As someone who has the honor of speaking around the world about social media marketing, I get to hear a lot of the misconceptions people have about social media, such as:
- It can’t work in regulated industries.
- Seniors won’t respond to Facebook ads.
- Affluent people won’t respond to Facebook ads.
- And the ever-popular… this won’t work in MY industry.
None of these assumptions are true. In fact…
Using effective marketing strategies, all of these challenges can be overcome.
Overcoming these challenges is exactly what my firm – Elite Digital Group – did for our client, Lange Financial (a planning firm), offering seminars for seniors over the age of 62 geared towards the changing social security laws.
The seminar was purely informational, and at the end of the seminar visitors had the option to book an appointment with an advisor.
Previously, Lange Financial filled their workshops with direct mail.
We’ve now used local Facebook advertising to fill workshops around the country for them and have done so at a lower cost per attendee than any other marketing they have used in the past.
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Today we’re sharing exactly how it was done. Let’s get into it.
Targeting Content to Local Audiences
First, we took a piece of blog content using curiosity and negative outcome positioning to encourage readership.
We ran this blog to grow an audience and prequalify traffic in the areas where the seminars were held.
The blog article was run to the 2 locations in Pennsylvania and restricted those who could view the blog to a 10-mile radius of the location.
Then, the ads worked to provoke curiosity about changes to Social Security.
Here are the ads:
And here are the results:
- The campaign brought in 594 people to the page.
- Average cost per click: $0.31
- Ad spend: $181.93
- The best performing ad set was a combination of a lookalike of their newsletter + location + age.
- The best ad image was the image of the congressional chairs.
- The blog traffic combined with the website traffic brought in a large enough audience to begin running the seminar campaign.
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Targeting Registration to Local Audiences
We then ran a campaign to invite people to register for the workshop.
This campaign was run to push for registrations to the seminar being held in 2 Pennsylvania locations.
We ran it to web traffic and broad audiences. Since this was a tame topic and a FREE seminar, we felt comfortable opening it up to colder audiences. For more controversial topics, we run ads only to warm traffic for a while before opening it up to cold.
Here’s the best performing ad from the set…
The landing page traffic they saw once they clicked…
And here are the results…
- 40 registrants
- Average cost per registration: $16.43
- Ad spend: $657
- The best performing ad set was a combination of location + age — meaning cold traffic won over website traffic.
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After we implemented the Facebook campaign for Lange Financial, they’ve been averaging roughly 15 additional attendees at each of their workshops because of Facebook.
When they analyzed and compared the cost of every attendee generated from their direct mail plan, they reported direct mail results not being able to come close to lowest cost and quality leads generated on Facebook.
Results don’t lie of course, and they speak much louder than opinions when it comes to marketing effectively.
Thankfully, Lange Financial was willing to challenge their beliefs, make the ‘digital leap’, and are now benefiting from the prosperous results of their campaigns.
