Summary:

Want to advertise to potential customers in your geographic area who need your product?  You may want to consider Facebook Pay Per Click advertising, which contains demographics that could change your business.

Details:

Facebook isn’t just a toy for personal use.  It’s a legitimate business tool, and you might be shocked at the power you have to advertise to your target market there.

Consider this example – you own a small wedding dress shop in Medford, Massachusetts and you decide that you have an advertising budget of $2,000.  You could take out ads in the local paper or the yellow pages, or you might advertise on a local TV or radio show.  Your ad would go out to thousands of people, but there are some significant problems with this approach, including:

• only a small percentage are looking for a wedding dress
  • therefore, you are certainly wasting money advertising to the others
• you only capture their attention for the time it takes for them to read your ad
• it takes some work for them to call or contact you
• it may be difficult to track where your customers came from, unless you ask them or have a coupon

Here’s a cutting edge social media alternative – advertise on Facebook.  Because Facebook keeps a lot of demographic information in each person’s profile, you can now advertise only to

• women
• who are engaged
• who live within 50 miles of Medford, MA

It gets better.  The ad is only shown to the women who fill the criteria above, and you only pay if they actually click on the ad!

When they click on the ad, you should take them to a web page on your web site (called a “landing page”) that

• contains your email address (as a clickable link) and phone number
• shows them wedding dresses
• allows them to enter an email address to receive a monthly newsletter that contains wedding tips

Remember that the only people who would be sent to that landing page are engaged women within 50 miles of Medford, so you aren’t wasting money advertising to people who wouldn’t be interested in your product.

You decide how much you are willing to pay to have them click on your web site, and you will be bidding against other companies that want to run similar ads, so the higher you bid, the more likely it is that your ad will show.  Let’s assume that you decide to pay $1 per click.  For your $2,000 advertising budget, you would get 2,000 women in your target market to see your web page, and they could immediately click to send you an email.  Wow.

I know what some of the naysayers may think.  Maybe engaged women don’t buy wedding dresses.  Maybe their mothers do.  Maybe they aren’t on Facebook.

The point is that you can advertise to a very targeted list of potential customers in a way that was never available before.  Here are the demographic options that you can choose:

• location
• age
• gender
• education
• college
• company name
• and word they’ve specified in their profile, which could include hobbies and interests
• more…

There is another big benefit to this type of advertising.  If people like your business, they can pass “word of mouth” very easily to other people on Facebook, and now you have happy customers doing your advertising for you!

These ideas could apply to other businesses as well.  If you own a Golf shop, you can advertise just to people who mentioned golf in their profile.  If you know any golfers, you know that they talk about golf as much as engaged women talk about getting engaged.  If you own a wine store, you can advertise to people over 21 years old who have mentioned wine as one of their interests.

If you want to experiment with this, go to Facebook and do the following:

• In the lower right hand corner of your Facebook page, click Help
• Under the section on Ads and Business Solutions, click Facebook Ads
• Read the Help sections

This new advertising option should make you happier than a newly engaged woman.

Editor’s Note: Patrick O’Malley is a social media trainer and consultant.