It's mid-March and we've just finished the rush to get the orders for decorated Father's Day clothes printed and delivered.
As a textile printing company, we have many clients who do a lot of work at this time of year, such as tatabitata or Moment of Dreams. Both are regular customers for decorated T-shirts and both see a big growth in sales at specific times of the year such as Father's Day or Mother's Day.
Returning to the initial premise and the rush of Father's Day, I remembered some experiments I've been doing with Facebook adverts. I also remembered some lessons I learnt on a digital marketing course a few months ago and an extremely interesting tool that Facebook ads provide for targeting this type of market almost perfectly.
In this article, I'm going to give you FOR FREE what many people would spend hours discovering or hundreds of euros on courses to learn.
Eu sei que muito pouca gente investe em anúncios ou publicidade paga, mas se há alguma fase do ano para o fazer, é em datas especiais.
These are the times when I would do paid advertising on Facebook:
- Father's Day
- Mother's Day
- Children's Day
- Valentine's Day
- Christmas
There may be a few more specific dates when people are looking for T-shirts or other decorated clothing, but these dates are guaranteed to be huge in terms of demand and sales.
How to invest your money properly?
From here we'll go through a mixture of print screens and text so that you can understand step by step which optimisations to use to get the best results and reach the target audience you're looking for.
- Choose the type of advert you want to show
Here it will be a personal choice. There are those who sell by catalogue, those who direct you to a specific website and those who sell by private message. Any of these options can be chosen when creating paid posts on Facebook.
For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that you receive your garments by private message. So choose the "messages" option.
2. Create audience (the people you want to show your publication to)
Let's take the example of Father's Day and go back a few weeks. Let's think for a moment about who's going to buy Father's Day clothes. Is it his own father? Is it the child? Is it Mum? I could be wrong, but I'm going to assume that it's usually Mum who deals with these things. I'm also going to assume that those who like to buy decorated T-shirts (and I see a lot of work where a father and son T-shirt is made) are young and up to 35 years old.
Here we already have some segmentations we can make:
- Women
- Up to 35 years old
- With small children (up to 12 years old - based on experience)
Knowing that Facebook adverts for Portugal start with around 6.3 million potential buyers, we're now going to segment (limit) them using this information.
By choosing "women" between the ages of "20 and 35" in "Portugal" and who speak "Portuguese from Portugal", we immediately limit ourselves to just over 1 million potential buyers. Even so, this is a huge number and one that is impossible to achieve without a megalomaniac budget.
Let's segment a little more.
- We're looking for women with children up to the age of 12
From over a million people, we've now reached just 28,000. Don't forget that we're now talking about women aged between 20 and 35, with children aged between 0 months and 12 years.
If 28,000 people doesn't sound like enough, you can expand your target a little more. In this case I also chose people with an interest in parenting, as they are usually people with children.
This way you've reached just over half a million Portuguese women with children up to the age of 12.
We can even limit it again, taking into account marital status (single, married, in a civil partnership, etc). I only use this segmentation to eliminate people who are "separated", "divorced" or "widowed". I'm assuming that there are three groups of people who have no interest in buying Father's Day clothes.
This brings us to the end of our segmentation. Just to recap, then:
- Women
- Up to 35 years old
- With small children
- Interested in maternity
- In a relationship, married, unmarried, engaged
A total of 300,000 people. That sounds like a very interesting number to start with! We could raise the minimum age to 24 (solely due to a possible increase in purchasing power from this age), limiting it to 250,000 people. I advise you to do a bit more research into behaviour and demographics, as no one knows your own customers better than you.
You can even actively exclude certain types of people you don't want to sell to. I'll leave this part up to you.
We'll leave it at that for now, as the article is going to be long and it's good to have material for a second part where we'll talk about the budget, the duration of the paid publication and the type of image and text to use. All these points will be equally important when it comes to running your sponsored campaign.
