Marketing to Millennials For Dummies
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After you develop your Millennial content strategy, brand voice, audience clusters, and editorial calendar, you’re ready to begin taking advantage of Facebook’s robust ad platform. While network’s like Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others offer advertising options, Facebook is perhaps the most valuable when it comes to reaching Millennials in segmented clusters. Between the targeting mechanisms, the dashboard structure, and the detailed real-time reporting data, there is a lot to like about Facebook advertising.

Launching your campaign

To reach Millennials through the use of Facebook’s ad dashboard, there are several steps to follow. Of course, your objectives may change from one campaign to another, but considering you’ve already created segmented audiences, the process is significantly simpler and results can be far above average.

Much like organic engagement on Facebook, engagement rates in your ad campaigns will generally run anywhere between 1 to 3 percent, depending on the audience, the objectives, and the desired action to be taken from your audience.

To launch a Millennial-focused Facebook advertising campaign, follow these steps:
  1. Access your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and create a new campaign.

    In the top right-hand corner of your Ads Manager dashboard, click on the green icon, to create a new ad campaign.

  2. Select the marketing objective that best defines what you’re trying to achieve.

    Carefully choose the right objective in Facebook to match your goals.

    Facebook advertising objectives

    While most of the outlined objectives in Facebook lead to similarly structured campaigns, the key difference lies in the way Facebook charges your account. Facebook may charge on a per-action basis, a per-click basis, a hybrid between impressions and clicks, or based on conversions. Make sure that you know ahead of time how you’ll be charged.

  3. Choose a Saved Audience from your segmented Millennial clusters.

    Instead of building out a new audience, which is often times what you’ll do when running a campaign, you’re going to choose from among the hypertargeted audience clusters within your Facebook account. When defining an ad set, you can choose a Saved Audience from the pull-down list.

    marketing-to-millennials-facebook-saved-audience

  4. Identify your ad placements manually.

    FAcebook campaign

    Facebook offers two forms of ad placements:

    • Automatically placing your ads on Facebook, Instagram, and within Facebook’s Audience Network by the ad server

    • Manually choosing where you’d like to place your ad

      While having this process done automatically is easier, it’s highly recommended that, when trying to reach Millennials, you do this manually. The reason is simple: Millennials engage in unique ways from one platform to another and from one network to another. The way one user engages with Facebook content on a desktop compared to how that user engages with Instagram content on a mobile device will significantly differ. Your content needs to vary to account for that difference.
  5. Determine how you would like to structure your bidding process.

    Much like the ad placements in Step 4, your bids can be automatically or manually adjusted. Automatic Bidding is easy and effective, but can lead to overpaying for clicks. Manual bidding allows you to carefully monitor the cost and rate at which your ads are receiving clicks and make the necessary adjustments.

  6. Load your audience segment-specific creative design.

    Your content strategy includes the development of hypertargeted pieces of content based on specific themes. These pieces are pushed to your audience clusters based on some of the more intricate details of their personalities.

Making your campaign more successful

After you create content that fits each audience cluster, you’re ready to model similar content with the message of your ad campaign.

You’ll want to remember certain tips when making your way through this process that will make it unique:

  • Not every objective is going to be well suited for a Millennial audience
  • Choose specific audiences for each ad set
  • Separate your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns
  • Think mobile-first when choosing your ad’s creative design

Not every objective is going to be well suited for a Millennial audience

When conducting an awareness campaign, you may want to consider selecting the option to reach local users as opposed to focusing only on your Millennial audience. Millennials nearby are on their mobile devices and accessing Facebook. If you’re looking for foot traffic to a brick-and-mortar location, reaching local users is an excellent way to go.

When running a consideration campaign and choosing to send people to your website, you need to select a very specific landing page. One of the worst mistakes a marketer can make in a campaign is to send users to either a convoluted page or one with too much information.

Choose specific audiences for each ad set

There is a reason that you segmented these users. While many of them may share a couple of characteristics in common, the little differences in their personalities are what sets them apart. Many of those little differences can lead to a significantly higher engagement rate.

Separate your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns

Placement matters more to a campaign’s success than you may think. If you decide to group all or most of your Facebook placements together — for example, in the desktop News Feed, Audience Network, and right-hand column — then at the very least, separate your Instagram placement.

While Instagram and Facebook ads are managed within the same dashboard, you should not treat them as the same network. They’re used differently, so content should appear differently. User personalities change from one network to another.

Think mobile-first when choosing your ad’s creative design

Mobile is where Millennials live. When developing a Facebook ad campaign, mobile needs to be top of mind. Your creative design needs to stand out, but it shouldn’t be so busy or unclear that it’s ignored.

The goal of most campaigns is to drive your targeted audience to take some form of action. On a mobile device, where scrolling through singularly delivered content happens very quickly, your creative design needs to match what appeals to the audience in question.

The term singularly delivered is used here because a social network like Facebook or Instagram operates in a single-column layout on a mobile device. Content is, therefore, delivered very quickly, on a rolling basis, more or less one item at a time.

Consider a control group of your general audience to test results against the average

There is nothing wrong with using part of your ad budget at the beginning of any campaign to test average engagement with generic content and your total Millennial audience. This approach allows you to see how average, nonparticular audience members are engaging with your content and set benchmarks accordingly. Then run your hypertargeted elements of the campaign with each group and measure their performance against the average. This meticulous process will highlight where your campaigns are succeeding in their mission and where particular campaigns need adjustments or should be discontinued.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Corey Padveen is an industry- leading marketing data expert with extensive experience building strategies and working with brands in a variety of industries to execute measurable growth campaigns. He is a partner at t2 Marketing International, an award-winning marketing consultancy that has worked with some of the largest brands in the world.

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