Voices

Facebook Ad Trick: Define Your Audience

I have been experimenting with advertising recently for my RIA. I started out by testing a generic Facebook ad and put out some promoted tweets on Twitter. I got some good results from these experiments, but also learned some lessons -- and got some ideas for changes I could make for another time.

Running a Facebook ad serves two purposes for me. It taps the Facebook audience and finds people who want to engage with my content, and it allows me to fill up my prospect pipeline at the bottom end with unqualified prospects. When I made time to launch another Facebook ad, I made two minor, but distinct, changes. In the wording for my ad, I switched out “fee-only financial advice” and instead used the words “easy-to-understand financial advice.” Also, and perhaps more importantly, I changed my targeting: Instead of reaching the entire Facebook audience, I chose to have the ad shown only to people who had specified they were in the education field.

My first ad had 120 people engaging with the page after a month. With the new ad, I added over 100 new fans in the first week, and I now have more than 500 “likes.” By tweaking my wording and narrowing down my audience, I managed to engage even more people than when I had made myself available to everyone. (I present to you: the power of a niche!)

Where do I take this from here? The ads are only costing me $200 a month, so I plan to keep doing them in order to further build my firm’s exposure. I’m also looking at my fans’ Facebook pages to find out who is actually employed in the education field and may appreciate personalized contact. That may have been the easiest way to find a prospect yet.

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Technology RIAs Sales and marketing Social media
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