META advertising for Clubs

Social advertising forms a large part of the marketing strategy to drive awareness of club facilities, promote upcoming events, attract & retain members and highlight community support activities. But how effective are your ads?

With 36.8% of the world’s population using Facebook monthly and the preferred social platform of the 35-44 demographic, its place in the marketing mix can’t be denied.

Along with the opportunity to put your product in front of a large potential audience, comes the challenge of getting your venue in front of the countless competitors in what’s already a very crowded marketplace. Organic reach of a Facebook post has been consistently falling and the average cost per click has risen over 13% since 2020!

Increasing governance of privacy is forcing tech giants to manage your data more transparently. The most game changing by Apple has been the iOS 14 privacy feature for iPhones, which effectively inhibits advertisers to track and target your activity across multiple devices and platforms. Industry publications report that up to 80% of all iPhone users have now opted out of Facebook being able to track their on-line activity.

Whether you outsource or manage your digital advertising in-house, it’s critical that your Digital Advertising budget is managed in the most cost-effective way, to drive a clear return on investment.

To help, we’ve put together our top tips for running effective META campaigns:

1. Organic Posts

Combining organic posts with paid advertising is best practice, but posting for the sake of it is not recommended. It’s better to have fewer more engaging organic posts then a raft of ‘meh’ content. Branded professional images, short videos, animated images & GIFs and select use of hashtags work best to increase engagement.

2. Data is the new gold

Whilst the landscape is changing, you still can leverage literally millions of data points in Facebook. Have you uploaded the META pixel on your website yet? This is a snippet of code that allows you to track visitor activity on your site and collects a myriad of data to run more effective advertising.

3. Audience Manager

Did you know you can create custom audiences using 1^st party (membership) data? You can also create audiences that have interacted with your business (website visits, Facebook & Instagram interaction, Video views, Event interaction).

Facebook will automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. You can further target your ad delivery with three audience selection tools.

• Core Audiences
  Define an audience based on criteria such as age, interests, geography and more.
• Custom Audiences
  Get back in touch with people who have engaged with your business, online or off.
• Lookalike Audiences
  Reach new people whose interests are like those of your best customers.

4. Audience first marketing approach ~ who are your consumer profiles?

Clubs can leverage their membership data to understand exactly who are their most valuable customers from POS or Gaming data. Your social advertising should reflect these audiences in terms of the copy and content. What you present to seniors/boomers (55+) should be very different to families & millennials.

5. Campaign structure

You or your agency needs to ask:

• What are the campaign objectives?
• What is the key messaging?
• Who do we want to target?
• What assets do we have available?
• How much budget and what length of campaign?

Devising a brief internally or externally and having a clear objective in mind will lead to a better outcome.

6. Budgeting

Too often I see venues throwing minimal budgets at META ads expecting to see results. Digital ads are competing against a multitude of competitors in an auction based environment. Our experience shows its better to run highly targeted campaigns in a shorter campaign window than throwing a couple of hundred dollars across a long period.

7. Return on investment

Having an ROI mindset is fundamental – regardless of who’s running your ads! A good ROI will always be dependent on multiple factors, such as your website or campaign landing page, what channels you’re using, the assets (for example, images and copy), audience targeting, budget and length of the campaign. At minimum, technically you need:

• The FB Pixel functional & loaded on website
• On-page events created using the event tool to track actions consumers are taking
• From the events, add customer conversions and assign a dollar value to measure ROI
• Use the aggregator tool to prioritize events

At Maer Group we’ve combined our knowledge of hospitality systems with an experienced digital team to create a specialised digital agency for clubs & pubs.

Unlike other digital agencies, we know how to leverage your customer data and track the success of your digital advertising.

If you’d like to find out more, drop me an email at darryl@maer.com.au.