targeting Archives - BlitzMetrics

Automotive Social Media Charlatans Exposed

I have been a part of the automotive aftermarket for over seven years now. Companies and brands of all shapes and sizes are realizing the relevance and power of social media. While their efforts are admirable, many are not capturing the characteristics of the aftermarket that make it unique from all others. That being said, there is a stark contrast within the measurable, mechanical world of the automotive aftermarket with the fluffy, mysterious world of social.

Bobby Likis host of the Bobby Likis Car Clinic radio show.

So I was wondering…
Does the mechanic ask you what type of wrench to use in fixing your car?

Would you trust a Ferrari mechanic who has never seen a Ferrari before?

Pros fix your problems, have legitimate certifications, and can provide a well-defined outcome with reasonable certainty.

But in social media, we have no such thing yet.
So to avoid being a self-proclaimed social media expert, focus on being a driver (no pun intended) of business value in your area.

There is an assumption that if you know how to post to a social media account is sufficient.
This ability alone does not make you an expert.

The automotive aftermarket segment is like no other, with companies that operate as B2B, B2C and hybrids of both.
Knowing the tone and personality of the brand, and having an understanding of the customer base and audience will allow for good content and even better targeting.

If you don’t know about antifreeze, you’re not going to be able to credibly write content for Prestone.

If you don’t know about how to modify Corvettes for maximum performance, you’ll fail responding to die-hard Lingenfelter fans.

The social media expert dies

Sure, there still will be colleges offering degrees in social media.

And the need for strong measurement in social isn’t going to go away either.

But the one-dimensional social media expert will be extinct.

If you don’t have deep vertical expertise for a particular client, you can’t help them in their social media.

Sorry. Just won’t work.

Your knowledge of how to pin and tweet won’t make up for lack of vertical knowledge.
Same is true for whatever set of tools you employ.

Here’s Rob Schermerhorn, who is a Ferrari mechanic.

Because he’s able to post content that Ferrari owners relate to and because he knows where Ferrari owners hang out (Ferrari Chat), when he runs ads, he gets leads.
This is the GCTA viral cycle:

Goals: Drive leads for his Ferrari tuning service
Content: Lots and lots of examples of him tuning Ferraris over the last 20 years– going faster for cheaper. You’d be surprised at what penny pinchers these guys are, but that’s another story.
Targeting: Ferrari owners, not the 18 year olds who are fans of the Ferrari page. Choose the right interests and demographics. Income works, too.
Amplification: This is where we run ads, but we call it “amplification” instead– the combinations of content and targeting to drive relevant traffic.

These are the mechanics of social media amplification.

Miss any part of this cycle and the wheel collapses.
If you don’t have awesome content, all the analytics and targeting in the world won’t save you.
If you don’t have proper targeting, no amount of measurement or content will win.
If you have clear goals, solid content, and strong targeting, but no amplification– well, you still might win, but you’ll be running on a donut tire.

How are you doing against these factors?

They’re not magical.
It’s just that not many people get this owner’s manual when they get their Facebook page, twitter account, or whatever network profile.

How does a marshmallow and dried spaghetti relate to social media?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

We wanted to know what happens when you take several professionals who are leaders in their fields and ask them to make a free standing structures out of spaghetti and a marshmallow?

Here are the rules:

You get 20 sticks of dried spaghetti, 1 yard of string, 1 yard of tape and one marshmallow.

The goal is to make to strongest freestanding tower with the marshmallow on the top in 18 minutes or less

Here’s what happened:

We had 6 teams of 4 people building structures, all of them using slightly different designs.

Almost all of them started with a plan. Most of the teams talked it out before hand, developed a plan and a few minutes in started to build. Some even drew their plan on paper.

For almost all of these, they started at the base and worked up according to their plan, and then at the end they added the marshmallow.

And for almost all of these teams, as the towers stood and the teams carefully placed the marshmallows on top, they would slowly let the tower go and watch as it slowly crashed to the ground.

The one exception was the team that started out testing what it took to hold the marshmallow.

The successful team took the tower and tested it, step by step to see what would hold.

So how does this relate to social media marketing?

The way most people view advertising is to make a plan and execute it once, but when it comes to social media it’s not a one shot chance.

In traditional advertising, groups of people will get together and made their best guess as to what will be successful, and after arguing back and forth for a time and eventually coming to a consensus, they will launch the campaign.

Luckily, when you are advertising on social, you don’t have to just rely on a guess. When amplifying your content on social, you get the opportunity to try out a variety techniques and targeting.

Because you are not limited to a fixed, unmovable campaign like you would be with newspaper or magazine advertisement, you can try out a large mix of content and targets and see what works.

But you still don’t want to waste money. On top of that, there are so many options, so how do you start?

Look at your goal(s).

In the marshmallow challenge, the goal was getting the marshmallow to the top.

The group that succeeded started by testing the strength of the spaghetti against the marshmallow then built up from there. Once they discovered how many pieces of pasta it took to hold a marshmallow, they would then keep testing different things to see what would hold.

With social, you can do the same thing. You can start with your content and target it against several different targets that you think may work. After several days, you will see which targets are doing the best. Once you narrow that down, you can test what creatives and content work best.

In the marshmallow challenge, every move that the winning team made had the goal in mind. When optimizing your campaigns for social, you have to do the same thing. With every move you make, you need to have the goal in mind.

If you need a little guidance how you would break this down check out how we believe it should be broken down here.

When amplifying on social, So many people will fail once and then quit, but what they don’t know is that in social, we get a chance to fail many times, at minimal cost, and learn from the failure and apply it to the next campaign.

With the constant “test and tweak” method, you are able to evolve your campaign and determine what is the best content and best targeting so that in the future you will know what will work well. As a result, the process becomes quicker and more cost effective.

Determine the right audience size by using friend-of-fan targeting

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

We previously talked about using exclusion targeting to refine your campaigns, now let’s delve into how to find the right size for your audience.

This technique is not exactly a negative filter, but one of my favorite tactics when choosing audiences is to use friend of fan targeting.

Let’s say that this audience of 68,000 is too big for my budget.

By the way, the rule of thumb on how big your audience targets should be is this: take your daily budget in pennies and multiply by 2 to get your daily audience size. So if you have a $10 daily budget, then you have about 2,000 people you can reach each day.

Assuming you’re managing 10 ads at any one time, then you can have a reach of 200 people in each, giving you a total reach of 2,000.

And since half of Facebook users log-in each day, you could go for an audience of 400 people, which gives you a net 200 people each day.

This audience of 68,000 gives us an effective reach of 34,000 (since half of folks log in each day). And at our average newsfeed CPM of $5 (the pennies x 2 trick above), it would cost us $5 x 34 to reach them daily, which is $170.

But in my example, I have only $10 a day.

So I want to hit a more precise audience. And now I’ll use friend-of-fan targeting to filter it down a bit.

I’ve now got 16,800, which is slightly on the high side.

Some people will say that there’s no downside to targeting an audience that is more than you have dollars to reach.

To which I say– why waste money unless it’s not yours? By adding in the connection target, I’m showing ads to people who have friends that are fans of BlitzMetrics.

All else equal, people who are fans of Mari Smith AND have a friend who is a fan, too, will be more motivated to click than those who don’t have a friend’s endorsement.

What should ultimately be governing my budget is profitability. If I’m making money on margin, then I should keep expanding until my margin cost is equal to my marginal revenue. That’s first semester economics for you!

I like to use FOF (friend-of-fan) targeting in nearly every ad. Having the magic combination of social trust as well as topical relevance (they’re interested in what I have to offer) is what drives conversion.

The only times I break this rule are:

When the client just wants a lot of fans– quantity over quality.
The audience is so small that the FOF filter makes it too small.
I’m trying to manipulate the media— when I workplace targeting, the goal is to get the impression, not necessarily a click. The audiences are usually quite small, except for those targeting Facebook as a workplace (too many users listing this).

Hope this helps you in your targeting escapades!

Let us know how this works for you.

How Will Facebook Graph Search Change Sponsored Results?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

With Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search, marketers anxiously awaited to see how they could take advantage of the new real estate. Look at all that space!

Last fall, “Sponsored Results” started appearing in the search bar. Even though there isn’t much traffic, these ad units are surprisingly powerful. We’ve seen CTR in the 5-10% range, and CPCs of $0.05 – $0.10. Advertisers can use this ad unit to “brand bid” on competitors’ names, or what’s even more powerful is to target a set of users and bid on a wide range of popular keywords.

This is especially sneaky because we’re not really bidding on the keywords, we’re bidding on a set of users to search for anything.

See how Degree Tree and Oxford Seminars come up when I start to search for Coca-Cola?

So will these ads be effective with Graph Search? Let’s take a look at old vs. new:

At first glance, Graph Search is a much wider bar – wide enough for them to have replaced the Facebook logo with just the “f”!

The ad still looks pretty good, and it’s not in a “Sponsored” section like before, but they’ve added the “Sponsored Software” badge to let users know it’s an ad. Will this affect CTR? As Graph Search is released to more and more users, we’re expecting:

Search volumes to increase, since Graph Search one of the 3 pillars of Facebook, as mentioned by Zuck. Might search on Facebook be bigger and more effective than RHS (right-hand side ads)? We think so.

Graph Search expands search from a single term to social connectedness, geography, and actions. How will us marketers choose to serve ads within this framework?

We think sponsored stories are even more important, since graph search is based on a user’s context ¾ what their friends have done.

How do we get more results in graph search, paid or not? Get more social actions ¾ likes, comments, check-ins, offers claimed, and so forth. We’re way beyond the days of just growing fans.

Matt Prater spends his professional life managing Facebook marketing campaigns, training agency partners, and working closely with brands such as Nickelodeon, Nike, Viacom, and PBS. His area of expertise includes ad campaign management and project development. Earlier this year, Matt was a featured speaker at several social media workshops for agencies in Bogota, Colombia as a part of the BlitzMetrics Certified Partner program. He graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with degrees in Economics and Political Science. Outside of work, Matt is an avid tennis player and enjoys rock climbing, cycling, and travel.

Creative Ways We Use Custom Audiences at BlitzMetrics

By Dennis Yu 2 Comments

Custom audiences are one of the many Facebook marketing tools we use to do thoughtful analysis that makes a real impact. The purpose of a custom audience is to target your entire list or specific segments of your list exclusively but the application of custom audiences goes far beyond that.

To create a custom audience, prepare your list (or segment) as a single column .csv and download Facebook’s Power Editor plugin. There are several options for custom audiences: email addresses, phone numbers, user IDs, and app user IDs.

Keep in mind that you can upload different list segments and do all of the below for each segment – the level of granularity is up to you. Uploading your entire list can work in ad targeting and has some practical use with custom audiences but think about trying some segments like:

Customers who have purchased
Frequent and reoccurring customers
Hot leads and report opt-ins
Webinar attendees
Conference/speaking engagement attendees
Customers who came from various traffic sources (SEM, Facebook ads, display ads, YouTube, etc.)
Unsubscribe list (gray hat)
SMS text messaging list
Get creative – there are unlimited possibilities!

Alright, Tom. I’ve got my custom audiences uploaded to Facebook and I’m ready to do this thing, what’s next? Here are some of the more creative ways we use custom audiences internally at BlitzMetrics:

Analysis against social interests

If you take a look at our documentation on social affinity for ad targeting you can do something very similar with custom audiences. Instead of finding the overlap between your brand and a particular interest you can see how many of the people within your custom audience have certain interests.

Determining how social your list is

After uploading your custom audience to Facebook, you can find out exactly what percentage of that list is on the social network. This is very useful for determining how social these people are and in some cases can help determine if marketing your brand on social media channels will be effective.

Demographic breakdown of segments

Did you know you can also do demographic breakdowns of a custom audience the same way you pull ad counts for precise interests? How much of the list is men? Women? What states and regions are they from? This information can eliminate up to 80-90% of wasted ad spend and help create an ad targeting strategy.

Lets say you upload your hot prospect list which only contains leads that have opted-in for a free white paper and clicked one of your ads within the last 30 days (we can accomplish this with InfusionSoft). You might find that 85% of the list is women, over 50% live in California, and 100% of the list is between ages 20 and 35. Knowing this you can target exclusively women that live in California between ages 20-35. This isn’t only useful for Facebook either, but all other channels as well.

Lookalike audiences

Another feature many marketers ignore on Facebook is lookalike audiences. The way it works is you upload your list and Facebook automatically matches the demographic qualities of your list with other related users.

This helps get your brand in front of new prospects that are similar to your existing audience. There are 2 options for lookalike audiences: reach and similarity. Reach will give you a larger list of people to target but similarity will match the interest and demographic profile of your list as closely as possible, likely creating the greatest efficiency. Both are worth testing!

Lead nurturing

How well rounded is your lead nurturing program? Sales funnels, especially for high priced or high value items are not 2 steps. You need to provide value up front, then provide more value and thought leadership, then nurture your leads by staying on their radar. I don’t care what business you’re in, nurturing your leads is going to make your marketing more effective.

Then, when the time is right figure out how you can help them and take action. If you’re doing nothing more than sending a “thanks for signing up” email you need to rethink your strategy. Use marketing automation to regularly rotate in fresh prospects once the existing leads are lower in the funnel due to your nurturing efforts.

Did this post give you some ideas? You don’t have to use the tools available “as is” – think of creative uses to maximize your output, make your targeting more effective or more granular, and most importantly drive measurable ROI. If you think of any other uses for custom audiences I didn’t mention let me know in the comments!