Advertising on the internet and social media platforms.

GoodShepherd

GoodShepherd

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I spend thousands every month on online advertising for my business, Im not running the ads myself someone else is doing it for me, my main platforms are Facebook and Instagram with direct messages sent to me through whatsapp messenger.

Has anyone here had good success on other platforms? For example, how well do the GAB and telegram platforms perform, or any other platform.

Online advertising is always changing and it can get expensive and difficult to reach the right audience, it seems to be getting harder and harder to reach the right people. Its also very difficult to directly target the people you are looking for and to exclude the wrong people, for example, facebook doesnt allow you to target people based on race, religion or even which neighborhoods they live in, you can select neighborhoods but anyone who works in those neighborhoods, visits those areas or drives through those zones will also be targetted for the adverts, this is a problem, the new cellphones with all their privacy settings is also making it harder to reach people since their data is more private.

Does anyone here perhaps have any tips and advice they would be willing to share?
 
If you are a business with a physical location that serves/targets local customers, FB ads are great for that. If you are a remote business that sells a product to "anyone", I've heard that Amazon is the way to go (but I don't have any experience there; just spoke to two business owners that do).

If you are B2B and local (or can identify unique job titles/positions as being your best buyers), then a LinkedIn combo of organic posts + cold outreach + maybe the occasional paid ad is quite effective. My clients drive their LinkedIn strategies via the personal accounts of the figurehead, rather than the company pages. Even LiN ads now finally let you use personal posts rather than company posts.

The most exciting thing I'm using for some clients right now is cold text outreach, but there are significant startup costs and lag time, and I'm not sure I would recommend it for anything but very big ticket items.
 
TooFineAPoint said:
If you are a business with a physical location that serves/targets local customers, FB ads are great for that. If you are a remote business that sells a product to "anyone", I've heard that Amazon is the way to go (but I don't have any experience there; just spoke to two business owners that do).

If you are B2B and local (or can identify unique job titles/positions as being your best buyers), then a LinkedIn combo of organic posts + cold outreach + maybe the occasional paid ad is quite effective. My clients drive their LinkedIn strategies via the personal accounts of the figurehead, rather than the company pages. Even LiN ads now finally let you use personal posts rather than company posts.

The most exciting thing I'm using for some clients right now is cold text outreach, but there are significant startup costs and lag time, and I'm not sure I would recommend it for anything but very big ticket items.
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So no I dont have a physical location and Im not really selling a physical product so amazon is not the place, I dont want to target "everyone" I want to target selected people, they have to be above a certain age, the have to earn a certain amount of money as the below average person wont afford it and I also need to reach the people who like this kind of thing so my advertising needs to be very detailed and targetted, when you reach the wrong audience you waste a lot of money but the times you get the right audience the sales come pouring in, it gets very complicated once you get into it and the rules are always changing
 
Yes, audience selection and actual product offer are far more important than the style of message. If you get the first two right you can basically say "buy my stuff" and it will still generally work.

So I guess your biggest issue is to figure out what accurate proxies the social media platforms have for "earn a certain amount of money."

On FB I tried ads to zip codes with high income earners and that failed miserably. The FB algo wants us to advertise to a wide audience (min 200K audience, ideally more), consistently, and then let them sort for the actual interested parties. In that sense they want your ad creative to do the filtering. Eg. "For people who earn over $100K per year, this really works!" Although I don't believe you can use that exact type of sentence on FB because it is against the TOS, hopefully you get what I mean.

For my clients that do cold texting, our proxy filter for high income is if they own a house worth more than $750K, so that's how we compile lists for that.
 
TooFineAPoint said:
Yes, audience selection and actual product offer are far more important than the style of message. If you get the first two right you can basically say "buy my stuff" and it will still generally work.

So I guess your biggest issue is to figure out what accurate proxies the social media platforms have for "earn a certain amount of money."

On FB I tried ads to zip codes with high income earners and that failed miserably. The FB algo wants us to advertise to a wide audience (min 200K audience, ideally more), consistently, and then let them sort for the actual interested parties. In that sense they want your ad creative to do the filtering. Eg. "For people who earn over $100K per year, this really works!" Although I don't believe you can use that exact type of sentence on FB because it is against the TOS, hopefully you get what I mean.

For my clients that do cold texting, our proxy filter for high income is if they own a house worth more than $750K, so that's how we compile lists for that.
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Imagine you are Amish and you would like to target other Amish people from your area to invite them to a family fun day in the park, you would want to only engage with the men so you would only target males, married males only so over a certain age and Amish are all white so you would only want to target white males and their religion is Christian so only Christians and they have to live in the area (not work in or travel through), I know Amish dont use social media but this is just an example, sometimes it can be hard to reach the correct audiance.

Or maybe you only want to target black females with a certain hair product, you dont want you paid ads going to white males right, I wonder if there is somekind of technology out there where a person could ONLY target the people they want to target, very detailed, Im sure the guys who own facebook they have everyones data so they themselves can do this as they own the platform. Or are there professional online marketing people who are maybe very good at this?
 
I can't help you much as I also have a guy who looks after this for me.

I am amazed at how precise and what you can do with social media advertising. What I'm trying to do lately is reverse engineer the process so I know exactly how much online spend translates into new sales and how much those sales are worth.

You have to keep lots of data and do analytics on this but I basically want to get to a place where I know that if I need more sales, I just turn up the ad spend in certain areas.

I just read a book on it called $100 dollar offers. This breaks all that down into good detail. Also read $100m dollar leads which is the follow up book.

Are you getting these kind of analytics and knowledge of the return, @GoodShepherd ?
 
GoodShepherd said:
Imagine you are Amish and you would like to target other Amish people from your area to invite them to a family fun day in the park, you would want to only engage with the men so you would only target males, married males only so over a certain age and Amish are all white so you would only want to target white males and their religion is Christian so only Christians and they have to live in the area (not work in or travel through), I know Amish dont use social media but this is just an example, sometimes it can be hard to reach the correct audiance.

Or maybe you only want to target black females with a certain hair product, you dont want you paid ads going to white males right, I wonder if there is somekind of technology out there where a person could ONLY target the people they want to target, very detailed, Im sure the guys who own facebook they have everyones data so they themselves can do this as they own the platform. Or are there professional online marketing people who are maybe very good at this?
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Social media is not going to (and is not legally able to) let you target by race or religion. You need to find proxy filters, or you need to get a list broker who will righteously read between the lines for you (or who you can speak openly with, which is about a 1% chance of happening in real life).

I get what you are driving at.

But what Facebook is saying (assuming I understand them correctly; take what I say with a grain of salt) is this:

- you make an ad for black ladies (write it to black ladies, using their language and their pains, make creatives like video and images that grab black lady attention, etc)
- we will show it to everyone
- we will quickly filter out the non-black ladies (just pay us $1,000 or so in the meantime while we get you useless impressions in order to "learn")
- you are not allowed to tell us you only want us to show it to black ladies
- but given the above, with enough time and money, we will only show it to black ladies

This is not necessarily even evil. They just have to protect their own ass.

The ad content itself (at least on FB) creates the filter.

But you can't write: "Hey Negress, tired of your gross nappy hair that is disgusting to men because it looks so shit compared to white women?"

You have to write something like "All the residents of MLK Boulevard are amazed at how easy it is to get straight hair now, even when they are on food stamps and don't own a clock or a working smoke detector." Maybe tweak with some "finna" words and other ebonics.

You can't tell FB to not show the ad to white men. You just have to trust that your copy is either so invisible or repulsive to white men that they will scroll by it, the ad campaign will learn, and it will start only showing it to Shaniquas.

This is my understanding of FB ads as of this writing. It is not like sending postcards to a zip code but saying you don't want them to go to any houses with south-facing windows, or that were built in the last 5 years. It's not precise like mailout. You have to live with leakage and imprecision for the benefits of max reach for minimal relative cost.

Edit: Retargeting is fairly precise online, but that is not what we are discussing.
 
Yip thats exactly what we have been doing, these platforms and the advertising laws are quite interesting and in a way very silly, it shows what kind of world we live in, because they literally have all the details and the data of their facebook users but we not allowed to target them directly according to their data that they shared online
 
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