Dear Sam,

You are one of my closest friends and the best baker I have ever met in my entire life. Baking is just your hobby right now and sometimes a good side gig for extra cash but someday you might want to expand your business. We have always talked about really making your baking a full time thing. So when you wake up one day and realise it’s time, I created a campaign plan to get your name out there.

They Taste Even Better Than They Look!

This week I did a deep dive into what kind of paid ad campaign you would want to consider to gain traction when you decide you want to take your hobby and make it your life.

First things first, we needed to have a basic understanding on who we are trying to sell too. Building a target audience and a goal will be a great first step. This will also help us understand if we are creating a successful campaign.

Right now we don’t know much about who we should target so lets start with a broad range.

Age Range from 18- 65 years old, is a good place to start mainly under and over those ages aren’t the people that are buying cakes and baked goods for parties and events.

The primary goal for this first ad campaign should be user engagement and building traffic to the website and/or social media page.

Time to go to Facebook ad Manager to smooth out all the details.

In Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard it says that a ‘Facebook page is generating not only introverted interest but conversations, discussions, and opinions.’ (Blanchard, 214) This works great for a company that can gain awareness from word of mouth. Mom’s go around telling their friends where they got there kids birthday cake and it keeps spreading like wildfire.

When using Facebook Ad Manager you have to start with one major goal. For this brand, the top priority would be to grow engagement. Since you are starting small you need to grow a community of people that can like, comment and share your ads with friends and family.

Since this Ad is about engagement you do not have to declare a special category. 

The next important detail is the spending limit. This might be the case that since you are new and not well known you might have to put in a little more money in it than you would expect. I would think to start with $200 dollars to start your campaign. Try and keep about $15 dollars a day. This first one is really about getting a deeper understanding of who could be interested and tailor future ads accordingly.

For the bid campaign strategy, I would recommend the highest volume, this will give us the ability to be seen by a larger audience. This will help build brand awareness and get people talking about the product with anyone they know. Hopefully this will be running the ads as much as possible within our budget. Flood the market with the sweet images and videos of the delightful cakes and baked goodies.

To narrow the market, You can set up an A/B testing system. Since we already know the pictures and videos are going to gain traction because they look amazing, you should test something other than creativity. I would recommend A/B testing for customs. Learning how changes in the post affect the target audience. Maybe more people like seeing cookies instead of cakes. Test this over a course of five days, the average work week. What you want to measure is cost per link click. The result being engagement and driving website traffic. 

The key goal here would first be brand awareness so for conversion location you would want to set it for ‘On Your Ad,’ to try and gain engagement for the post and start to really build that community. That is why I set the engagement type to ‘Post Engagement.” Since you are still trying to understand and build a target audience, you should set performance goals to maximum engagement and try to reach as many people as possible.

As for the start date, I wanted to plan to do it near a time when celebrations were happening, so the second week in June made sense to me. This is around the time people are starting to plan High school graduation parties and the fourth of July barbeques for the community. It’s a great way to spread local awareness and reach a large group of people. 

As for the location, I made it for a 30 mile radius around Sam’s home base. This will allow for it to feel neighborly and familiar. 

And then I set the target audience demographics.

As you can see I set the age range for 18 (High school graduation) to 65+ (For the retirement parties) and everything in between.

A good takeaway to note from Sharon Lee Thony’s book ‘ The Marketing Campaign Playbook,’ Thony writes, “By integrating market research, cross-channel distributions, and measurable goals, business can create campaigns that resonate with their target audience.” Once we run the campaign and get to understand our audience more the more we can expand and grow our goals and ultimately the company as a whole.

Good Luck and Don’t Stop Baking