With a Virgin Media survey showing that two-thirds of Irish businesses use social media, but 40% of those report no business growth as a result, it’s clear that turning social media opportunities into bottom line results is nowhere near as simple as it might seem.

So Virgin have published a handy e-book about Facebook marketing which they hope will help. The manual beats a path for businesses through the tangled thickets of Facebook’s advertising jungle and advises bluntly that nowadays you have to pay to play to get noticed on the social media platform. It showcases some Irish examples of successful online marketing which offer a sort of roadmap on how to do it.

For consumer-facing businesses, Facebook is the most important platform, as that’s where the most people hang out. Facebook is very crowded and it’s difficult to get noticed, and the days of relying on Facebook ‘Likes’ to grow a business are long gone. Facebook is now an advertising platform, with monthly ad revenue of €1.7 billion, and to rise to the top of the heap there is very much a case of pay to play.

“Irish businesses clearly recognise the social media opportunity, but transforming that into real business results is proving a challenge,” says Elaine Rickard of Virgin Media Business.

Overwhelming Options

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“Facebook advertising options can be overwhelming, particularly for businesses without in-house digital marketing expertise. But for firms that persevere, the results can be worthwhile. We have worked some SMEs that are achieving specific business objectives, including attracting enquiries and lead generation.”

From the case studies, successful campaign foundations such as content, authenticity, user-generated content and Google Analytics insights are identified, while the most essential components of the Facebook advertising platform itself — Carousel ads, interests targeting, website custom audience targeting, and lookalike audience targeting — are discussed in the e-book.

The strategic combination of these campaign foundations and Facebook features can enable an SME to achieve measurable results. It’s also important to remember that the more relevant an SME is to its audience, and the more value it can offer to it, the more successful the Facebook ad campaign will be.

According to Rickard, a strength of Facebook advertising is the ability to create highly accurate lookalike audiences based on either a website custom audience or an external list such as an email list. If a business has one of these for marketing purposes and uploads it to Facebook, the platform will find those profiles on Facebook based on their email addresses.

Rickard says: “You can then say to Facebook, ‘See this list of highly relevant users? I would like you to find lots of other people just like them, as they are also likely to be interested in my products’. This could potentially turn your email list of 2,000 people into a highly relevant lookalike audience of 100,000.”

Drive Downloads

One example is Dublin-based Camino Ways, which specialises in walking and cycling tours on the Camino de Santiago. Quality e-books are at the heart of company’s marketing strategy, so the aim with Facebook advertising is to drive downloads resulting in relevant leads.

Camino Ways used the data from Google Analytics to target the age group most likely to convert and overlaid this with their website custom audiences. This enabled the company to target people on Facebook of a certain age group, who had visited the website but had not submitted an enquiry or made a booking.

Once on the landing page, this Facebook submitted their details in return for the e-book at a rate of 25%. The campaign drove 611 leads for Camino Ways at a cost of 62c each.

Cosmetic surgery specialist The Avoca Clinic combined Google’s analytics results with Facebook’s ‘Interests Targeting’ to define a precise audience, or more than one, and target them. The clinic could drill down by gender, location, age and interests, until it had defined the precise audience it wished to target with each piece of content.

So while many SMEs feel using social media contributes little to business growth, the case studies suggest that if you get to grips with Facebook’s advertising options, and are prepared to invest, the results can be worthwhile — and relatively cheap.

Download the e-book here.