Episode 112: Targeting with & Ads Guest: Angela Pointon

This is Prove It. A podcast for impatient business owners, overwhelmed marketers, and PR practitioners with no time for podcasts. In just 10 minutes they answer 3 questions and offer proof of what’s working in marketing communications today. Here’s Debbie Albert, President of Albert Communications.

Debbie Albert: Welcome! This episode of Prove It is actually the third of 3 parts in a series on Facebook ads. The first was a 30,000-foot Look at the ABCs of Facebook Ads. The second focused on List Building with Facebook Ads and this episode we’ll look at Targeting with Facebook and Instagram Ads. Angela Pointon has been our Facebook ad expert throughout and she’s back, so welcome Angela!

Angela Pointon: Thank you, Debbie!

Debbie Albert: Her company is called Hand Select Your Clients. Angela works with business owners to generate leads, plan content, and create inbound marketing campaigns. Her work involves a lot of interaction with Facebook and when we first discussed doing a podcast we saw immediately that a 3-part series was necessary and now that I see that we may need to do another 3 at least. So, if you’ve been listening you know the format. We’ll take 10 minutes of your time, ask 3 questions to our expert and then she’ll offer proof of how this is working in marketing communications. So, Angela are you ready to talk about this?

Angela Pointon: I’ ready!

Albert Communications • 215.283.6006 • www.albertcommunications.com

Debbie Albert: Okay so my first question is what kind of people use Facebook and who can you target using Facebook ads?

Angela Pointon: I’d like to say that everybody uses Facebook. Truthfully everybody uses Facebook or Instagram and you create ads using the same set up for both platforms because Facebook owns Instagram. So, between the two of them the entire market is covered. You will often talk to a company and the business owner will say, “I don’t think my prospects are on Facebook,” and I say, “Yes they are, and I can prove that to you.”

Debbie Albert: You talked about it in an earlier episode and I think it’s important to reiterate that everyone is on Facebook shy of maybe the most elderly, although I know a lot of people are, and maybe the younger ones who are on Instagram. So, which is why we’re talking about Facebook and Instagram today. So how do the Facebook ads differ from Instagram ads?

Angela Pointon: Facebook ads and Instagram ads are fairly similar. Obviously when you go to set up an ad you can choose which platform you want it to display on so that’s the first difference I suppose is you’re actually choosing to whether to include Facebook and/or Instagram. Instagram does not allow for some text links within the ad. If anybody is an Instagram user you’ve probably been frustrated with when you post, not being able to do a hyperlink in the post to lead to something. So, there are some constraints. But it’s important to know the audience that you’re trying to attract for choosing the platform that you want to post the ad on.

So, a quick way to keep this in mind and you can always prove it, by doing the actual research within Facebook. Facebook is going to skew a little bit older and Instagram is going to skew a little but younger. So, for Facebook ads I probably wouldn’t run them for a business solely looking to attract young, young individuals. So, for example, I have a

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restaurant that’s located near a big university who’s a client of mine and they’re looking to run a special offer in August as the students are starting to return to campus. We’re going to run an ad to people who’ve been a freshman, of course, so they’re an upperclassman. And then we’re going to run an ad for brand new people who are freshmen or transfers.

So, for that particular ad it’s Instagram all the way because those individuals are not spending more time on Facebook. You know they’re anywhere from 18 to 22-ish. They’re much more likely to interact and respond to an ad in Instagram. For other organizations we were looking to target individuals with disposable income, who have a family of two, and live in Nevada, for example, that’s Facebook all the way. Those individuals are probably somewhere around 30, 35, 40, maybe, that’s definitely the platform of choice for them.

Debbie Albert: Angela what about with Instagram ads (and I’m embarrassed to tell you that I am not on Instagram, primarily because I think my teenage son would disown me if he saw that I was stalking him), but when you said that you can’t put a hyperlink in an Instagram ad, how can you get an offer through? How do they get the offer on Instagram?

Angela Pointon: There’s two types of ads on Instagram. There is a feed ad and then a straight ad. There’s just different functionality with how the interface works. For example, if people are familiar with an Instagram story it’s a snippet, it’s a small recording that people make that disappears within I think it’s 24 hours, it might be 48 now. It’s meant to be a small capture of somebody’s life that they’re sharing with their followers and then it goes away. You can run a story ad where it’s a video or a still image and in order to get the offer people have to swipe the ad up. Instagram does have a desktop version but nobody uses it.

Debbie Albert: [Laughs] You are making me feel like a dinosaur today!

Albert Communications • 215.283.6006 • www.albertcommunications.com

Angela Pointon: People just interact with the platform a little bit differently, that’s all.

Debbie Albert: Okay so does a company come to someone like you who knows this so well to decide if they should do Facebook, Instagram, or both? I mean you said really know your audience which is always my…it’s the first commandment in marketing and public relations is “know thy audience.” So, if you know that there’s no way that you’re going to audience that’s either 15, 16 years old to 22, you’re going to Facebook.

Angela Pointon: Sure, that’s part of a marketer’s job is first in some cases convincing a business owner that yes, it’s worth marketing on here and let me show you all the ways that you haven’t thought of that applies to your business. Rarely but sometimes we’ll have individuals come to us that say I know I’m missing out because I’m not marketing on Facebook or Instagram. I think it takes a savvier business owner and marketer to see that vision. Usually we’re doing some convincing in the beginning. But then yes, it’s all about leveraging someone’s talents to be able to use the platform and segment the audience and display that to the business owner and say…

For instance, I have a client who wants to market to people of Indian ethnicity from the country India who are living within the Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh area of the US. And who have a specific age range, you know male or female. I’m just telling you all the things that we as marketers would plug into the Facebook platform. I can then share my screen or report to him and show him that this found about 435 individuals within that city that likely, at some point their family came here from India, they are of Indian descent and his business caters to that audience, so it makes sense for him to market to that and it’s a wide enough audience to obviously market to within this geography. So, a marketer can go in there with this tool and absolutely prove or disprove to you because sometimes we report back and it’s such a specific target. Yes, there are individuals, but it’s a really small community. But they can report that back to you and help you build that campaign in a smart way.

Albert Communications • 215.283.6006 • www.albertcommunications.com

Debbie Albert: So, let me ask you one, which might be sort of an idiotic question, but when you think about budget. I’ve had clients who’ve used Google Adwords; the cost is enormous. I know you can’t give me a budget figure but the spend for this, it seems to me that’s it’s so worthwhile because it’s a smaller spend to buy the Facebook ads. A greater ability to target. You’re not bidding on the words. So, it can be more cost effective. Have you ever run into a situation where a business owner listens to what you’re saying, believes you as an expert, but he or she is not on Facebook? I’ve had this situation myself. And so, they don’t understand the value of a Facebook ad because they Google everything.

Angela Pointon: Yeah, so it’s about creating that value for them. I do have a client who has a big Facebook following on their , but they pay someone else to manage their brand page for them, doing regular posts. So, they don’t tend to interact themselves, they don’t see customers commenting about the great time they had at their business and great experience that they had. They don’t see that stuff. They also spent, prior to working with me, a ton of money on direct mail. They bought lists within their geography and they would market to people with postcards. We all know that. One, it’s incredibly expensive and two, depending on the market that you are going after, I would argue in most cases, that’s not how people want to be marketed to anymore.

Debbie Albert: I would agree with that.

Angela Pointon: It’s about building that value for a business owner that doesn’t, again, very few of them come to me and say, “I’m missing out! I know tons of people are on Facebook and I know I should be advertising there.” That’s usually not the conversation I have.

Debbie Albert: Right.

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Angela Pointon: It’s usually, I want to grow my business can you help me figure out a way to? And Facebook ads become an element of that, that it’s my job and my team’s job to build value around the why.

Debbie Albert: Okay so let’s get to the, I mean you’ve proven it along the way, but for our prove it point, can you tell us about a specific business that maybe even tested both platforms, selected either Facebook or Instagram and how they decided to do that and what kind of return on their investment they had?

Angela Pointon: Sure, I do have a business that tested both. And Instagram has come a long way, so this test was actually performed about a year ago before the piece that I was talking about was released. And they tested both and they proved that Facebook was right for them. Again, I’ll be honest, the age demographic is different between the platforms so that will have an impact, the way people interact with each platform has an impact. What businesses have seen a lot of success for on Instagram vs. Facebook are ecommerce businesses where people can literally swipe up or move their finger and buy a shirt, a pair of shoes, a pair of socks, some cool new speaker system… Something that’s easy, quick and doesn’t take a lot of thought to buy. For a younger audience works really, really well on Instagram. And if any of your listeners are thinking that kind of applies to me, then Instagram is probably a great platform. This particular business, it really didn’t apply to them. We tested it and we quickly pulled it because it was proving it was not worth the investment whereas on Facebook it definitely was.

Debbie Albert: That’s great. Angela I can’t thank you enough. I know we’re still scratching the surface of what ads on Facebook can do for a business. You really have me thinking a lot. If our listeners have questions about more of this, they want to hear more, please send in ideas. I’ll buy Angela lunch, convince her to share more, spend some more time with us. In the meantime, I want to thank all of you for listening to Prove It. Stay tuned for more episodes about issues and trends in marketing communications today. And hear real proof of what works. Take care and thanks again!

Albert Communications • 215.283.6006 • www.albertcommunications.com

End of podcast

Albert Communications • 215.283.6006 • www.albertcommunications.com