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Posted: 17/02/2011
It was a bit cheeky and brash, but we used our network of colleagues, friends and contacts to help us analyze our recent emarketing campaign alternatives before we began testing on Facebook and Linked-in. As a company we are a bit hard to position. We could sell to anyone but basically we have a passion for helping smaller businesses grow. It is fun and it provides almost immediate gratification and feedback.
Based on our  own perception of our chosen positioning, we came up with twenty advert ideas and images. From this, we created a shortlist of 10 adverts that could be run within facebook. Then, using Surveymonkey, (Free on-line survey system), we created a survey allowing people to rate and comment on each advert. The survey was sent out to our friendly test group, to see which ideas were highest rated by the group.
To understand our positioning, you should know that typically our clients come to us to help solve one or a combination of three problems:
- They are unhappy with their web-presence, perhaps not getting any new business from their web-site.
- They are in a bit of a muddle with all of the emails and documents that relate to customers and suppliers, in fact their whole customer-facing intelligence system is an inconsistent mess.
- Their sales process is undefined and they are not getting the sales results that they expect. They need something built into their CRM system to keep proper track of sales progress, checklists and stages, for better sales management
We use open source software to create quality products, similar to those that some larger companies pay big money for. Growing businesses want access to big business capabilities and consistent results on a budget. That’s understandable… so do we!
Facebook ads are a great medium and format to refine and hone your positioning: A three word headline, an image and a fourteen word call to action, all designed to catch the attention of the target prospect. Clicks cost money, so you really don’t want just the curious to be clicking your ad.
So once we got the feedback from the survey, the next stage was to take the 3 most popular adverts and edit them slightly based on some of the feedback people posted. Then we uploaded them to facebook in an appropriate format, targeted the audience we wanted, in terms of demographic and location and set a budget of clicks per day. The purpose of these ads was to find small and mediums sized businesses who were looking for solutions to their problems and direct them to our website. If they were really interested in what we offered, they would also have the opportunity to sign up to the site to start a conversation on their needs.
Early on, we saw a prevailing trend with the 3 adverts we uploaded. One in particular drove the majority of traffic to our site. This was the idea of having ‘Hit the Wall’ with your business. This was an idea and image that appealed to our audience. We were able to react and alter our ad budgets to maximize the benefit of this advert, resulting in many people clicking onto our site and the ad showing up on almost 1.5 million pages (impressions) over the week we ran it. All this on a modest budget!
These results were due to testing ideas and fine-tuning our adverts. It’s a process we strongly recommend.
We will be following up on this by creating a series of additional adverts based on the most successful one. These will be more closely targeted to the need and problems of small business owners. On the left are our successful ads>
If you need help with your own marketing please contact us to see if we can help.
by PeterCoy
Peter Coy | President | Prodigm Inc. | Toronto
+1 (416) 564 1446 | petercoy@prodigm.ca |
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