How Facebook Tools Can Revitalize Ad Campaigns

In their book, Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 600 Million Customers in 10 Minutes, authors Perry Marshall and Thomas Meloche lay out the fundamentals of advertising your goods and services to users of the hugely popular social network. In this edited excerpt, the authors detail ways to engage clients after a traditional ad campaign runs out of steam.

Imagine stopping by for a casual conversation and you meet someone who, at first, seems interesting but quickly monopolizes the conversation and talks about a single subject. You realize you have been standing there for 15 minutes and haven’t been able to say a word. The speaker still doesn’t change the subject, so you make an excuse and leave.

The next time you stop by, that person picks up the same conversation. After another 15 minutes, you again make an excuse and leave. The next time you just walk by. You’ve had enough.

That’s ad fatigue.

Ad fatigue is your prospects’ way of saying they want to change the conversation. Here’s how to use Facebook to do just that:

1. Advertise an event. Facebook events appear as destinations that you can select in the “design your ad” section of the ads manager. You can target the advertising for your event just like any other ad. They are simple, powerful guided missiles.

Once people confirm that they are “attending,” Facebook does all the work required to remind them of the event. An event is a great way to engage your user in additional conversations. And events don’t fatigue — they happen.

Even better, if people commit on Facebook to attending your event, Facebook gives high priority to the messages reminding them to attend. You can invite your existing friends to attend your event free in limited size groups. You can advertise to your existing fans to attend your event for very little money. Do both.

2. Start an “ask campaign.” When you run out of things to talk about, see if your visitors have something they want to talk about. Allow them to initiate the next conversation.

Simply ask your fans, “What is the one question you would most like to ask an expert?” Then let them tell you what’s on their minds. To make the campaign more interesting, launch a live event, such as a free webinar, where you will answer the most common and most interesting questions.

An ask campaign is designed to reconnect you to your target audience. Learn the questions they want to ask. Then be, or find, the expert to answer their questions. The questions your fans ask will contain marketing terms you can use in your next ads.

Set up a form to capture the questions they would most like to ask an expert. Every question they ask is the source of a potential new ad.

Related: Is Your Website Ready for Facebook Advertising?

3. Throw a party. If you hold a special sale at your store, throw a summer picnic for your church or produce a teleseminar for your consulting firm, then advertise your special event to those who specifically liked your page.

For pennies per person, you can get the word out to your fans and to the community as a whole by advertising it on Facebook.

The more event-driven your business, the better your presence on Facebook, because Facebook is all about new, novel and different. Make your business more Facebook-friendly and destroy ad fatigue by creating and advertising events.

Events can be anything you can schedule and invite people to attend. They should be something that people would find fun or interesting, but don’t have to be complex or elaborate.

A restaurant with amazing pies can have a taste of pie event; on one day each month, anyone ordering a regular dinner will get a free slice of pie. It is simple to do, easy to track and measure the results, and simple to discover if the net impact is increased traffic and increased sales of pie.

Facebook understands that their service is fundamentally different from search. Expect it to create new advertising options to take advantage of the unique social graph it has created. These tools will change the way you reach customers for years to come. Start adding fans to your Facebook page and take advantage of new ways to reach customers.

Related: What Facebook’s Page Post Targeting Means to Your Business

This article is an excerpt from Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising available from Entrepreneur Press.

Read more stories about: Online marketing, Facebook advertising, Online advertising

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