Zappos recently revealed the key to their success in several interviews and articles. It seems that they are so successful in Facebook marketing and advertising, that they get a 350% ROI on all their Facebook marketing efforts. This comes as a surprise as more and more companies seem to be implying the opposite: that they are losing money on Facebook, and can’t make it work for them. Perhaps part of the problem is the training and how they use Facebook, but also perhaps part of the problem is the tools that they use.
In an interview with Nate Luman, the Facebook Marketing Head of Zappos, he revealed what he does with Facebook, and what should be ingnored.
As a marketer focused on driving Web traffic through Facebook paid ads, I am constantly trying to discover new audiences to target. Tools like XA.net’s OptimalKeyword look for fan pages with overlapping Facebook users. Fan-page engagement data isn’t as important to me as it is for the folks on my team focused on community management. I have a hard time suggesting to ignore any Facebook data without first testing to see if it is relevant to your business. Just don’t get caught up in doing it because you can. We’re taking an extra lean, agile approach to development, and if a minimum viable product shows that sending targeted emails based on what a connected customer recently posted on their wall creeps them out, we’d be smart to ignore that data and move on.
He mentioned the tool, OptimalKeyword, which has been gaining some attention out there, but not much usage in the performance marketing industry. This self-serve keyword expander tool, is “an audience expansion and research tool that is available on the OptimalSocial.com website and also at OptimalKeyword.com and is powered by SocialPredictTM. SocialPredictTM is optim.al’s proprietary interest/affinity matching engine based on an edge graph of over 3.6 billion modeled connections between the most popular consumer interests. Keyword Expander helps you build better keyword targets based on social data, and tells you more about the brands, interests and passions that connect us.”
Nate Lumen really does love this tool. He’s quoted recently as going on an on about how great the tool is, and basically how Zappos couldn’t do business on Facebook in the same way without it.
I’m in love with this tool called OptimalKeyword. What they have essentially done is mine the entire Facebook Ads API for different likes and interests. They’re looking for overlap between different likes and interests. So they’ve indexed everything and if you search a like or interest they’re able to tell you similar ones that those fans are also fans of. So if we run a query on Zappos we’re going to find out what our fans also like. So we’ll find out they like Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Yoga. But we’ve also found other interesting things that they like: Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and they like different shows on the Food Network.
We also use that tool to discover new audiences to target on Facebook. So if we find that targeting our own fans is effective, which it is: we see our highest ROIs on our ads that target our own fans. How can we find people that are similar to our fans but aren’t our fans? We want to look for new customers on Facebook. We’ve used that tool to do that as well. So we are targeting the same likes and interests that are informing the content on our fan page, we also target them with ads and expand our audience base to see if we can’t find people who are similar to the Zappos customer, maybe fit their similar demographic profile based on what they like on Facebook.
Here’s a great video explaining how the tool works and how it can easily increase your ROI.
We spoke to Optim.al and they agreed to give everyone free credits to try the tool out and see how it can increase your Facebook ROI. Click here for more information.
