The internet age (and American culture today?) is all about instant gratification, and it’s no different for online marketers – we want it all and we want it now. Which is why I love using Facebook Ads for marketing campaigns – I can create an ad this minute, the ad is approved and goes live within the hour, and I can see results almost instantaneously after that. FB ads allow us to overcome some of the biggest challenges campaign builders face:
- Speed to market: it frequently takes significant planning and market research before launching a campaign. If it takes too long, the campaign might not be relevant by the time you actually flip the switch – especially in the fever pitch world of social media. A Facebook ad can be built in seconds.
- Audience targeting: with traditional digital media, we’re typically working off inferred relationships, interests and demographics: “Site A visitors are likely to show affinity to Site B and would be likely purchasers for Site B.” The ability to hone in on very narrow interests is one of the great features of FB ads – we’re not comparing look-alike cookie profiles across sites trying to find likely customers. We can target the exact interest and demographic information, narrow it down by location, and make sure we’re showing the right message to the right people at the right time.
- Campaign investment: you’ve heard this before when you pitched a campaign: “How much exactly are we talking about?” If you could spend $5 or $10 and have results within a couple of hours, are you more likely to experiment with the kind of off-the-wall ideas that sometimes become The Big Thing? That might be my favorite thing about using FB ads – if I get a crazy idea, I just throw together a quick FB ad, wait a few hours and see how it looks.
- Audience reporting: just like the tenuous relationship between demographic data and potential site visitors, the demographic data you get on actual clicks/visitors with display or paid search is never a one-to-one relationship. That all changes with FB ads, thanks to a data geek-friendly report suite, which allows you to narrow things down all sorts of ways. More on how best to do that in a future post.
