DoctorPreneur: A Social Media Marketing Primer

John James, M.D.

Most people say, they know half of their marketing budget is wasted, they just don’t know which half.

Over the past decade, the two most powerful marketing platforms in the history of advertising have been created: Search Engine Keyword Marketing and Social Network Advertising. With each, you can track your return on your ad spend down to the penny, meaning no more wasted ad spend.

To start the revolution, Google stole (and perfected) Yahoo’s pay-per-click (PPC) keyword marketing platform. For those of you not familiar with Google’s business model, here’s a short primer video. (Seriously, watch it… you’re already waaaaay behind.)

After cutting my marketing teeth as a young direct-mail marketer, pay-per-click keyword marketing was a God-send. Even 10 years ago, keyword marketing was light years ahead of direct mail in terms of return on ad spend. More importantly, keyword marketing provided real-time analytics that allowed you to gauge the success (or failure) of a campaign in hours rather than months.

Since its inception, pay-per-click (PPC) keyword advertising has been the gold standard for providing a positive return on investment. I’ve bought (and sold) ads on the Interwebs for the last 13 years… and unfortunately, nothing could hold a candle to PPC marketing when done correctly.

For example, if I sell maternity scrubs, I’d buy the keyword “maternity scrubs” on Google. Whenever someone searches for maternity scrubs on Google, my ad will show up alongside hundreds of other stores selling scrubs for pregnant nurses.  Makes sense, right?

Ninety-nine percent of the advertising budget for my e-commerce company is spent towards PPC marketing on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Why? Because it works.

Until recently, this number was even closer to 100 percent. Over the last 6 months, I’ve directed a significant amount of our advertising budget towards social networks, namely Facebook.

Why? Again, because it works.

The latest iteration of Facebook’s ad program was launched earlier this year. Using their platform, we’ve amassed over 9,000 Facebook connections to our nursing scrubs business in less than three months. We can communicate with these “fans” any time day or night FOR FREE.

We generate several thousand dollars of revenue with every Facebook post we make. To top it off, if we post a discount coupon, our 9,000 Facebook fans are likely to share the code with their Facebook friends. Even more exposure.

While I won’t go into specifics on how we acquired so many scrubs fans so quickly, I will provide some examples to illustrate the power of the system. To put our Facebook success into perspective, our largest competitor, a $50 million scrubs business, has only 400 fans. For the time being, we are ahead of the curve in our little industry. I hope we can get an even larger lead before our competitors start to catch on…

So, here’s how it works. While keyword targeting on search engines lets you put your ad in front of a person searching for your product at the exact time they voice their intent, Facebook’s ad platform lets you go one a step further.

Facebook allows the marketer to harness a level of demographic targeting never before possible. You can target people by almost any imaginable demographic criteria. Age, sex, marital status, education, likes, interests, etc.

Here’s a couple of odd examples to show just how powerful (and specific) the demographic targeting system can be.

Say you have a T-shirt business. Let’s say you design weird shirts. Really strange shirts. Your most recent creation has a picutre of Jon Bon Jovi and has a caption that reads “Post-menopausal College Graduates of California are Awesome!”

Got it? It’s a pretty odd shirt… an odd shirt with a very small, very specific target market.

It’s pretty clear PPC keyword marketing won’t work… not surprisingly, there were  zero searches for the phrase “Jon Bon Jovi California Menopause Shirt” last month.

Likewise, targeting the 11 million people who searched for “T-Shirt” last month doesn’t make sense either… it’s VERY unlikely they would be interested in your quirky little shirt. (As a side note, you can check search volumes here.)

So, how can you address this tiny target market? Facebook makes it easy.

With Facebook’s program, you can target your ad exclusively to post-menopausal women who live in California who also love Jon Bon Jovi. That’s pretty specific. For around 20 cents a click, I can plaster my T-shirt ad in front of all 1,620 people who fit these pretty stringent criteria.

So, how about a little more realistic real-world application of the system? Let’s keep it on the fringe of plausibility just to keep it interesting.

Perhaps you own a bar in Fayetteville, and you are hosting a pub trivia night on Friday. Let’s also assume you were a young dude who wanted to pack his bar full of hot, college-educated females. So, to kill two birds with one stone, you decide to advertise your trivia night to single, female, college graduates, who are lovers of trivia.

Believe it or not, there are 60 of those educated, trivia-loving hotties in Fayetteville. Jackpot!

If I weren’t happily married with three kids, perhaps I’d buy a bar and hold a trivia night…

Clearly, those are examples with very little real-world utility, but they will give you an idea of just how robust the Facebook ad system can be.

So, now that we’ve sold mildly offensive T-shirts and packed a bar full of trivia lovers, it’s time to apply the lessons to your business.  Dive in follow these links to learn how to create a Facebook page for your business, then add a Facebook like button to your website, and finally advertise your business on Facebook.

One last thing. Speaking of trivia, here’s an update on my pet project. As I mentioned in last week’s DoctorPreneur post, we recently launched a trivia game. On our third day, we received a link from a very popular movie review blog to one of our movies trivia quizzes. The flood of traffic literally crashed our server…

I’ve built websites for 15 years, and I’ve never been able to bring a server to it’s knees with too many visitors. It’s the online equivalent of having too many customers in your checkout line… it’s a great problem to have.

Eight days into the new project, we have 1,600 registered users, and we’re on pace for nearly 2 million monthly pageviews. Oh yeah, we have, a few hundred Facebook trivia fans as well.

Until next week…

(John James, M.D., is a physician turned serial Internet entrepreneur. His latest venture is Acumen Holdings, a rapidly growing e-commerce company based in Fayetteville. Each Tuesday, his Doctorpreneur blog will appear in INOV8. Drop him a line in comments.)

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