Here's a little excerpt from page 88 of my Facebook book ...
One of the first things we do with any new client is a marketing and advertising audit. Almost every audit proves that events aren't tracking their advertising spend to ticket sales even at the most basic level.
Here comes some compassionately brutal advice. If you're not willing to properly setup and track your Facebook advertising spend to a ticket transaction, stop using Facebook. You can't break through all the Facebook noise if you don't pay to advertise.
But paying to play (paid advertising) isn't enough. By failing to track, you're subjecting you and your event team to a plethora of unqualified opinions about what is working without the hard data to back it up.
So, it's agreed that you're going to track all your efforts on Facebook, yes? Great! Because you'll gain a massive competitive advantage and profits galore when you spend money advertising on Facebook while meticulously tracking your results.
Before we get into tracking specifics, it is important to understand some basic marketing math. What is that? It involves a few key digital media metrics and their crazy acronyms. To be successful with your social media marketing strategies, you need to have a basic working knowledge of these metrics.
With traditional media, it was very difficult to quantify the usefulness of advertisements. The beauty of digital media is that tracking effectiveness has never been easier. Facebook has a straightforward way to setup and automate your ad tracking.
Here's a simple place to start, Customer Acquisition Cost (at least the basic version of CAC).
Let's say you spend 20,000 USD cash on advertising and marketing to promote your event. You know that 1,000 people attended your event. Sorry, you can't use the grossly exaggerated attendance numbers people love to tout to calculate acquisition cost.
Remember, bad data equals bad marketing intelligence. To get your customer acquisition cost, divide $20,000 in ad spend by 1,000 paid customers. The result is $20, so your "Customer Acquisition Cost" is $20.
Your customer acquisition cost determines what you can afford to spend on advertising and marketing. If you don't spend more than $20 per person to acquire a customer, you should always stay in the black.
Another advantage of digital media is that you can turn it on and off in a matter of minutes. Hence, if an ad is not working on Facebook, you simply turn it off. The same isn't possible with television, radio, or billboard ads.
This is a very basic measuring stick when you look at it from the top down with a bird's eye view. As we come down to a ground level view, customer acquisition cost becomes very important for digital media. It becomes microscopic at the social media level. Facebook allows you to track the customer acquisition cost to a single post or advertisement.
That is where Facebook provides you with a huge advantage and it's tracking at the microscopic level.
Track & profit!
You Must Play the Game Differently
If you want to take advantage of social media, you have to play the game differently. What follows are the most common social media marketing mistakes to avoid and simple corrections you can use. The suggestions apply to any social media platform. Click below and dive on in to the 5-Part Social Media Series:
- Putting Your Social Media Mindset Ahead of Theirs
- Focusing Too Much on Likes & Followers
- Trying to Engage on Too Many Social Media Platforms
- Avoiding Paid Social Media Advertising
- Not Measuring the Results of Your Hard Work
Here are some additional social media resources you can use to market your event:
- Do You Make These Social Media Mistakes with Your Event?
- Measuring Your Social Media Event Promotion Efforts
- How to Leverage Facebook and Your Event Marketing
- Beware of the "Social Media" Event SMACKDOWN!
- Social Media, Your Event Marketing, and "Insider Info" . . .
- Social Media Comments and Your Event
- The Downside of Promoting Your Event with Social Media