Lore

Marketing for Makers; or, My “Expert” Notes from Makers Summit

I had the pleasure of taking part in the Makers Summit last weekend as an expert. (Don’t know how I fooled them into thinking that about me.) It’s a great event put together by our friends over at Makers Collective and their awesome tribe. The event featured a bunch of experts and keynotes from Phil Sanders of Citizens Supply, Jen Gotch of ban.do, Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni’s Ice Cream, and our friend Matt Moreau of Dapper Ink and The Landmark Project. Since I was an expert I had the opportunity to provide a written portion for the workbook, an opportunity I didn’t pass up. Now I’ve decided to share it with you, interwebs! Soak up all my knowledge below the sweet pics.

1. Manage Like a Boss ?

If you want to advertise on Facebook and Instagram, setup a Facebook Business Manager account and link everything together. It will give you access to a suite of powerful tools and give you easy access to them. It’s free and easy to setup so there really isn’t a reason not to do it.

2. You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure ?

One of the biggest benefits (besides cost) of digital advertising, especially on Facebook and Instagram, is the ability to measure their performance. And you don’t need  a math or computer science degree to do it. Google Analytics is a great, free tool for monitoring the performance of your website. If you are running digital ads that send people to your website, you can also use Google Analytics to monitor your ad performance once the users get to the site.

3. Pixels, Not Just for Video Games ?

A Facebook Pixel is a piece of code you put on your site that allows Facebook to match up visitors to your site with their Facebook profile (when possible). So if you’ve ever looked at a pair of shoes on some e-commerce site and then an ad for them magically appeared on Facebook the next time you logged in, one of these pixels is probably to thank for it. It’s a great way to target ads at previous visitors or customers, or to find more people that Facebook thinks is similar to them. It can get even more powerful too, but that’s for another time.

4. Tag it! ?

And I’m not talking about hashtags, though you can use those too. Facebook allows you to attach what’s called a UTM parameter to the end of your URL so that Google Analytics can tie a visitor to the specific ad they clicked on (remember that bit about measuring stuff?). It sounds really technical and daunting, but Facebook makes it easy. Google “Facebook dynamic UTM parameters” and you can find a quick and easy way to get granular with it.

3. Hit the Target ?

Facebook has amazing targeting. It’s actually a little scary. Boosting posts with that shiny “boost” button on your page is nice and easy, but you might miss out on really narrowing down your audience and finding your niche. Using Ads Manager will allow you to really dive into all the targeting options available to you and create specific groups to deliver ads to.

4. Start Small ?

You don’t need a Nike sized ad budget to get started with all of this. You can start with as little as $5 a day. I recommend starting with small budgets as you hone your skills and fine tune your targeting and creative. Once you’re comfortable and have a good baseline feel free to go nuts.

5. Embrace Your Inner Mad Scientist ?‍?

Another advantage of these digital ad platforms is that you can easily and cheaply try new things. You need to let ads run for a little bit, so don’t crown a winner or give up after a day, but you aren’t locked in to one ad for a few months. Try different targeting, mix up your creative, test out the newest Facebook ad type, go wild.

6. Stay Organized ?

It can be tempting to breeze through naming campaigns, ad sets, and ads to get to the fun part (that’s choosing your targeting and making the ad), but having things named well will be very important later on. As your account grows these names will help you navigate your account quicker, it will also help you better track performance if you use the dynamic UTM tags mentioned earlier.

Disclaimer: For #s 2 & 3 you might need to edit some code on your site. Both require adding some code snippets, but if you’re using a platform like Shopify or WordPress there should be easy integration tools, just check the documentation.