Case Study: Boosted Facebook Posts Build Brand Awareness
August 31, 2017
One thing that’s pretty well established is that solicitous, direct-response advertising to a broad social media audience doesn’t work. Blast an advertisement to a Facebook crowd that only vaguely fits your target audience and you’re flushing your budget down the drain.
So what do you do to engage people on social media? What’s the point?
The point is to create brand awareness and get targeted people into your sales funnel. This is a business development strategy.
What engages people is, quite frankly, content that has almost nothing to do with your business offer.
It’s content that’s touching, inspirational, and – perhaps – borderline cheesy. It’s memes that boys in the first-grade find funny, or memes frat boys find funny. Or what guys in their late 40’s who remember old Saturday Night Live skits find funny (if that’s your target audience).
Most of all, it’s content that makes its point fast and is shareable.
As a business, you may not want to have your voice appeal to the Bart Simpson’s of the world, but instead, inspire people as they go about their day.
We’ve found this to be an effective social media engagement strategy. Here are some examples.
Using Quotes on Boosted Posts to Increase Engagement
These examples are all boosted Facebook posts, meaning we spent a small amount to get the posts to show higher in people’s feeds and to target certain audiences.
For example, a client who sells doors wanted to target people with certain job titles:
The post was an inspirational quote:
This post got 41 shares and 81 reactions for a business that only has 137 page followers. That’s a tremendous amount of targeted engagement for a $20 spend.
Here’s another example from a business that does auto window tinting.
The audience:
The post:
240 reactions, 2 shares and 11 comments. Excellent engagement for a local business.
It’s very popular to take a “day” like “national flower day” and turn it into a simple post:
This post got 12% engagement, 35 shares, 201 likes and 13 comments.
Marketing 360® also uses this strategy:
Why Quotes and Memes Work for SMM
For people new to social media marketing, the examples here may seem trite. How does this help my business? you ask.
First, remember that this is brand marketing. These are not meant to be direct response ads. They’re meant to get your brand name in front of more people.
And when you do, several things happen.
First is that when a post from your page gets engagement, it improves the rankings and visibility of other posts you create. Part of how Facebook displays content on News Feeds is to evaluate what the user responded to previously.
So when someone comments and says they like Ford best, or shares Gail Devers’ quote, Facebook sees that person enjoyed the content and will put more from your page into their News Feed. If on the other hand, your posts never get any engagement, you’ll get to a point where you have no organic visibility at all.
Second, you can create Facebook Engagement custom audiences. For example, the door company has 122 people who engaged with their post they can now add to a custom audience. They’ll create another post with a call to action to move this group further into their sales funnel.
Third, this is brand exposure. You want people to know who you are and what you do. Hopefully, you’ll get touches on social media or with other branding. Perhaps you get them to your website and get them on your email list.
In time, when they need your services, they’ll look you up by name. When you look at your data and see people finding you on Google by searching on your brand name, you’ll know that this marketing had an impact.
Brand marketing is not easy to track and it can seem disassociated from your main message, particularly on social media.
But Facebook is a fantastic place to create awareness and give your company a voice. Today, people follow and buy from brands that they feel a personal connection with. Posts with quotes, funny memes, and quick bits of useful info will help you make those connections.
*Results are based on past client performance. Individual account performance may vary. Results are not guaranteed.
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