Hello again! I thought I’d build on my initial posts by talking about what I think will be THE big growth area in online marketing over the next 12 months… Facebook and Linkedin paid advertising.
It’s been possible for some time to advertise and market on these platforms, however not many companies have taken advantage of the fantastic opportunities these present, and stick to more ‘traditional’ forms such as Google Adwords and display banner ads. Don’t get me wrong, these are great tools, and if managed effectivly can be very cost effective and provide a fantastic ROI. However I see Linkedin and Facebook advertising as fitting in alongside these techniques to ensure that you get the widest possible coverage for your organisation.
The reason these techniques are so powerful is that they don’t rely on people activly searching for a particular product or service, instead ads are shown to highly select groups through very refined targeting systems. To give you an example, a client of mine offers CD duplication which can be used for marketing purposes (company brouchures etc), one of his target markets are business owners of small companies (medium and large companies have marketing managers). We set up and run a series of micro ads on Linkedin targeting this market, the parameters of which were: companies of between 0 and 20 employees in the London area, in the marketing industry with the ads only being shown to Owners and Directors, running on a pay per click basis. Although I can’t divulge figures, the campaign has seen a fantastic return on his investment. The beauty of the campaign is that we started very small, with a low budget in order to testfeasibility, then when we saw that it was working well, we were able to scale it up and it’s clear to say that it really is making a huge different to the business.
A word of caution however, it is very easy with online advertising campaigns to throw a lot of money at them and see very little, if any reward. For a campaign to besuccessfulit must be designed with a clear target market, the micro ads must be individually tailored to your audience and most importantly, the whole campaign must be continually assessed and improved, reacting to opportunities that present themselves and changes in the cost of each individual ad.
To find out more about paid search opportunities on Facebook or Linkedin, here are the direct links: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/ and https://www.linkedin.com/directads.
If you want to have a chat about how best to promote your business or organisation on Facebook, Linkedin or any other online advertising platform, please fell free to get in touch!
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