As we covered in part 1, Facebook marketing is an incredibly powerful and precise tool for your agriculture or food business. It can deliver a high volume of relevant potential customers to your website or landing page at a very low cost. In part 2, we are going to jump straight back in – so if you haven’t already (or need a refresher) read part 1 now.
You could also check out our other blogs aimed at specialist food producers …
7 essential tips to help you show food provenance – explains how to tell your story online in a genuine way to build your brand and your provenance.
Sell your products in your sleep with e-commerce – talks you through why e-commerce is a great way to take your food brand to the next level and runs through some great tips on how to drive customers to your site.
If you are all caught up, let’s dive right in ….
Two things to consider before you start
As the subheading suggests, before you even open Power Editor you need to have a solid idea about two key factors in any FB campaign.
- A clear target audience. As mentioned in part 1, FB’s targeting system is very precise. Which means there are a lot of options, so it pays to have a clear picture of your target customer in your head. Not having a detailed description of your audience puts this valuable tool to waste. If you have multiple target customers, profile each one. DO NOT try to create a single “catch all” customer profile as these never work. If you try to be all things to all people, you end up meaning nothing to anyone – and ambivalent audiences never convert. Having a clear target audience is essential because we need make some educated decisions about what their interests are, what kind of content and pages they look at on FB, as well as the normal demographic aspects such as age, gender, location, etc.
- A clear campaign objective. I know having a clear objective is Marketing 101, but it’s worth highlighting again – especially in the context of FB marketing. If you don’t have clear objective then you have no way of measuring success. And, on a more practical point, Facebook will optimise your advert and targeting based on your objective – whether that’s to reach as many people as possible, reach those who are most likely to recall your brand, whether you want people to fill in a form, make a purchase, or whether you simply want to drive traffic to your site of landing page. Facebook has more than a dozen preset campaign objectives, so you need to have a sense of what you want to achieve.
How Facebook campaigns are structured
Before we get into some of the tactical stuff, it’s worth talking through how campaigns are structured in Facebook Power Editor. Essentially, there are three distinct stages – campaign, advert set, adverts – and each have a different job to do.
Campaign is the first step. Think of this section as a big envelope into which you stuff all the info about targeting, budget, and the content. It’s here you also define what the campaign is called and what your overriding objective is, eg, brand awareness, website traffic, offer responses, lead generation etc.
The next step is called advert set. It’s here you define the targeting, the budget, and the duration of your ads. The third and final step is called advert – and this is where you define how your ad will appear to those people you targeted in the advert set.
Now that’s all pretty straightforward, but it gets really interesting when you realise you can have as many advert sets as you like under the one campaign, all linked to as many different adverts as you like.
And here’s where we get to …
Your one true goal
So above I told you to have a clear target audience and to make some educated decisions about their interests etc. This is true – because you need a strong starting point. I also told you that you need a solid objective and that, of course, is true. But your number one priority when getting into Facebook marketing for the first time OR whenever you promote a new product or service. Your one true goal is to find the audience that responds the best.
It’s great to go into a marketing campaign with a clear picture of your audience, but it’s also true to say that sometimes those preconceived notions don’t always play out. FB’s Power Editor gives us the chance to test and tweak until we our ads are delivering the maximum return.
This ability to test and tweak is one of the major advantages of Facebook over other advertising platforms. This gives us the ability to …
- Create multiple versions of the same ad and serve it to the same audience. This means we can try ads that are the same apart from either a different picture, different headline, different copy, or different call to action and deliver each to the same demographic and see which combination delivers the best result.
- Serve the same ad to multiple audiences. So now we can take our winning ad and put it in front of different demographics and people with different interests and we can look through the results and determine which audience is responding the best.
This process is known as split-testing and is an incredibly powerful, data-driven way of determining the best content and the most responsive audiences. The idea being that when you hit a winning formula, you can scale up your budget knowing you’ll get the maximum return on your investment.
To give you a real-world example, we did some work recently for a rural wedding venue. They had done some FB marketing but it hadn’t really generated many inquiries. Their content was good and their objectives were solid – but their targeting was a bit off the mark. They were targeting their ads at women, aged 21-50, who had a relationship status of engaged. That audience is clear and sounds reasonable, right? So why was it not generating many inquiries? We looked at the data and the ads had generated traffic, but no queries. So we did a split test campaign. We ran the same advert to three different but similar audiences. Audience 1 were women, aged 21-50, who had a relationship status of engaged. Audience 2 were women, aged 21-50, who had an interest in ‘weddings’. And audience 3 were women, aged 21-50, who had an interest in ‘brides’. We ran each ad for five days and audience 2 and 3 outperformed audience 1 by nearly 4-1.
So in all likelihood, the initial problem was the fact the venue were targeting people solely on whether they were engaged. Sounds reasonable, but a lot of people get engaged and don’t actually start planning their wedding for a while. After the split test campaign, we narrowed the targeting criteria to women aged 21-50 who were engaged BUT were also interacting with content on Facebook about ‘weddings’ or ‘brides’. Our thinking here is that users who are engaged are probably interacting with such content because they are actually at the stage where they are planning their wedding. Just making this small change and making the audience even more relevant delivered a four-five-fold increase on inquiries.
In the next blog, we’ll be looking at some advanced ways you can refine your targeting. In the meantime, if you have any questions about how you can apply the above to your business, drop me an message at dan@redstagmedia.co.uk