Gumbo Shop's First Facebook Ad

Ok so there are quite a few sites with how-tos about setting up a facebook ad... this one in particular is a little dated but is extremely detailed:

http://subliminalpixels.com/facebook/how-to-set-up-and-track-facebook-ads/

Rather than go into the mechanics of setting up an ad in general, I'm just going to talk about some of the rationale behind the very first ad created for the Gumbo Shop.

I'm actually pretty glad that it took me forever to write this post, because now there's a really interesting article discussing what people look at when presented with a Business / Brand page.

http://mashable.com/2011/12/14/eyetracking-facebook-brand-pages/#38865CocaCola-Visual-Attention-Level

My main takeaway from this article is that you need pictures and you need some decently compelling posts on your wall.  My goal for the very first ad is to get people to interact with your page, regardless of how populated it is.  Therefore, they'll populate the page and later on, people who WILL make their decisions based on the how populated the page is, will see a page with Likes, Posts, and Post Responses.

So what demographic will have people who not only know of the Gumbo Shop, but are the likely people who enjoy the place and will click that "like" button without a second though?

At first I thought of the regulars - people who work in the vicinity of the Gumbo Shop and come on a weekly basis.  The absolutely easiest way, of course, is to simply have a little sign at the restaurant "Like us on Facebook!" or something silly like that.  However, in terms of filtering on Facebook, the biggest problems with that were the following:

• Will have to get a listing of all the businesses in the area: even a decent representation would be pretty hard.  There aren't that many ginormous employers in that area where picking a couple will be good enough.
• Not that many people actually post where they work on Facebook anyway.

The next group of people that came to mind were people in St. Louis who likely sought out places like the Gumbo Shop: people who lived in states where Cajun food is much more prevalent.  Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't have a filter for "where people used to live," so education was the next best thing.

All the LSU guys I know in STL are Lawyers...

So after doing a quick Wikipedia lookup of  colleges where Cajun food is more prevalent, I went with pretty much all the Gulf States between Texas and Florida.  As for the ad, itself, I simply wanted to convey "Hey, remember the Gumbo Shop? We have a Facebook page now."  For that, I put up a pic of Gumbo Shop's logo and took my favorite Yelp quote on the place:

So I felt that this accomplished a couple things:

• Identify the Gumbo Shop.  Duh.
• Show a picture of yummy Gumbo.  The people this is aimed at, I'm assuming, have already had gumbo before.
• Point out that there's a positive review on Yelp.com by an (awesome) Lisa C.

Ok.  Now all that's left is to set a budget and maximum bid for clicks.  This means that every single time someone clicks on the ad and visits the Facebook page, I will be charged however much the bidding went down.  I don't really know how the mechanics all work, but essentially, the higher you place your maximum bid, the more likely your ad will be shown.  When there are many advertisers going after the same demographic you are, the more expensive this will likely to be.  I have recently found out that Women who are in a Relationship are quite expensive... but that's another post.

Self Explanatory.
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/lifeexplained.jpg

At first, I set a daily budget of $3 and let Facebook have its way with my max bids.  In the end, I feel that this isn't the way to go.  I personally don't think that Facebook really does have a decent way of figuring out how to "maximize" the value of your clicks and it doesn't take any other input for your goals.  For example, your bidding and budgeting strategy can vary quite a bit if you goal was to get as many impressions (total times an ad is displayed) as possible in one month, as opposed to ensuring that you can get the best bang for the buck with at least so many impressions a day.

Also, the daily budget idea is a bit silly.  This severely limits how often your ad is going to be shown, as once that budget is hit, your ad won't be shown for the rest of the day.  Sometimes, on a Facebook heavy day (when people are home for the holidays, for example), you're going to hit that budget limit pretty quickly and then your ad will be pulled.  That's just pretty lame.  That, coupled with Facebook's relatively high automatic bidding, you're paying more for people to click on your ads while limiting how often your ad will be displayed.

So here're some of the metrics in the first month of that ad.

A "Social Impression" means that this ad was shown 1003 times where the target has a Facebook Friend who "likes" the Gumbo Shop.  Initially I was pretty satisfied with the results of this... with some fiddling we go through September's results...

WHOA what just happened... numbers are WAY higher for some crazy reason and yet my (yet undisclosed) costs were practically the same.  What the heck happened?  (aside from that fact that these screen shots are from Google Docs and Excel, respectively?)

Well... hopefully it won't take me more than a month to post the next post to explain some of that crap.

Facebook Users are PIGS!

So what makes a Facebook Page better (or at least, more interesting) than other tools to aid in the Consumer Relationship Cycle?  It is one of very few tools where a brand can interact with consumers along almost all fronts of the Cycle.  The one thing that Facebook doesn't do is provide e-commerce functionality, allowing you to actually buy stuff on the site, but it comes pretty freaking close.  On top of that, almost everything is free.

http://verydemotivational.memebase.com 

I like bullets to list things:

• Avenues of Market Awareness
• Ads / Sponsored Stories (the only thing that really costs money)
• People's interaction with the Brand's page typically gets reflected on their wall and other's News Feeds:  Likes, Shares, Recommendations
• Methods to sway the flocks towards your brand
• Media (Photos, Videos, Links to external sites like reviews and news articles)
• People's interaction with the Brand's page typically gets reflected on their wall and other's News Feeds:  Likes, Shares, Recommendations
• Continuous Interaction
• Feedback
• News in a relatively non-intrusive way (Facebook News Feed vs. E-mail Newsletter)
• People's interaction with the Brand's page typically gets reflected on their wall and other's News Feeds:  Likes, Shares, Recommendations

Promoting interaction with a brand's page is obviously the most important aspect of managing a Facebook Page.  However, you can't promote interaction if people aren't "liking" the page.  Getting people to visit, like, accept your news feed, and interact is an entire Consumer Relationship Cycle in and of itself.  You're practically selling a Blog (really?) to promote the Brand.  

So let's think about just who we are targeting in order to raise awareness of the Gumbo Shop Facebook Page.  Warning: The following may seem extremely obvious, but as I've found, you sometimes have to go over these as people tend to not explicitly think about them... because... well, they're obvious.

Neo Geo's Obviously Awesome
http://keithapicary.bandcamp.com/

People Who Already Know of the Gumbo Shop and Like the Place

It will be pretty easy to get these people to visit the page and yet they are by far the most important.  This is because they are most likely to enthusiastically (and sometimes, emphatically) promote your brand as they interact with the page.  The Gumbo Shop has a pretty large work-lunch following.  If you're starting out extremely early, these people would pretty much be made up of your friends.  The usual points of entry to the page would be through Facebook Check-Ins or the fact that you just told them to visit the page in person (or with a sign on your cash register).

People Who Only know of the Gumbo Shop, but Haven't Ever Visited...

...or maybe at some point a long time ago.  At least they're aware of this place.  This is where the page content can tip them over into actually visiting the Gumbo Shop.  

Have no clue that the Gumbo Shop existed...

Honestly, I consider this group of people to practically be in the same bucket as those who haven't ever visited or haven't been in a long time.  This is because the starting point of interaction is the same for both groups: ads or news feeds from other friends on Facebook.  Of course, people could stumble upon your page from a link on your Website and from there a slew of other sources.... buuuuut we'll get to that some other time.

Next time, we'll talk more of these "points of entry."  There are many, much like in Deus Ex... which I've seriously been neglecting, lately...

Wait, so What Do You Do, Again?

I guess before I get into the actual crap that I'm doing, I should talk about the actual and ideas behind them.  My main goal is to increase foot traffic to the Gumbo Shop to help them sell more food and make money.  One additional side effect is to get more consistent foot traffic throughout the year, which can lead to significant cost savings and headaches.

I can try to accomplish that in a couple ways:  I get more people to recognize the fact that there is such a Cajun place called the Gumbo Shop at Manchester and McKnight in Rock Hill, MO.  I convince them that the Gumbo Shop, is indeed, the place to be and a place for good eats.  Lastly, I remind them that the Gumbo Shop really is some place they should visit at least once a week.

Honestly, the ideal customer is me, who isn't too far from that depicted in this particular Oatmeal Comic.

Replace the Pizza with Fried Oysters

To take another look at this whole thing, I'm turning to consultant-esque diagrams that you'd see at business school classes or meetings where people are trying to sell you on the idea that giving them $500 an hour is actually a good idea.  This thing can be called a variety of things ranging from "purchase cycle," "Customer Engagement Cycle," to "Consumer Relationship Cycle."

In my search for just the right diagram, I realized two things.  Firstly, there are all sorts of different points of view and little details that yield a shit ton of very different looking diagrams, but are very similar in nature.  It all depends on what direction you want to tackle the problem from.  Secondly, not one of them had a picture of a dog.

Notice the lazy eye...

For the sake of the fact that I'm too lazy to do a detailed flow chart, just believe in the following.

• A customer starts out not even knowing that the Gumbo Shop exists and therefore, out of the cycle.
• The first state of interaction is "Awareness," having the Gumbo Shop be somewhere near the front of their minds.
• At any point in this cycle (I guess somewhere on the arrows), a customer can drop out and the interaction has to start all over again ("oh yeah... I forgot about that place...").  

So let's go through these boxes:  

• Awareness:  Obviously people won't go to the Gumbo Shop if they don't even know it exists.
• Consideration / Comparison:  If people in general are anything like me, choosing what to have for lunch is an epic struggle for an hour starting at 10am on a daily basis.  Something's got to point out just how the Gumbo Shop should be at the top of the list on a consistent basis.
• Purchase and Evaluation:  Eating at the Gumbo Shop.  This is grouped together as this is an event that's going on practically simultaneously.  This is largely out of my hands... or is it?

FEAST

• Continued Engagement:  Usually, you only have the previous experience at the restaurant to ensure whether another visit is going to happen anytime soon.  This is where Continued Engagement comes in and where it can get sort of confusing.  I attempt to remind people that it's been absolutely way too long since they've been to the Gumbo Shop amongst many other things.

All Over Again?  

So just how can I keep this endless cycle of violence going?  My use of Facebook is the core part of Continued Engagement and Facebook Ads is by far the most invested method of increasing awareness.  The next posts that I'll put up will likely bounce around from topic to topic in this cycle, especially as new observations crop up.  I'll be tagging those with the appropriate term.

I totally expect Nestle Purina to steal my doggy diagram...

Why Facebook?