As I am writing this, I am sitting in a plane on my way to Hong Kong to meet Perry Marshall and to learn more about Marketing.
I also just finished an online Facebook marketing training with Tom Meloche.
Since I have taken on online marketing we have seen our monthly inquiries go from about 130 to 350 and have also just had the most students in a school since 5 years. And the next school already has even more students.
This has come through optimizing individual ads and keywords in Google as well as optimizing our landing pages, a better follow up process, Autoresponders and integrating other advertising channels like Bing, Msn, and third party websites.
So far I was not convinced that using Facebook was a good way to advertise for our schools, as we havent seen a lot of students come from it. But I learned in the last few weeks that Facebook needs a lot more attention than Google Adwords.
Facebook offers a lot, if you know how to tap into it. You can for example target people by sex, location, age and likes. The one thing you will have to be aware of is how many people you target at a time and how often they see your ad. Let’s say you target 10000 people they will see your ad a lot more than if you target 1 million people. Each has it’s pros and cons. Targeting a very specific, small group of people may get you cheaper impressions and clicks, but you won’t be able to run your ad as long, as people will get tired of seeing it, and you are only reaching a small demographic. Targeting 1 million people you can let your ad run a lot longer.
What it comes down to is monitoring your campaigns and being aware of how much you spend, how many people you reach and how often they see your ad.
Something else that I am finding is that I get better CTRs (click through rates) using CPC (cost per click) rather than cpm (cost per thousand impressions).
If I am after branding, eg getting my name out cpm may be the better option, but if I am after clicks I think it is better to let Facebook worry about how to get the most clicks. It seems to be cheaper and more effective.
Currently I am sending most of my Facebook traffic to an external landing page, with pretty good results. On average one lead from Facebook is $4-6 or 10-15 clicks. In the next few weeks I will be experimenting with sending traffic from Facebook to internal Facebook landing pages, to see if that increases conversion rates.