Facebook Best Practices on Demographic Targeting

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Many people do not fully utilize the customizable features in the creation of Facebook Ads. This is essential for receiving the full value of your ad dollars. Are you properly targeting your demographic with Facebook Ads to reach your intended audience? If not, we have you covered. In this article we’ve compiled a few tips on Facebook best practices when targeting your demographic.

Identify Key Audience Segments

Properly identifying your audience segments is one of the key principles of marketing. This allows you to create specific content that will resonate with your audience. Once you know exactly who you would like to market to, the rest of our Facebook best practices become a breeze.

Understand the “Detailed Targeting” When Creating an Ad

The second step to our Facebook best practices is to understand “detailed targeting” when creating an ad. Have you ever noticed the “detailed targeting” section while creating an ad, yet did not know how to use that feature? In this section one can specify demographics, interests or behaviors to ensure the right audience is reached.

1.) Demographics

Once you specify your audience, add their demographics to your campaign. Make sure to be specific as possible because Facebook allows you to be.  A few demographic options include education and income

2.) Interests

What interests is your product or service intended for? Whether it be cooking, shopping, outdoor activities or B2B marketing, Facebook has an interest for every industry there is.

3.) Behavior

If you are a Facebook marketing agency, you may want to find people who have recently purchased business marketing related services. By understanding their purchasing behavior, you can customize your ads better than before.

By utilizing the demographics, interests and behaviors sections in Facebook Ads manager, you ultimately waste less ad dollars on people who have no interest in your product or service.

Utilize the “Connections” Feature

The third step to our Facebook best practices is to properly utilize the “connections” feature in the Ad manager. Under this feature, one can dictate the ad to target people or friends who like your page. People who like your page can even be excluded from seeing the ad. The same principles apply to events or apps created by your business.

Facebook ads can be quite profitable when they are set up correctly and are as targeted as possible. Working with a professional Facebook marketing agency such as Bright Age can ensure the best quality and targeted ads for your business.

Determining the Best Facebook Advertising Objectives for Your Business

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Facebook marketing is a highly rewarding way to expand your brand’s potential.  While its relevance should not be overlooked, fully taking advantage of what Facebook has to offer can be a daunting task.  An efficient Facebook advertising agency will help you use the social media platform to properly achieve your set conversion goals.  Below we’ve listed advice for successfully getting the most out of your Facebook marketing experience.

Choose an Objective

First things first, before you can begin creating your ad on Facebook, you need to select one of the available objectives.  There are currently 13 objectives to choose from, each having a slightly different function.  The overarching goal of your Facebook marketing campaign should determine the objective that you select.  Whether you are focused on brand awareness, clicks to website, or even conversions, being specific in your selection is extremely important.  Once you have chosen the perfect objective for you campaign, it’s crucial to keep in mind that Facebook optimizes your advertisements based around this selection.  This process is critical in achieving the best possible results and should be thoroughly considered.

Determine Ad Type

After your objective has been decided on, you then need to pick a specific ad type.  One of the most popular ad strategies offered by Facebook is that of the boosted posts.  Boosted posts are optimized towards achieving maximum engagements with your brand, such as likes, comments, and shares.  Remember that the popularity of a specific ad type does not necessarily guarantee its success for your specific brand.  Putting into play another ad type might be an option to consider if your brand is focused on more towards conversions than engagements.  The ad type selected should change to properly accommodate the previously decided on objective.

Adobe and Thermo Fisher Scientific ran a recent test to compare different ad types. A newsfeed ad versus a boosted post and a newsfeed ad versus a carousel ad were compared.  The end goal was to see which type worked better for reach and engagement.  Using the same image, copy, target audience, and spend, each simple advertisement ran for a period of one week.

The first test resulted in a surprising 101{3257b6ea9729d50d0ff0b2d66dfbc71319303295fd3654295ddeccd44865dc00} more reach from the newsfeed ad than the boosted post.  Results came back similarly with impressions, showing almost 200{3257b6ea9729d50d0ff0b2d66dfbc71319303295fd3654295ddeccd44865dc00} more on the newsfeed ad.  When it came to likes, comments, and shares, the boosted post outperformed the newsfeed ad by 80{3257b6ea9729d50d0ff0b2d66dfbc71319303295fd3654295ddeccd44865dc00}.  This came as no shock, though, considering these style posts are aimed towards the goal of engagement.  This goes to show that your ad type plays a significant role in helping achieve your objective, and ultimately handing your brand its desired success.

A Facebook marketing agency, such as Bright Age, can help you focus on running the best possible ad campaign.  Selecting the right objective followed by the most suiting ad type can be challenging, but ultimately this is what will make or break your online success.

The Art of the Image: Making Engaging Images for Social Media

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The image is the central unit of communication for online media today, not text. We are definitely in a visual society, and when text oriented sites such as Twitter and Facebook both say that they are switching to an image and video based publication platform, then the world had better follow suit or be left behind.

Images that are meant for social public consumption can mean the difference between a successful social media campaign and a stagnant one. Here are some of the best ways to create good images that have the ability to go viral and will definitely bring across your message on the platform.

Give the users unique content.

Do not overuse memes that have already been used. Once they get to you on social media, they are likely running out of steam in the first place. Original content gets the most juice, especially if you are trying to solidify a brand or an image online.

Use high quality stuff

There is no excuse for using low quality or grainy images. This is the same to a social media user as a sentence with nothing but misspelled words and bad grammar. Invest in a prosumer camera in order to take great HD pictures with no large out of pocket expense. The investment can last you for years! Not a photographer? There are sites such as Big Stock and Shutterstock where you can purchase photography and graphics to use for your images.

Make a statement.

Everyone loves a few words of wisdom, and pictures with witty sayings are actually more likely to receive positive social feedback in the forms of likes and reposts on all social networks including Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Give a unique look.

If you are doing social media management Los Angeles level work, then you are giving a unique brand to all of your content. This keeps people from stealing it and using it in their own campaigns as well as branding your business so that people will begin to recognize the style and look for your products on the open market.

 Make your content exclusive.

Everyone loves to think that they are on the cutting edge of something big. When you create your images, give the impression that you are telling a story that will come to fruition if the user clicks through to the website or further explores the history of images that you have on the major online media sites.

The success of social media management Los Angeles campaigns relies on the use of good images. Make sure that you follow the tips above for the best chance at creating an engaging campaign that will last for many years after its initial publication! Constantly creating content for your company or project can be a huge endeavor. Luckily, Bright Age, a social media management company located in Los Angeles is here to help. Bright Age creates, manages and posts content on all different social media platforms, making sure that your content is unique and true to your story. Contact us if you have any questions!

 

Bright Age Agency Partners with The Good Seed To Aid Los Angeles Youth

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It’s estimated that there are about 4,000 homeless young men at any given time in the streets of Los Angeles. Most of these male youth come from poverty stricken families struggling to make ends meet. They are too old to qualify for social services aimed at children, and too young to have adequate means to support themselves. These factors can cause a lack of a sense of direction which can lead to hopelessness, drug use, crime and homelessness.

The Good Seed Shelter is a non-profit organization that provides social services and transitional housing to the underprivileged youth of northern and southern California. It’s centermost in a program that was started by the Good Seed Church. The shelter provides a host of services to Transition Age Youth (TAY) from the ages of 18 to 25. These young men are provided with basic human needs like food, clothing and a warm bed in a secure, homelike environment.

The shelter is committed to alleviating the painful issues associated with poverty and homelessness by providing counseling aimed at addressing substance abuse, learning life management skills, job training and independent living. Many of these young men are in need of mental health and medical services, and The Good Seed assists them in obtaining these. The Good Seed has partnered with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health in order to conduct intensive case management assessments to determine the individual needs of these underprivileged young men. This helps secure permanent housing, ongoing counseling and social services to further their stability and success after leaving the shelter. They are also given referrals to additional programs and resources they might need in the future.

Bright Age Digital Creative Agency is a well-established company that specializes in web design, graphic design and internet marketing techniques which include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Facebook advertising and social media management. The Good Seed asked them to design and produce ads aimed at grabbing the attention of homeless youth to lead them to the shelter. They were kind and caring enough to offer their services for free. The result of this partnership is a creative, well-designed ad that will be posted in 1,200 buses across Los Angeles. Homeless young men will often ride the bus continually through the late night hours in desperate attempts to find warmth and shelter, so these ads couldn’t be placed in a better location.

The professionals at Bright Age Digital Creative Agency are excited about this opportunity to help their community. These ads will help The Good Seed and Bright Age reach a large number of desperate young males and make a huge impact on the Los Angeles community. Bright Age has produced multiple versions of these ads in order to adapt to these young men’s different demographics. The ads are written in Spanish as well as English to reach Los Angeles’s large male Hispanic population.

This partnership between The Good Seed and Bright Age should stand as a shining example of what can be accomplished when organizations work together to better their communities.

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Creative Ways to Utilize Social Media Management for Grand Openings

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Launching a new storefront or restaurant in the online world is a way to maximize the potential growth of a company while expanding the target market and audience you are able to reach. Understanding social media management and online marketing today is a way to ensure you are capable of reaching any goals you have set for your business and the future you foresee.

1. Introduce Your Brand to New Audience With a Targeted Campaign

Using social media is a way to introduce your brand and what you have to offer to an entirely new audience with a targeted campaign in place. Whether you are promoting a local clothing store or a family restaurant in different cities, social media provides you the option of launching paid ad campaigns to begin promotion to any target market you have in mind.

2. Tease and Involve Consumers to Spark Questions

Whenever you are sharing the launch of a new company it is important to get as many followers and fans excited about the grand opening! Get followers excited by teasing with graphics, videos and imagery in addition to asking questions to keep them involved with staying current with your brand’s updates online.

3. Create a Countdown Prior to the Weeks and Days Leading to Your Grand Opening

A social media management tip that helps attract new followers and individuals to become more interested in your business is to create a countdown prior to the weeks and days leading up to your launch. Sharing countdown dates is a way to integrate social media advertising with any campaigns you have for your business currently.

4. Offer Special Exclusive Deals to Customers During the Grand Opening

Social media advertising includes the ability to offer special deals and discounts to loyal customers, fans and followers for the actual grand opening of your business and company. Giving customers exclusive deals is one of the best online marketing tactics to utilize.

5. Interact With Your Online Community

Any time you want to put social media to use for a grand opening of a company or local business it is imperative to communicate frequently with online followers and future potential customers. Interacting with your online community is not only a way to increase brand validity but it is also helpful with maintaining a positive reputation in your industry.

6. Offer Prizes for Those Who Check-In on Social Media at Your Place of Business

Offering prizes for individuals who check-in to your place of business on social media can keep them coming back for more and referring additional business to you from their own family members and friends.

Implementing a few creative methods of utilizing social media for grand openings allows you to draw the right crowd and attention to your place of business, regardless of whether you are working in retail or promoting a new local restaurant. Integrating social media at all times with new business launches allows you to build a name and reputation for yourself in any market or industry.

5 Ways to Stay Creative in Social Media Marketing

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When social media first sprang onto the internet scene, there weren’t many marketers or entrepreneurs who put much stock into it. Social media began almost entirely as a platform for personal use. However, over the years, social networking brands have begun offering commercial entities opportunities to use their services for improving business and marketing. If you’re looking to get the best out of social media marketing but aren’t sure where to begin, these are five ways in which you can jump-start your creativity.

1. Find out what interests your audience. Most people utilize social media as a form of self expression and casual communication with peers. The sad truth is that most people in your target audience won’t immediately be interested in what you have to offer. This is why it’s your job to listen and find out what is important to your audience.

Based on what your audience already posts or follows, develop content that you know they will respond to. This takes a bit of research, but the insight is well worth it.

2. Make sure your content is “share-able.” Right now, the trends in social media sharing are list articles (for example, “21 Fluffy Cats That Will Put a Smile on Your Face”) and memes. People like sharing these types of posts because they are extremely relatable. Use these trends to your advantage by creating similar content that’s also relevant to your product or service.

3. Engage your audience. Even if you’re posting content that is attracting attention and followers, your job doesn’t end there. You should also be engaging your followers. If you make a habit out of posting content or advertisements that fail to evoke discussion, your followers are going to get bored extremely quickly. In turn, they could get annoyed with seeing your posts in general and eventually unfollow you.

Ask your followers questions on a regular basis, and don’t hesitate to jump into the discussion from time to time. Your audience will love the interaction on a personal, casual level.

4. Schedule your posts and use analytics. Rather than living in a state of mystery and wondering what your next post will be, take some time away to plan out your social media content all at once. This way, once your content is scheduled to post, you can use the downtime between them to analyze their performance rather than brainstorm new ideas for future posts. Analytics alone are great tools for determining whether your social media marketing strategy is worth developing further, or not worth the time at all.

5. Lastly, don’t focus your social media marketing strategy entirely on your business or product. Keep in mind that your content doesn’t have to be strictly about your business or product 100% of the time. Mix your content up with unrelated posts to keep things interesting and casual. You can easily find out what else you should be posting by, once again, checking out what else your target audience is interested in. The object is to speak to your followers on a personal, relatable level so that the bond of trust can be tightened even more.

Why Video in Social Media Marketing is a Smart Strategy for 2015

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The rapid amount of communication that social networking allows is one of its greatest strengths, but it’s also one of the its greatest obstacles. People tend to jump from one thing to the next as soon as they have finished consuming that content.

This creates a unique challenge. Effective communications must involve information that is not only easy to digest, but also able to grab the audience’s attention.

Video in social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. It can keep a person’s attention while facilitating the proper mental processes to make sales and build relationships with consumers.

How Does Video Work With Social Media Marketing?

Video allows for content to be delivered to an audience in a format that’s easily digestible while retaining an individual’s attention. The best part is that video is often easier and faster to consume than plain text content or images, which means that it is more accessible to the busiest and most desirable of consumers.

The idea behind video in social media marketing is relatively simple. You integrate it just like you would traditional content that you would post on social media platforms, except that you can publish it in multiple places for a greater reach than what most other types of content would acquire.

The effect of video marketing is markedly different from other types of marketing. It creates an accessible connection that allows the person viewing it to quickly form an emotional connection, which in turn allows the story that the video tells to be more complete and compelling in a person’s mind.

The Versatility of Video

For example, say that you have a firm devoted to social media marketing Los Angeles publishing a video for a plumbing business. It details the common problems and preventative measures that owners can take to prevent their pipes from bursting in the cold months of the year.

This content can be published to the business’s website and to other places. It may be published on YouTube to gather interaction from people with Google Plus accounts, placed on Facebook, or published to another site that can host the video directly.

The link can the places where these videos can then be cross-promoted to Twitter and other platforms. It can even be posted to a company’s Google+ profile.

Unlike other forms of content, video does not suffer a penalty when it is posted to multiple places. This makes video versatile for spreading from one platform to the next.

The Interaction with Consumers

The spread of video is something that businesses like Cisco expect to expand quickly. They estimate that more than two-thirds of all consumer traffic will involve video by 2017.

The reason video in social media marketing is so much more powerful than regular content concerns how it can “pop out” to people whom view it. There’s no need to actively try to read words to interpret images, as moving pictures and audio can illustrate a story or present a problem and a solution that someone can view in just one sitting.

The real power of video for social media marketing Los Angeles resides in this unique quality. Video can give users a reason to pause through the rapid influx of messages that most social networks are inundated with so that the consumer hears only your message for a brief time.

This allows you to foster brand recognition, increase customer loyalty, and establish things that will benefit your brand in the long run both digitally and in the real world.

Is 2015 the Year for Video Marketing?

The prevalence of video marketing is on the rise. More consumers will use it in their daily lives. Even mobile device users, which have been one of the most profitable demographics, are increasingly relying on video as broadband wireless connections become increasingly more affordable.

Video will become a part of social media marketing Los Angeles in 2015. While it may not be the dominant form of content for a few years, starting now is the only way to ensure that your customers will follow your brand’s messages.

The best part is that the results of video can be felt as soon as you begin using it.

This makes video marketing a sound investment now, and an even smarter idea for the future.

Five Ways to Engage Your Audience through Social Media Marketing

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Social media nowadays is more than just the latest website teens flock to with stories of their lives. It is, instead, a means by which people can connect. By extension, it is a means by which companies can reach their customers while growing their audience. If implemented correctly, social media is an extremely powerful tool that can either make or break your success.

Know the Audience
Before you can even hope to come up with an engaging social media marketing campaign, you have to know who it is for. Different groups of consumers find vastly different things entertaining. In addition, what they find relevant to making a decision also varies widely. The better you know the group you are trying to appeal to, the better you can shape your image and your message. This alone allows you to focus in on the specifics, giving you the power to immediately veto anything that falls outside the realm of acceptable.

Know your Goals
What are you hoping to achieve with the campaign? Wanting to expand your brand requires a far different approach than wanting to maintain the loyalty of your current customers. Take the time to create an extensively detailed list of all of the goals you are hoping to achieve. Once written down, you can isolate the common theme and build from there. Audiences respond much better to organized social media marketing than they do to disjointed collections of shots in the dark.

Know your Customers
This is more than simply being aware of who usually buys your product. This is actually getting to know your customer base. Social media marketing has made it that much easier for people to reach out directly to companies they like or have a problem with. Scouring feeds and forums will yield extensive discussions on both important and not so important topics. Take out the gems and utilize them to make the company better than it currently is. If your customers know that you are listening to their desires, they will be much more inclined to stay.

Know the Metrics
The proof is in the results, but this is impossible if there are no results to pull from. Find a way to quantitatively measure how people respond to certain things. With this collection of data and graphs, you will be able to accurately predict how things will go in the future. Without it, you’re simply flying blind, hoping that what you do yields results.

Know the Value
People love good news no matter how much current media would not want you to believe this. Keep your community active by sharing with them the great things your company has been up to because of them. If they feel responsible for adding to great causes, they will have a much more vested interest in continuing their support of your business.

Customer engagement is far from a hard goal to strive for. Instead of seeing it as a challenging new outlet, look at it as an active collaboration of everyone who wants the best.

Social Media Marketing Tips: The Joy and Cheer Holiday Edition

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Read here for Social Media Marketing Tips, Joy, and Cheer!

The holiday season is a phenomenal time to spice up your social media marketing efforts. This is the time of year when people not only are in their best moods, but are actively monitoring companies’ social media profiles for deals and steals. Take advantage of this joyous time of year by giving your social media marketing strategies a major holiday boost. Here are some social media tips that will inspire joy and cheer.

Get an Early Start – Major retailers will begin planning their holiday social media strategy as soon as May. Even if you aren’t a major company like Macy’s or Best Buy, you can still be ahead of the game by getting a head start on your holiday social media strategy. Small businesses would be wise to start planning in early fall.

Be Cheerful! – This is the time of year when cynical consumers who might otherwise roll their eyes at blatant cheeriness are willing to ignore their inner pessimist and get into the holiday spirit. When it comes to your holiday social media efforts, the name of the game is to be cheerful. Bright colors, inspiring text and lots of pep and cheer will be warmly received by your customers this season.

Have Fun, But Be Genuine – Holiday social media marketing needs to be fun, but remember to be genuine. Remember, this is the season where consumers are willing to try retailers that are new to them in the hopes of getting great deals. If your genuine about your product and the specials that you are offering for the holidays, you may win new regular customers. However, if you try to oversell your consumers or are disingenuous about your company’s holiday deals, you might turn away some potential new loyal customers.

Pin, Pin, Pin Away! – Pinterest has really proven itself a worthy competitor to companies like Twitter and Facebook in the social media marketing landscape. Pinterest is also great because it allows you to promote content not necessarily related to your business without seeming sleazy. Feel free to share great holiday recipes and other holiday pins that people will want to spread. Just be sure that your business name and contact information is easily spotted on your Pinterest dashboard.

Focus On Those Great Deals – From Black Friday to post-New Year’s sales, this is a season where consumers are looking to spend. However, the new retail landscape is one where consumers let deals and specials truly influence their purchasing decisions above anything else. Once your have determined your holiday deals, don’t be afraid to spread the word across all of your social media pages. Just remember to do it in a way that is cheery and upbeat.

The holiday season is a great way to promote you brand. Above all else, remember to have fun with it and to get into the holiday spirit yourself. Genuine enthusiasm is attractive to consumers and your customers will be able to feel your excitement and holiday cheer.

Facebook’s New Hyper-Local Ads will Target People within a Mile of a Business

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Facebook’s mobile omnipresence and drive for location sharing abilities has manifested with their new launch of super-targeted local advertising and virtual location targeting that’s geared towards getting consumers to visit nearby brick-and-mortar stores. Before long, physical businesses will have the capability to target ads to potential customers that are within a certain distance of their store’s location, which is essentially known as location targeting. Advertisers can predetermine a radius of their location as small as a mile if they wish and their ads will display on consumer’s web browsers or mobile phones. These new and innovative Local Awareness advertisements will be ready for business owners in the U.S. shortly and worldwide over the upcoming months.

Facebook’s hyper-targeted local advertising has been in the works for a while now. It obtained Rel8tion back in January 2011, which already implemented this type of ad targeting. Then, VP Carolyn Everson had the notion in June 2012 that location-conscious mobile phones could possibly one day facilitate hyper-targeted local Facebook ads, and so the plan took root and moved forward. Although the ads are in real-time, ultimately brick-and-mortar businesses could have the ability to pre-bid to hyper located audiences and reveal them to potential customers as they enter the targeted area.

Today, with more than 1 billion mobile phone users, several of which provide Facebook complete access to their specific location along with laptop users who volunteer key information including their location through their IP address and the city they currently live in, has easily provided Facebook all the information it needs to turn hyper local advertising into a reality. Thanks to its latest launch of its ‘Nearby Friends’ feature, Facebook advertising also has real-time location access on people using that particular tool.

Businesses can select an address from their Facebook page or simply key in their address, set up their radius, age range, gender, add a message and photo, and Facebook advertising will route the targeted ads to people close by. They can even choose to add directions in their ad through a unique button that will automatically launch a map app on the user’s mobile phone.

How easy would it be to simply walk down the block and receive an ad for a nearby clothing store or bar-and-grill that’s located right around the corner from where you are? Undoubtedly the ads wouldn’t be as effective if they included the whole city. But by focusing on consumers within just a mile, Facebook advertising can literally drive people to nearby brick-and-mortar businesses leading to actual sales. That’s cutting-edge marketing and something that local businesses are very interested in and currently can’t get anywhere else.

Ultimately, Facebook could potentially combine its ad network and retargeting capabilities with hyper location targeting so that virtually any business you frequent could target you with a relative ad in Facebook or even another kind of app when you’re close by. But for now, that’s in the future. As always, Facebook continues to seek new and better ways to make money.

It’s crucial to stay on top of the latest social media changes in order to successfully stay in the game. Facebook and other social media platforms are constantly changing. Therefore, if you need help effectively managing your social media platform, let Bright Age help.