Scott's main push with online advertising has been selling subscriptions to comic books, and while he's a local business, customers of his subscription service are spread across the U.S. The main reason he focused here is that he can justify the relatively high acquisition costs for a subscription customer, rather than just driving in foot traffic. And his acquisition costs with online advertising have been high -- especially via paid search.
As I mentioned, the one shining ray of hope he's had is Facebook. With Facebook, he can target so incredibly well that he can get his ad in front of folks he could never reach using other methods. He walked me through some of the campaigns he's running on Facebook right now, and the results were pretty impressive. With Facebook he's been able to branch out beyond his subscription sales and effectively target local customers to bring traffic into his store. And with Facebook's features for hosting events, he's found a very powerful tool to bring potentially high value customers from around the region into his store.
Unlike a national advertiser, as a small business, it's in Scott's best interest to spend some time honing his campaign to address incredibly small micro-targeted audiences -- audiences that would be too much work and too tiny for a big advertiser to bother with. He showed me one campaign he's been running to promote an event at his store. With the five targeting parameters he'd assigned to the campaign, his estimated audience was only 620 people. But he had more than 40 clicks on this campaign and, at last check, had 24 people who had signed up to participate -- using Facebook's event promotion tools. It is this integration of incredibly rich targeting with tools specifically available for individuals, organizations, and companies that make Facebook so incredibly valuable from a small local businesses standpoint.
I first recognized this power when I happened to notice an ad for a local Vietnamese restaurant called Monsoon East on my Facebook homepage. I still don't know if Facebook was somehow able to glean that I love Vietnamese food, or if the ad just targeted me as a local. But what really grabbed my attention was not the ad itself, but what happened when I clicked on it. The ad didn't link me through to the restaurant's website. It brought me to a group page for the restaurant. My first thought was, "Oh -- smart -- it's providing a landing page for local advertisers so they don't need a website." But then I saw that Monsoon East did, in fact, have a website -- and after a bit of clicking, I realized that the restaurant actually has one hell of a website. It's elegant, beautifully designed, and a fantastic site for a local restaurant. At first I was baffled as to why Monsoon East didn't link to its website, but I quickly realized that its group fan page is brilliant.
This was a fan page with concise, relevant information that told me about why I might like the place, and then the magical "bit at the end" -- the members' list and discussion board. Monsoon East currently has 109 members on its group page, mostly filled with young, good looking, active-lifestyle (judging by their profile pictures) people. Despite my cynical ad-pundit view of advertising, I thought, "This looks like the kind of place I might like." Just that they had 109 members on their fan page made this restaurant much more legitimate to me (as a consumer). And that's powerful.
So kudos to a savvy set of local entrepreneurs who are unleashing the power of social networking to promote their businesses. I think we all have something to learn from them.
Eric Picard is the advertising technology advisor to the Advertising Platform Engineering team at Microsoft.
On Twitter? Follow Picard at @ericpicard. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
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