In Part One, we talked about identifying need and parameters before launching a social media campaign. In Part Two we’re going to focus on using those decisions to make a smart advertising buy on Facebook. As mentioned, we’re going to be using a campaign we’re doing to convince college students to take Amtrak home for the holidays as our example.
The first step is to select the kind of advertising you’re going to do (in our case a link), which is a fairly easy decision to make on your own so we’re not going to go into great detail about that now.
The second step is where the real decisions start. Who are we going to target with our advertising? Our target is students who would be most likely be taking a trip longer than 100 miles and would thus consider taking a train home for winter break. So we selected people currently in five universities in four cities currently served by Amtrak Illinois (John Wood CC, U of I at UC, IWU, ISU and SIU at Carbondale)
In terms of gender, we don’t have hard data showing that male or female students are more likely to use the train to get home for winter so we included both. If you’ve got good data about your target audience then you should of course use it.
More on creating an advertisement below:
We limited our target to people between the ages of 18 and 27 because we wanted traditional students. Though it’s possible non-traditional students would take the train home, most have full or part-time jobs and live close enough to the community to commute and would therefore not take a train to go elsewhere for the holidays. For similar reasons we selected people who are currently in college. When all that was done, we had a target audience of approximately 13,200 people, which is great considering we’ve just found a way to spend our $500 on the people most likely to use the service.
The third step involves coming up with a clever advertisement. You have to remember that the ad is going to appear on a page where a member is probably looking for something else important to them (like who is dating who, who is pregnant and who likes the new LCD Soundsystem CD). In our case, it means making it a bit funny but also short and direct.
Our result was setting it up so it asks “Going Home This Holiday?” in the headline and then following with “Take Amtrak! The inexpensive way to get your laundry and books back home this winter.” We’re not quite as interested in getting people to link to our website as we are to get them to think about taking the train, so we didn’t say “Click here to find out how.”
The next step is making the bid for the views. The choice is between making a bid on impressions (page views, i.e. each time someone reloads a page and your ad is there) and clicks (someone clicking your ad). If you’re goal is merely to get an idea out there, for example a new service, you’re going to want to bid for impressions. If you want people to click on your advertisement and buy bus passes, you should pay per clicks.
We’re sort of in between the two approaches. We want to use the piece as a stand alone object to convince people to take the train, but we wouldn’t mind people click over to our site to learn more about the system. Therefore, we’re going to put a low bid on each click $0.30, limited to $50 per day, or a max of 166 clicks per day.
From what we’ve ascertained through experience, the system is based on an algorithm that determines the most efficient way to make money from your clicks. If your post doesn’t generate clicks at a certain rate you’ll have to raise your bid to a higher amount to continue to get impressions.
Coming Up: Part Four
We’ll look at how our first transit marketing advertising buy on Facebook went, what adjustments we made and how far you can stretch a dollar if you’re a clever transit marketer.
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