Facebook Ads for Market Research and Testing Ideas

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Being web entrepreneur types here at NeuMarkets, we tend to come up with a lot of ideas for solutions to every day issues we as both consumers and users of technology in a business context face. One of our favorite ways to get an early signal as to whether or not one of our ideas has ‘legs’ is to put together a quick Facebook campaign to test how our assumed target market might respond.
As always, testing each component is key. But in this case, the call to action can be as simple as ‘Fill out this form’ to be one of our first beta testers – or ‘Sick of X? Check out this video demo of our Y solution to solve X’
To get things going quickly you can setup a launch page with one of the many services out there, include a simple email submit form, your creative or hero shot (some cool image that captures attention) and the appropriate messaging you want to test to see how you might be able to successfully position your solution.
To get started, head over to the Apps section in Facebook, click Ads and click Create a New Ad.
Now, spend some time thinking about what kind of positioning would logically work for your solution/product and design your ad as per below. Remember it is key to have continuity between ad and landing page – so stay consistent with your messaging from one step to the next.

Once that is done, you can drill down on your target demographics. At this point it makes sense to either go really wide – or really narrow in terms of location (if you were able to turn up some intel on your competitors via Alexaor Quantcast).

You can then select the broad interest categories your audience might partake in (ie. cooking, dancing, biking etc.) these are a bit speculative but I think we can naturally make some safe assumptions.
Next up, you will see an option for Advanced Connection Targeting as shown below. With this tool you can target people who already fans of one of your existing pages or apps – a good way to test market how your customer base might react to a new line of products or services.

The last targeting section is focused on demographics, again you can get most of this information from Alexaor Quantcast by analyzing a few of your bigger competitors (national or international brands work best).
You can also get specific by adding in companies or universities that your target audience might attend/work at.
This last piece is cool, as you can use this information to further refine your ad, and landing page copy. For example, if you are targeting Ryerson Students why not put ‘Ryerson Students! Are you sick of X?’
There is no limit to the number of ads and corresponding landing pages you can create – so go nuts – get as granular as your patience allows!
Once you have made it through the grunt work part of web marketing, it’s time to start adjusting your campaign to maximize your spend.
First you should set a lifetime budget for the campaign and pick your start and stop dates. It would be a good idea to set it for at least a few days in order to account for variables like time of day Facebook usage.

It is also usually best from a budgeting perspective to start with a Cost per Click (CPC) campaign, but Facebook runs on a Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) model behind the scenes – so if you can stomach the chance of a lot of impressions without many clicks – the latter will get you better exposure.

Next you can set your maximum bid per click or per 1,000 impressions. As a best practice, we like to always start by bidding 80% of whatever the Facebook tool suggests to try to find the sweet spot where others are not bidding below.

You will just need to test this out for your specific campaign – so pick a starting point, then hit ‘Review Ad’ to make sure there are no major mistakes.
If all looks good, hit Place Ad, and wait for your Ad to get reviewed/approved by the Facebook review team.
Once you are up and running (congratulations!) – let the campaign run for a full 24 hours without touching it. If after 24 hours you aren’t getting a lot of clicks/impressions – try adjusting the pricing. If you aren’t getting a lot of form submits or whatever action you were hoping for – try adjusting the ad and landing page content to tell the visitor more about what to expect when they click (essentially pre-selling).
Hope it helps! Have fun, and if you like this tip. Please show us by sharing it! If you don’t like it – tell us why!