Recently, we started Facebook advertising campaigns for some of our clients in an effort to promote their existing fan pages, build a bigger audience, increase social signals, increase search engine rankings, and increase website traffic. The endgame is to increase lead generating efforts through these funnels. We started this campaign with cautious optimism that we could improve lead volume through Facebook’s advertising platform.
After thinking through which businesses we would like to try, we immediately identified some of our B2C clients that we felt would be ideally suited for this experiment.
Client: Cooking-Culinary-Arts-Schools.org
Cooking Culinary Arts Schools is a website directory of schools for people that are interested in becoming a chef, cook, baker, or hospitality manager. Visitors can easily navigate the site to get more information and find the right degree program for them or perform an instant search using the Quick Degree Finder feature - a great resource for locating specialized schools in specific areas by city or state.
Results: The fan page started out with 19 Likes and has grown to over 2,900 Likes within 30 days of the campaign launch. In addition, Facebook is saying that about 1/3 of the people interested in the Facebook page are talking about it and the Pinterest interest has increased dramatically. We are also seeing an incremental increase in daily conversions on the website.
Client: Accredited-Online-Colleges.com
Accredited Online Colleges connects individuals wanting to earn an undergraduate or graduate degree to a variety of online accredited colleges and universities that offer degree programs online in popular fields such as business, technology and healthcare.
Results: The Accredited Online Colleges fan page started out with 133 Likes and currently it has grown to over 2,400 Likes within a few weeks. We are also seeing an increase in the amount of Facebook engagement (likes and comments), followers in Pinterest that funnel through from the fan page to the profile, and on overall increase in daily conversions from leads generated on the website.
Client: DirectHomeDiscount.com
Direct Home Discount connects people looking to remodel or furnish their home with top brand-name products at prices up to 50% off retail pricing by allowing them to buy direct from manufacturers and authorized suppliers once they become a member of their local discount club in their area.
Results: Facebook “Likes” have grown from 12 to over 1,700 within a couple of weeks. So far it is indeterminate on how much website conversions have increased through this campaign but since it is still relatively new compared to the other two, we want to give it more time before drawing any conclusions.
While these experimental campaigns are underway, we will continue to regularly monitor results. At the conclusion of these campaigns we hope to have more answers to the questions that most marketers are still trying to figure out about Social Media advertising such as “Can you achieve an actual ROI through Facebook advertising?” and “How does Facebook impact lead generation efforts?”
Until then, we will continue on with more traditional social media marketing efforts such as content marketing and social bookmarking that have generated good results in the past and show promising results for the future.
