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Have you ever thought about echoing Facebook’s fluidity and constant change as part of your marketing? Alongside the set pages you have for company news, engagement and e-commerce, you can launch great temporary or seasonal campaigns and competitions that will show up on people’s timelines.

Codastar have set up several campaigns like this for companies, making sure they are targeted at the right audience for maximum impact and effectiveness. A good case study is 1948 Original Equipment. The firm’s owner Andrew McRobb explains:

‘We are an online business which sells equipment and clothing for outdoor expeditions. For Christmas, we used Facebook to attract new customers to our site to buy snow shovels and winter-related equipment. Codastar took a two-pronged approach:

1.    A special offers page with necessary calls-to-action and information.
2.    Placing adverts to various groups who were identified as having a potential interest in the product or promotion.

This approach worked amazingly well to increase our “likes” fourfold, and increased sales for this period by 18%.

The beginning of the story is the audience and objective (do you, for example, want people to visit your website, ‘like’ your Facebook page, use a coupon code or sign up for an event?).

1948 OE thought about who they wanted to target with their campaign and what they wanted to achieve. Codastar then created comprehensive advertising campaigns on Facebook to boost sales of certain products in a seasonal offer.


The Right Destination

It was important to give the adverts a destination that could convert traffic into business, with clear calls to action, so we developed specific landing pages (special offers tabs in this case) for everything. This allowed 1948 OE to make the most out of Facebook’s marketing tools while not losing their control over how they looked. We designed facebook apps / tabs that looked and worked perfectly for the company and its target audience.

The tabs maximised conversion by taking users to the goods they had seen advertised – without them people would have simply given up and left 1948 OE with a costly, ineffective campaign. The landing pages/tabs were tailored to match the tone of the particular adverts users had clicked from.

Facebook users are going to see your firm first – they will size you up from your message or your image. That’s going to inform their approach to your products and offers. It’s important to make sure your adverts continue the story you’re telling elsewhere.

With 1948 Original Equipment we knew the special offers tab had to say enough about them to win over users, and quickly. We needed to give everything the colours and graphics of their website and get them noticed out there.

Bespoke E-commerce Facebook Tab

As the example shows, we did this by having an image that introduced the firm with an evocative range of products on offer and a pithy description – just enough to echo the message the firm sends users every day through their general online presence. There was also just the right level of humour (a woman can never have too many Land Rovers!).

More text flagged up that the displayed products were part of an offer, and a bold call to action swiftly took users from Facebook to the products on the 1948 OE site (it’s vital to take users to what they’ve seen in the ad. Sending them to a generic page and making them feel ‘deceived’ is going to kill the campaign).

The page showcased those products that people loved buying as gifts, and the items were especially well chosen. That winter saw heavy snowfall, and the snow shovel in the offer quickly became very popular.


Finding the Audience

The advantage of Facebook is that you can target your campaigns as generally or specifically as you want – all from the information users give about themselves (age, gender, location, interests, what they’ve ‘Liked’…)  – maximising the effectiveness of your promotions.

A little bit of market and keyword research is enough to generate some idea of who to sell to. It pays dividends in terms of reducing wasted resources/money and hitting a responsive target audience with your ads.

And, once you’ve identified your audience, Facebook has all the tools to help you make the most out of your choices.

You can target things like the location, gender, age, interests, relationship status, workplace and education of your audience (or maybe even their work, financial information, home/ownership type, parents, politics, generation, life events…).

You can find even more niche audiences by targeting certain behaviours (people browsing from a certain device, who make charitable donations, who have particular shopping behaviours…).

With 1948 Original Equipment we made a comprehensive study of Facebook users, and identified several demographics who would potentially be interested in the products available (we came up with things like people interested in camping, people interested in bushcraft and survival, and people with similar interests looking for Christmas presents…).

We then divided each interest group even further so that we could create very specific adverts to target them (things like: female 18-26, female 27 – 26, male 18-26…). We might, say, target female users looking for Christmas presents for their partners, but not men  – reflecting the present-buying trend at the store. At the same time we could target men looking to buy themselves presents!

Breaking down the audience into possible interests and motivations not only allowed the adverts to address users far more personally (and thus improve results), but it also allowed Codastar to use the most powerful tool of online advertising…
Test and Measure

With everything set up and running and subdivided into different target audiences, it was easy to track and compare what worked and what didn’t. At the most blunt, what didn’t work would be turned off, and what did work got the extra advertising cash spent on it. But between those two extremes we could continue to use the results to tweak all of the different adverts and improve their performance.

The result was to fine tune everything so that the adverts were at their most efficient – with a healthy return on the money spent on advertising and nothing going to waste. We could work out who was actually buying, and target them.

The entire time we were running all of this this we were gathering data about 1948 Original Equipment’s audience and client base. We have developed a comprehensive picture of people’s preferences and shopping habits. All of this data can be re-used for other campaigns. In fact we are doing this now for 1948 OE’s range of Frost River goods.

As for the Christmas campaign, the result was a 400% increase in likes for the firm on Facebook, increased traffic to the 1948 Original Equipment site and an 18% rise in Christmas sales.

 

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