The great thing about targeting certain conferences is that you'll find like-minded people; people who are likely to be interested in your product/service. So if you are in the PPC industry, you'd want to target wherever Hero Conf PPC Conference is going to be. If you are into social media marketing, Social Media Marketing World is where your social nerds will be (I know, it sounds like an oxymoron).
You can find some of the most popular digital marketing conferences here.
Today's Quick Tip Tuesday is all about finding people in your niche that are attending these conferences using Facebook's targeting tool.
Let's dig right it!
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Conferences can be a great way to get exposure, but they're expensive. You have to travel, you have to buy a booth. It all adds up.
So what I want to show you is that, for the price of dinner, you can get more exposure than a keynote speaker, without ever actually walking through the door of one of these conferences.
Let me show you how:
One of the cool things about Facebook ads is that you can actually target a geographical area.
So what we're going to do is, first, target the actual conference you want to have exposure for, the one that you wish you could've been to, but you didn't make.
Okay, so just choose the objective that makes the most sense.
I'm going to use increase conversions, select that.
At this point, what you want to do is type in the location that you want to target.
Now, naturally this is gonna be the address of the conference center, or the venue.
So I have one saved here. It's the Boston Convention Center. Put the address in here.
Now, you'll notice that there's an option to have a radius around that convention center. So what I want to do is reduce that all the way down to the minimum of one mile.
Facebook lets you target within one mile of an address that you supply, which is absolutely amazing.
One other thing that I want to point out to you is this option right here, locations.
So you have four options here:
Everyone in this location is just a catchall for people who either have an IP address in that area, like they live there, or they've just recently been there, everybody.
The next one is people who live in this location. So these are people who have indicated in some way that they have a residence there, probably not the best fit.
People recently in this location is if people are on their phones, or they've somehow been
picked up on the radar that they've been in this area, and then the other one is people traveling to this location or in this location.
For the most reach, you can just do everyone in this location.
At this point, all the standard targeting options apply, but, in this case, you're really going to want to cast as wide a net as possible, and then start really qualifying people with the ads that you're creating.
Now, at this point, I think it makes sense to think about when would you target somebody at a conference?
Well, there's a few different ways to do it:
Think about when people are arriving to a conference. Think about when, maybe different keynote speakers are speaking, or there's different big breakout sessions that are going on.
You can also think about when people are leaving a conference.
These are all different kind of triggers or events where you might be able to stand out and reach people.
The idea here is you're going to get exposure to a lot of people who aren't at the conference, but for the people who are, you want to really stand out and reach them.
Let me show you an example of an ad that we ran recently at a conference.
So this was targeting Pubcon. It's a really big conference, traditionally known for SEO, that's held in Las Vegas. And we ran this right as the conference was ending, basically saying, hey, you got all your SEO bases covered, now let's talk about PPC.
Get really specific around what people are going through. Step into the minds of people who are leaving this conference.
How can you speak to them directly?
Now, believe it or not, this ad got us the attention and a lead over a Fortune 100 company.
So this works.
It's all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time.
So this is one way to get in front of people using Facebook. I'd also recommend hitting Twitter and using, you know, ads that target different hashtags.
So if there's a hashtag for a conference, you can target that as a part of your audience targeting on Twitter.
One other tip would to be to create a custom audience for anybody who visits your site through this ad, because you can tag them as somebody who probably went to this conference, and then retarget them with ads later down the line.