent of ad campaign management tools such as our very own Upcast (http://www.upcastsocial.com) has opened the doors to some very exciting ideas.
Most of the builders of Facebook management tools have come from a search background, and as a consequence their tools reflect a search-related approach to paid advertising. To date this has served marketers well, but the landscape is maturing and a new set of ideas are needed to unlock the enormous potential of social advertising.
Facebook can target users down to an unprecedented level of accuracy, a feature already well used by many advertisers. But this ability to create hundreds of narrow target groups for a campaign comes at the price of huge amounts of time needed to think up all of the segments. But what if there was a system that did this thinking for you? What if a system allowed you to enter “greek holiday” and then instantly built you a thousand distinct micro-segments of people who want to go on a Greek holiday in the next 3 months, based on what it had learned through crunching vast amounts of quality data?
Then imagine those holidays are on sale and the price is changing week on week, and some resorts get filled up quickly. You want to show the hottest price and don’t want to advertise a resort with no capacity - so bring in a feed of booking data from the holiday company’s database and change the ad copy. Then supplement that with feeds from other social media networks, and maybe even optimise the landing page in real time with social discussion. Suddenly your ads are relevant, social and compelling.
Does your holiday campaign still need a boost? Make use of Facebook’s new email/messaging hybrid to message all of your company’s fans with a hot resort. Or why not take advantage of the fact that most Facebook users log in at least once a day, and tell a story in images over a week, with a new picture every day that builds up the tension for that luxury getaway.
Finally you’ll need to know how well your holiday campaign has done - not just direct response, but also the “halo effect” from all those millions of impressions. You can measure that with sentiment analysis - an automated analysis of the postive and negative social media discussions about your campaign and brand. Drop that automatically into your reports, mix in data on how each marketing channel has contributed, and bingo - you have a god-like view of your campaign.
Hopefully some of these ideas have illustrated how much more can be gained from paid advertising with Facebook and other social media networks. The most exciting thing is that the best ideas are undoubtedly still being brewed somewhere out there.
