Facebook Ads for the Win

We’ve already spent some time talking about Facebook and several different marketing strategies involving it, but because Facebook is the single biggest social media website we thought it was worth a second look. Today we’ll look at three companies that used Facebook differently but all had tremendous success.

1. Travel Site

A U.K. travel site On the Beach wanted to see how Facebook ads compared to organic and paid search efforts. After 30 campaigns they discovered that Facebook far exceeded any search based marketing they had done. In addition, due to information from Facebook, they were able to narrow their target audience from 18-64 year olds to women between 35 and 54. In the end they received 7x more customers from Facebook ads than they did from searches.

2. Beach Bunny Swimwear

Beach Bunny Swimwear also launched a Facebook campaign but went about in a dramatically different manner because they were already an established brand with 15,000 likes on Facebook. The primary goal of their campaign was to get a jump on sales going into bikini season. They used Facebook ads advertising a 20% discount and targeted women ages 18-24. It’s the oldest trick in the book but offering discounts works. Beach Bunny Swimwear saw massive growth in both Facebook page views and likes, and the important part, a 120% increase in daily purchases that they attributed to the Facebook campaign.

3. YouBeauty.com

YouBeauty.com is a relatively new website created by two physicians that became TV stars, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen. The primary focus of the campaign was to increase the sites Facebook following. The TV show as well as the website primarly targeted women, so naturally the ad campaign did as well. They used Facebook’s ability to target specific groups of people and advertised to women 18-50 that showed an interest in health, fitness, beauty, skin care, and Oprah Winfrey. The ads were a sweepstakes where the winner got a three day trip to New York City to meet Dr. Oz on the set of his TV show, as well as a $300 L’Oreal gift basket. The campaign was a tremendous success increasing the sites Facebook likes from 500 to 15,000 and bringing in 13,000 subscribers to their email list.


These three examples show how very simple ad campaigns can have tremendous success on Facebook. Because of Facebook’s ability to send ads only to the people you want, the results tend to be better than other advertising avenues. Remember often less is more as these companies used essentially a coupon and a sweepstakes. The actual ads were the nothing special, companies have been offering coupons and sweepstake for ages, what made the campaigns a success was the delivery method.