As a fairly active social media user, I am exposed to many different advertisements throughout the day. I can explain which I find particularly effective and use this to craft ads for my own projects. I find that ads with very specific target audiences are most effective. For instance, I saw several ads for JimmyUp — a drift inspired retailer with clothing, car accessories, and stickers — that were of course extremely relevant to me. By using Facebook advertising tools to target only people with an interest in motorsports, the campaign was sure to be of interest to me. While there may be more people interested in their product than just those who enjoy drifting, advertising dollars are better spent on a very narrow, high-converting target market than a more broad market.

Compare this to another example — Baby Boss. Movies obviously have a greater general appeal than drift inspired apparel. But this expanded market needs to see relevant content. For some reason, the marketers for the new DreamWorks movie decided that I was their customer. I can think of no reason that a 20 year old, unmarried male would ever watch a children’s animation called Baby Boss. I was so peeved that I actually commented on the post, saying whoever was in charge of the campaign needed to rethink their strategy. My comment actually became the top “liked,” and multiple people responded to it with similar statements. Clearly, their defined audience was simply not narrow enough. It included too many people who found the movie completely irrelevant to them. If the advertiser really believed their target market was as large as this, they should have created different, more relevant ads for different segments. For instance, an ad for me could focus on date-night while another campaign could focus on family fun.

Yet another example is the movie CHIPS. This movie very clearly knew their target audience: very young men. I saw non-stop advertisements for the movie on my Facebook feed, and when it came time to watch a movie with my girlfriend, I picked CHIPS. Even though I knew it would be low quality movie, their advertising and campaign put it into my primary consideration set. The other factor here was timing. In this case, the advertisers could not have known that I was about to go to the movie theater for the first time in months. Nonetheless, the fact that I saw an advertisement for the movie on the same day my girlfriend wanted to go to the theater is what lead to my ticket purchase. Timing is extremely important for everything from advertising seasonal products to pushing relevant childcare products throughout the life of the infant. This is the third aspect of a quality ad campaign.

These three factors — narrow target market, relevance, and timing — are what I believe to be the key to successful social media advertising. The success of a particular campaign can easily be tracked through advertising tools, site analytics, and conversion rates. Using this, advertisers can tweak the target audience, modify content to be more relevant, and test the timing of ads to avoid their own Baby Boss disaster.