Boosted Facebook Posts Saved The Marketing Day

Nov 30, 2015 by Mark Maier

Many of you may or may not know that while I consult for Luce Performance Group, I am also the Marketing Manager/Catagory Buyer for Kings Variety Stores in the Paciific Northwest.  They have a chain of 21 retail Variety Stores that celebrated their 100th anniversary this year and their Black Friday business is vital to fourth quarter.  

I got a call Wednesday afternoon from our store manager in Driggs, Idaho saying that the printer of our ad circular inserted the wrong ad into the local newspaper and none of our Black Friday marketing was in the market leaving us with the potential of loosing thousands of dollars in sales.  I asked the manager what Radio station was dominant in the market and he quickly referred me to the front runner as it was a unranked market where I couldn't get any backing research.  I called, explained my plight to the Radio Sales Manager's voice mail, and had every confidence I would get a call back.  To this moment I have not gotten a call back.  I know there were people at the station as I had spoken to an on-air person who gave me the Sales Managers' cell phone number, makes me wonder whether it was just too big of a hassle to put another couple hundred dollars on the books?

It was later Wednesday evening when I checked our store Facebook feed and saw that or Social Media Specialist had posted a pdf of our circular when the idea hit me.  I can boost a post in a specific area.  Driggs was the only market effected by the mistake so it was easy to isolate the area and build a campaign. I hoped the pdf would have the 75% image content that Facebook needs prior to placing the ad online and submitted my campaign a little after 9:30pm on Wednesday night.  At 9:53pm, my campaign went live to a prospective 7,900 Facebook subscribers within 25 miles of Driggs, Idaho who were 18 plus and would see the post in their newsfeed on mobile and desktop devices.  

I went to bed that night nervous but with the knowledge that you can reach a lot of potential customers on a holiday where people are still connected to their social feed with an ad that contains good offers of hot items.  At around 10am Thanksgiving Day, with 8 hours before our sale was set to start, we had reached close to 3,000 individual subscribers and had over 200 post engagements or click-throughs.  By 5pm those numbers had grown to almost 4,000 individual subscribers and 300 post engagements.  I felt much better but the proof would come at 9pm that night when the sales figures were available.  When they were totalled we doubled our sales over last year and more than doubled our gross margin at the Driggs store. I felt better but Black Friday is still the big dance, if you are going to do well, you have to do well that day.  When the sales were totalled that night the Driggs store was up $800 in sales and about $500 in gross margin.  A retail miracle because of a boosted post campaign on Facebook.  On Friday night my campaign ended, for $250.00 we had moved the marketing needle and delivered the Return on Investment to beat last year's sales figures and gross margin.  Here is what my campaign synopsis looked like...




What I found very interesting was the data I got back on the devices that the impressions were delivered on, I knew mobile and tablets were big but these results really impressed me...




I can't draw the conclusion that Facebook Boosted posts will replace inserts into newspapers or direct mail as I don't have enough data, but I do have a case study in what we were able to achieve and I will continue to test what we can do with marketing on the Social giant.  If it can work in my case, it can work for your clients.  You have a graphic designer and a specialist who posts to Facebook, you just add the billing aspect in your traffic program, determine your margins (I would go 50% or double the cost of the campaign) and market the service to your clients. Related Categories