Generating Affordable Leads for Your Small Business: Part Two – Social Network Traffic

By: Michael | Published: August 11, 2010 | Filed under: Small Business Advice, Small Business Tools

This post is a continuation of a series about how to utilize various internet advertising platforms to generate leads for your business.

Using pay-per-click traffic is only one effective way to drive relevant viewers to your lead page. As relevant as it is, the primary downside of this advertising medium is your restriction to target only based on key words. Let’s look at another rapidly growing online advertising medium that will allow you to show your ad to your ideal consumer based on demographics.

Many times companies know who their target demographics for their product or service are, they just need a platform to put their ads directly in front of that specific demographic. Enter social media advertising. The two most prominent players in this space are Facebook and MySpace. Both of which allow you to run advertising campaigns that will be displayed to people in the demographics you specify. Both Facebook and MySpace allow you to target by geographic location, age, gender, relationship status, education level and more. MySpace will also allow you to target based on parental status.

Facebook’s platform allows you to create ads that consist of a headline, an image, and body ad copy. MySpace on the other hand allows you to upload banners in any standard IAB compliant size. No banners? MySpace also offers a unique tool called the AdBuilder that will help you build banners on the fly. If you are working with a limited budget, using the ad builder tool and Facebook’s propriatery ad format will help you get campaigns up as quick and affordable as possible. However, having your own banners created to run on MySpace will probably get you noticeably better results in the long run. You will have more control over the images, text placement, call to action etc, which can all result in more clicks to your landing page.

One thing that is crucial to keep in mind when running display campaigns, is to test and optimize every variable in the process for maximum profit potential. For example, if you are only running one banner or text ad, to one demographic, you may or may not do well on the campaign. In the event of the latter, you will have to proceed to guess what worked out well, and what did not before continuing. Ideally, try a few different banner or text ad designs. Three to five is a good place to start, but the more you are running, the clearer you will be able to distinguish which is working well and why. Target each of the ads to not only what you believe to be your ideal demographics, but also one or two other sets of demographics as well. You may be surprised by what is working out and you will never know what works unless you test. Testing numerous variables is not going to be useful unless you are tracking which ads are performing best. Take cull advantage of Facebook and MySpace “conversion tracking” (pixel) technologies to determine which of your ads is bringing in the most leads for the lowest cost.

As you optimize your ad campaigns, you will begin to learn which ads are driving leads for the least amount of money per lead. Of course, the goal will be to drive as much traffic to this as possible. However, do not rule out any ads that are performing well and are driving you leads for a reasonable price each. While you want to drive the majority of your budget to the best performing ad, runner ups can help bring in plenty of new business for a feasible price.