Influencer instead of expensive Facebook Ads! With your own reach you save a lot of money!
Today I had an interesting new client of our social media agency. Even market leader (Germany) and of course looking for advertising opportunities in social media like Facebook, Instagram & Co. among other media. Of course a great ad budget could have been packed into an offer, of course not! We educated our client that for his purposes it makes little sense to advertise on Facebook! A really interesting topic that always comes up at our advertising agency. As media managers we love to advise our clients holistically. Therefore, I wanted to show in a quick briefing, how to work instead of a lot of ad budget, much more sustainable with its own community on which we then, in combination with retargeting pixels (integrated on individual pages), the ads!
For more on the topic, check out my online Facebook Marketing course (Instagram is included) or my social media marketing agency‘s blog.
Important: This customer is not a classic online shop for which scattered ads are of course also worthwhile. Our customer must address the tops in companies and convince them. This is not so easy and would involve a lot of wastage. So it makes sense to build your own community!
Facebook Ads – High wastage due to extremely small target groups
Basically, the point is that with Facebook Ads, for new successes, you have new issues. Over and over again. With customers, for example, from the fashion industry, there is little wastage, if directly 500 of 10,000 advertised people buy the beautiful new dress via the button. The target group is widely spread, yet precisely definable, such as female from 15-19 years.
For industrial companies, qualitative B2B business, we would always have a problem in targeting on Facebook (and Instagram). There is no way (especially in German data protection) to target individuals. We can only target groups. But… where does the company manager belong to? Hardly definable with the options available.
What’s more, people consume the Facebook stream very quickly. Every single view of the ad costs your company money at that moment. But who needs such a special innovation from the hundreds of thousands of people? And who is allowed to decide spontaneously about the purchase of an innovation in the five- to six-figure range? And who decides that on the mobile phone?
In the end, only a handful of people remained who were already distracted by the next message from a friend on Facebook the moment after.
In short, we need a clear target group. That means contact persons.
How do we achieve this? You construct your own target group with relevant people and decision makers, multipliers and influencers.
For our client, this means we gather all relevant people in the field of novelties, innovations and design in real estate. Thus follow our customer (no rental apartments, very exclusive, rentable properties) for sales, relevant people from marketing, event marketing, advertising, etc.. Potential clients who, through the community, as with TV advertising constantly see something new (elaborate designer pieces, installations, concepts, planning, construction, etc.), constantly exclusive, innovative concepts in connection with the NAME our customers.
Influencer Marketing Basics from A-Z
Since we have an extremely high volume of inquiries at our social media agency, we wanted to clarify for everyone how influencer marketing works. With our agency, we focus on long-term engagements for our talents. However, many online shops, companies and agencies also need help and support for ‘smaller’ projects. For that, we now have this 6-part free online course on Influencer Marketing. Based on our Instagram software Social Analytics, I show all the steps it takes to set up a successful influencer marketing concept. From the initial definition to monitoring the campaign. More tutorials on social media, marketing, Photoshop, WordPress, SEO, and much more can be found on my advertising agency Youtube channel.
In principle, three types of influencers can be identified:
- Brand critics, they are always critical of your brand, perhaps they have had negative experiences. By being negative towards your brand, brand reviewers are negatively influencing referrals or readers’ opinions with their posts.
- Brand lovers have a close and direct connection to it. In addition, have extensive experience, for example, in the application
- Brand experts, these are recognized as renowned subject matter experts. They draw on the fundamental knowledge when evaluating services. They always have as neutral an attitude as possible towards brands.
Influencers can be, for example, the following people:
- Bloggers talking about travel, fashion, technology and food
- Public figures
- Forum operator
- Journalists
- Entertainer
- Speaker
- Social media users with a high number of fans
- Politicians
- Your existing customers
- Youtuber
- Instagramer
- Photographers
- And so on
For German companies, Facebook is crucial (national market). As a supplement and for growth outside the national markets, Instagram (international market). For very specific requests, also Xing (national) and LinkedIn (international). Here we can very well identify, find and contact individual interlocutors. If you build up a strong brand on Facebook beforehand, you can also work cross-medially between the networks. This increases the reach even more!
You can advertise permanently, launch promotions or even promote products in advance. “In a few days, the new innovation will arrive!” You don’t have to send the message to 100,000 anonymous people anymore, it goes targeted to your own community without any expenses. Additionally, we have our pixels and can target and advertise to those people as well. Smart ads, little spread.
Facebook Pixel for retargeting homepage visitors on Facebook
On the homepage you install not only one pixel, but several, on different individual pages. So we can, span for online shops, later visitors of individual pages again address, with similar products. These pixels remain active for 30 days. This means that you can subsequently send extremely targeted advertising – not only on Facebook, but also on Instagram. In this way, your BRAND is used over and over again in connection with new products, innovations and design, as in the case of our customers. This makes you interesting and new products quickly presentable.
The advantage, you have your own community + retargeting (targeted advertising) to visitors from individual product pages and the cycle begins, the community of relevant people and influencers grows.
If you start today, all concepts and pixels are defined and integrated in a week. In parallel, you should build up the community with images, Facebook and Instagram. In a few days you already have your first influencers and can use the first data from your homepage from 30 days, targeted advertising in both networks. To do this, use networks like Xing to reach even more targeted decision makers. In just 30 days, you can then continue to work with results, adopt the concepts and ad campaigns for further work and bring new innovations to market faster and more effectively.
Good luck for your exclusive B2B business!
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