We never hold back, so today we are sharing our best Facebook marketing tips for private clubs and resorts. These are the same tactics we use every day for our clients and now you can use them too. And while you might be familiar with how to do some basic Facebook advertising like boosting a post, we are going to go a bit deeper into the power of Facebook advertising and targeting today.
Why Facebook Marketing Works
Facebook has developed the world’s most comprehensive database on the interests and demographics of their users. This makes it the most powerful way to reach a targeted audience for marketing purposes.
Every time you click the like button, share an article or follow a page, Facebook keeps track. Then they took all that information and developed a user profile of you. In addition, their tracking code is installed on many websites you visit to let them know what you’re browsing on the internet.
While that might seem scary and an invasion of your privacy, it also makes the your time on Facebook and Instagram a much more tailored experience. Relevant ads for things you’ll most likely want get served and you get to skip all the stuff you don’t like.
Like other marketing channels, Facebook has many traditional targeting settings like age, gender, interests and income brackets, but if you are doing Facebook right, you’ll want to go much deeper. This is where Facebook’s real power, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences, are invaluable. Below we’ll show you how we use these tools to develop better membership prospect targeting for the clubs and properties we work with.
Facebook Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences are actually quite simple to understand. This feature enables you to upload a customer database, or a client/prospects list into Facebook. There are a lot of variables that Facebook will accept, but at minimum if you have a name and email address for each person this will work (creating an excel file is the simplest way). The magic of Facebook can take your list of data, and match it with the corresponding users on Facebook. It’s worth mentioning that this information stays anonymous, and even you as the uploader don’t see the fully matched list. However, what it does let you do is use this synched up list as an audience to target with your ads.
Scenario – You have a list of hot prospects you want to convert. You compile their information into an excel sheet. Upload it into Facebook Audience Manager, and create the custom audience. Presumably you have an offer/message for these people. You create an ad/post highlighting this, and make sure you select the custom audience you just made as the target (as below). This ad will then run solely at those people sourced from your prospects list.
You may think why not just send an email to these prospects, and you could sure. But running something through Facebook could be in addition to this, or separate entirely. Remember that you want to be in the prospects mind, and you want to hit them at multiple touchpoints. From a customer’s perspective it looks more professional operating across different platforms. A custom audience gives the ability to tailor ads towards a lead, a prospect, a hot prospect. You can fire different messages at different stages of your sales funnel, and the more people progressing through the funnel, the more converted prospects your club can call members.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences
This is a step up from the custom audience that we just made. The difference here is that instead of matching your uploaded prospect list, you treat them as a sample. The lookalike function identifies similar traits between the uploaded individuals, and matches them to the Facebook user base. This gives you an audience list closely resembling your uploaded list, but on a drastically bigger scale. The positives are that these people should be similar demographically, interest-based and socially. The negatives are that you can’t see what the similar traits are, you have to trust the software.
Scenario – You want more leads for your club. Let’s assume you also have a spreadsheet of current leads, and/or recently converted members. Go to create a Lookalike Audience, and you will see the following menu:
You upload the excel sheet of data you created.
Then select an audience location, generally the United States for us.
Then select how many audiences to create, and what accuracy you want in your Lookalike Audiences. We tend to create just two audiences; a 1% and a 5%. Facebook states a 1% audience most closely resembles those from your source data. The higher the %, the bigger and broader the created audience will become.
You then create the audiences and Facebook will populate them. Now they are ready to be used in your marketing efforts. You can create your ad/post, and select the Lookalike Audience you created as the target audience. You are now running a campaign at people with similar traits/interests/characteristics to your original source data. This should create better results than simply using Facebook’s basic targeting options.
These are two simple but very effective tools to enhance your targeting efforts. Try them out today and see if your results improve. Or contact the Private Club Agency, and we can help you with your Facebook marketing efforts. Click here to schedule a chat with us.