003 - How We (at Michigan) Earned $17,392 on Facebook

As we strive to bridge the digital and physical worlds, it’s essential for us to cater to our season ticket holder and donor audiences.

Utilizing Facebook (and Instagram) ads has been one of our bigger areas of focus in the past year and will continue to be one in 2018-19.

Paid social is easily some of the most effective marketing that a brand can do in 2018, where the cost is cheap relative to the performance and attention.

Quite often we find content and cater to folks who live in certain areas and have interests related to what the content is about. (i.e. Ice Hockey in Michigan). But we have recently discovered the best-performing content is when we directly reach emails of folks that we have already classified as something, like recent purchaser, season ticket holder, etc.

Several months ago, our development team provided our digital team a spreadsheet of approximately 20,000 names of people that had the means to give to Athletics but had not previously.

After uploading that list into Facebook’s, the platform found approximately 15,000 of those emails. We targeted content specifically to them during the last week of December, urging supporters to donate to the Michigan Athletics Scholarship Fund, which supports our student-athletes.

We spent $500 that spanned the final week of 2017, which reached 9,029 of those 15,000 individuals found in Facebook.

The results:

• 199 Link Clicks

• 9,029 People Reached

• $2.51 Cost Per Result

• 0.56% Result Rate

• 40 Conversions = $17,392.84

Thanks to Facebook and their ad platform we’re able to target content specific to the people that would want to see them. i.e. tickets to a game in Michigan don’t need to be seen by a fan in California.

I think Facebook should be a go-to ad platform for your next campaign. To learn more about Facebook Ads, start here.

We will definitely continue to dabble with it this upcoming year.