Facebook Ads for Dive Shops
Facebook groups are something that a lot of scuba dive shops understand is very important for improving their business, staying in touch with customers, increasing sales, increasing the value of their business, encouraging their customers to leave reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor, and more. Facebook is an incredibly useful tool for businesses of all sorts especially to businesses in the tourism industry, where customers are looking to get an idea of the type of operation you run before making a decision on where to spend their money when on vacation. The value is so great, that many dive shops have realized that there is great value in buying ads on facebook rather than just using the free features that come with the page.
Facebook ads come in all shapes and sizes. They can be used to drive visitors to your website, to your facebook page, to get likes, to increase exposure to a certain post, event, offer, etc. There are all kinds of things that facebook ads are great for, yet I see again and again, businesses only using facebook ads to try and increase the number of likes that the business has for their facebook page. Something I have noticed with facebook ads when you do nothing to promote them, is that they are only delivered to a very small portion of your page. If I put a quick post on facebook that is simply an informational post that isn’t likely to go viral in any way, it likely will only get delivered to 10-20% of my group. Sometimes less. Problem is, that informational post is something I want as many people in my group to see as possible. So what do I do is spend $10 or so on a facebook ad that will easily triple the number of people within my group that see a post. How do I ensure it is delivered to only my group? This is done through custom audiences. If you are familiar with custom audiences you can get great bang for your buck with facebook ads. You can target exactly who you want to see your post or page, how much you want to spend for them to see it and a whole lot more. When you can target specifically the people you want to show the ad to, you don’t have to spend as much to get the same number of inquiries or conversions.
Another great feature about custom audiences is the ability to create them from visitors to your website. A lot of people aren’t aware, but you can place a facebook pixel on your website that when a visitor visits your site, it leaves a cookie on their browser. The next time the user goes back to facebook, facebook recognizes this cookie is there and knows that you have visited my website, and then serves you my ad. So I can literally have a custom audience made up of people who have previously looked at my website, presumably who may be interested in the services offered. This is a great soft reminder to these individuals my business, the services I offered, etc. In the dive shop and tourism world this is perfect. A customer may be looking around for several different dive shops in an area before deciding on which one to support. If they check out yours as well as your competitors and then the next time they visit facebook, an ad to your dive shop pops up again, you have just increased your chances of another visit from that potential customer, which very likely could end in the potential customer, turning into a customer.
Another way I often use custom audiences for my clients is that if they have an offer that may be of interest to one of their competitors customers, I will market that ad and serve it directly and only to that dive shops facebook pages fans. Whether it is playing fair or not is up for the dive shop to decide.
So before you go and buy your next facebook ad and serve it up to a huge general audience, why not get in touch with us and find out if there is a better way to spend your marketing money online.
