Facebook Studies ADIDAS and TASTING TABLE

We are going to look at two different companies that used Facebook in remarkably different ways but both received fantastic results. The first company is Adidas. You’ve probably heard of them. They’re one of the largest sports ware companies in the world and we will look at their Facebook campaign surrounding the 2010 FIFA World Cup and Adidas’ attempt to boost awareness of their brand and football boots. The second company is Tasting Table, a much smaller company that provides an email newsletter with recommendations about various restaurants, bars, food, wine, and anything culinary to a few select cities.

We’ll start with Adidas. What they did that so is a simple principle that often works in many social media websites. They didn’t always walk about themselves. A large portion of their campaign did not directly talk about Adidas. In social media releasing news or information about your companies industry but not selling any specific product is extremely effective, especially when dealing with advertising on websites such as Twitter, which we’ll delve into in detail in future blogs.

The Adidas campaign utilized the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Using something like the World Cup worked for advertising because all of Adidas’ target audience was already interested in the tournament. Here’s the lesson: find out what your customers are already interested in, and advertise there. Adidas set up their Facebook page to give updates, news and behind the scene information about the World Cup. In addition, they create a game where users could select varies players in the tournament and follow the players success and earn points. At the end of the tournament, Adidas gave out prizes based on who had the most points. They also helped support a charity started by Nelson Mandela to help victims of HIV/AIDS. The only section of Adidas’ campaign that directly related to a product was the release of a new football boot which they advertise during and leading up to the tournament. Think about what your customers are already interested in and give them information about that, even if it is not directly related to one of your products.

While Adidas’ approach was successful it is not the only way to achieve success on Facebook. Tasting Table used somewhat of the opposite approach and used Facebook for targeted marketing. Tasting Table utilized the banner ads on Facebook to send ads to users that expressed interest in food. However, because Tasting Table is a smaller company that only provides information in a few select cities, they used Facebook’s geo-targeting. While it might sound fancy it’s really quite simple. Geo-targeting allows marketers to target users located in a specific area. So Tasting Table was able to target users that expressed an interest in food in the San Francisco area. This hyper targeted marketing strategy had incredible results and Tasting Table have seen their subscriptions grow from 50,000 to 400,000 in less than two years with an estimated 40 percent coming from Facebook.