As an aviation company, should I advertise on Facebook?
As part of a result-oriented, measurable marketing system, Facebook ads can work.
Without a system, (as a Random Act of Marketing) Facebook ads are simply a waste of money. There’s no lasting benefit to getting more traffic to your company Facebook page unless you are prepared to capture an email address or other contact information from your Facebook fans, and capitalize on that traffic.
These ads work to bring your page to the attention of people who fit the demographics you’re looking for. And there are SO MANY Facebook users that you can just about certain that your target customers use it!
But there are three conditions for turning that attention into sales:
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- A plan to earn your visitors’ continued attention with high-quality, interesting content after you stop running the ad.
- An offer that gives them a reason to extend their relationship with you beyond “liking” your page. It’s important to keep this offer, “ask” or “call to action” (CTA) small and low-risk. A lead generation campaign with a CTA like “download this free checklist!”
- A follow up process that moves them through your sales cycle.
Case Study of a Facebook Ad
Here’s the actual performance of a test of one of our ad campaigns on the Facebook social networking site with our commentary. We ran a very small test on a very new Facebook page – we purchased an ad with our target demographics (Male, 45+, interest in aviation, living in the U.S.) for one week, with a budget of $5 per day.
Note – the purple dots are posts. We increased the frequency of posts toward the end and immediately after the ad stopped running.
Here are our results and conversion rates:
| Before (10/1/2012) | During (10/7/2012) | After (10/14/2012) |
| 28 “Likes” | 65 “Likes” | 65 “Likes” |
| 23 People Reached | 5,205 People Reached | 64 People Reached |
| 0 People “Talking About This” |
30 People “Talking About This” |
9 People “Talking About This” |
| 1 Ebook downloaded | 9 Ebooks downloaded | 3 Ebooks downloaded |
Since some of the terminology may be unfamiliar, a “like” occurs when a visitor clicks a “like” button on a Facebook ad or page, indicating a willingness to learn more about a person, company, product or service.
Facebook As Part of a Campaign
On the Facebook page, we included an offer for a “free ebook” – visitors could download it in exchange for their contact information, including a phone number and mailing address. We wanted to see how willing visitors were to extend the relationship. For this campaign, we kept thing simple, with a single ad set. Our intention is to reach prospects and potential customers who are willing to download an ebook and take a step closer to being a customer for our client’s product.
Track traffic using the Facebook pixel.
As part of a system, Facebook ads work. Without a system, you’re just wasting time, energy and money. There’s no lasting benefit to getting more traffic to your company Facebook page unless you are prepared to capture and capitalize on that traffic.
Obviously, we need to repeat this test on a larger scale to see if the results are proportionate.
You can check out this Facebook Ad guide from Upbeat.
Some advice from our experience:
- Keep tests small and short-term. Facebook changes its advertising policy frequently.
- Use custom audiences to narrow the scope of your ad to a target audience of your most likely prospects.
- Start with a small budget until you have a proven, repeatable marketing campaign. We would not devote a large budget to this until it’s more proven.
- Ensure your call to action is placed clearly and prominently while the ad is running.
- Improve ad copy and try more compelling image design.
- Follow up, follow up, follow up, and then, follow up!
As always, please refrain from wasteful Random Acts of Marketing!
We offer free consultations. If you’re frustrated with a campaign that isn’t working, or if you’re wondering what might work better, we’re happy to take a look! Call us at 702-987-1679 or pick a time from our calendar here.
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As part of the test did you run any re-targeting ads for those potential leads that clicked the facebook ad but did not initially sign-up for the offer? What was the overall conversion rate?
Hi Michael!
Great question – thanks for asking.
This article was originally written in 2012, so the results were based on the tools that were available then – simple page promotion to a very generally targeted group (Male, 45+, interest in aviation, living in the U.S.)
If we were to run the test today (and we probably should, just to update the article) we would do several things differently.
1) We probably would probably NOT have more Facebook page engagement as the goal. We’d drive traffic to a blog post or a product offer using the Facebook conversion pixel.
2) We would specifically target people who had visited the target website (or liked Facebook pages of competitors) rather than simple demographic targeting.
3) We would do REtarget people who visited but did not click, exactly as you suggested.
We talk about these cases (and others) in detail in our Aviation Market Master Class. Micheal – having seen your posts and activity, I think you’d be a great fit. Details are here: https://abci.flywheelstaging.com/class