Remember Creative

SHOULD YOU REALLY BE SPENDING ON FACEBOOK.

You have to spend money to make money, right? In it’s truest sense, we should probably remove the first “money” from that sentence: You have to spend to make money. Because you can quite easily spend time and make money. And of course the reverse is also true. You sell to make money whether it’s the goods and services you sell to make money and, if you’re a government that doesn’t truly understand (or perhaps care) you can sell some of your infrastructure which is vital to your ongoing revenue, for short lived but immediate gain.

Marketing is spending three things to make money.

• We spend money to make money via advertising.
• We spend our mental energy on creativity and ideas.
• We spend our time on pulling it all together in a strategy.

Today we are focussing on advertising and in particular, Facebook advertising.

The main reason why you should spend money on Facebook is simple … it works.

We have all seen the organic reach of our Facebook posts being throttled in recent years. Me, being the petty person that I am, immediately thought why should I reward Facebook with more ad spend if they are hurting my organic reach? It’s a reasonable question, why should I? If you’ve already forgotten – it works.

Facebook doesn’t need to apologise for monetising its platform, in fact it’s a testament to Facebook that they have been able to do so seamlessly and at a time when many other social platforms are struggling. Did you know that Twitter has never made a profit (a statement I may no longer be able to say in 2 months time)?

The reason why it works is no real secret. It’s audience segmentation. Traditional media outlets had demographics and those demos were bible. You could be assured that the typical audience of a TV show, say, a day time soap would be mums wanting to buy groceries and perfume for the longest time. This was done by surveying a select group of people and extrapolating that over the entire TV watching public.

Audience segmentation has grown a lot since the days of broad age brackets and gender. Take a cursory glance at Facebook and you’ll notice that you have many segments to choose from: age, sex, location, education, religion, interests and other page likes (perhaps even target your competitors followers). You can determine political beliefs, job titles, marital status and not only that, Facebook will tell you exactly how many people your ad was served to.

And to top it all off, it’s still cheaper than traditional forms of media. Time will tell whether social media advertising remains cheaper – supply and demand will dictate the trend especially as internet advertising was to surpass TV advertising this year.

If you want to tackle the minefield of creating great Facebook ads, Pia Silva has some good tips for what not to do. Just like governments selling off infrastructure to save a bob, we often see is businesses looking to save in social. Thinking they can do it themselves or skimp on content but in the end if you want Social to work you have to invest in your audience and give them what they want to see.

As this Buffer post suggests:
if you can’t design, find a designer…
if you can’t write, find a writer…
if you can’t be a social media manager, find a social media manager…
well, what do you know, we do all three 😉 Let’s grab a drink and have a chat.