St. Bernardino, patron saint of advertisers.

Um, what was I thinking?

I tend to be a penny pincher. But yesterday I was getting frustrated.

By 2 pm, we had spent only $23 in ad costs that day for a women’s religious community that we serve. I was boosting their Facebook fan base. In other words, these are the people who have pressed “like” on the Sisters’ Facebook page, and who are interacting with these Sisters’ posts.

We have been building up these Sisters’ fan base of single women age 18-35 in the U.S. who tend to be devout Catholics, for some time now.

You see, if we can get three or four, or ten thousand such women to “like” our client’s Facebook page, we have a pool of religious candidates that we can make posts to, as well as send ads to. In this way, some of them will attend the Come and See events, and eventually enter the community. This is the way marketing for sisters, brothers and priests works.

But how do you get qualified Facebook fans?

Going beyond your boundaries

These fans are your group of potential religious candidates. You get them  to enter into the conversation. Of the various ways of vocation marketing, advertising is the quickest way to find these people. With ads, you throw the net beyond your own group.

But it’s important that you advertise in the right way. We don’t send our ads to just a generic group of single Catholic women. These are women who have attended colleges such as Franciscan University at Steubenville, Christendom College, or similar colleges on our approved list.

Or they may belong to other groups, such as nationwide Catholic youth groups. We strive to ensure that all of our groups are founded on the promotion of authentic Catholic teaching. In all, we have more than thirty such groups on our growing target list.

This target list is our secret sauce for vocation promotion. In advertising, targeting is everything.

We ran three ads for these Sisters, and the most popular featured a photo of nine smiling faces. There were six sisters, young and old, and three young postulants. The message was clear: join us, and you will be smiling, too.

Was Facebook failing us?

But for some reason, Facebook was not displaying our ads to many of these candidates. I had set what is called the ad spend to $125 per day, but it was past midday, and Facebook had not spent anywhere near half of that goal.

This at times is the tendency of Facebook, as well as Google in its ads. It must be a technologically-related problem. Sometimes you have to set the limit twice as high to get what you really want.

So at 2 pm, I boldly ratcheted up the ad spend to $500 for that day. What was I thinking?

At 11:30 that evening, I was shocked to see that we had spent $331 in ad spend. Whoa! (Our client did not have to pay anything extra, however.)

So before turning the ad off, I noted that we had gotten 147 page likes that day at $2.42 per like. When you see the quality of these prospects, you can see that it was well worth it.

Reaching your audience

Another interesting tidbit was that the “reach,” or number of people that the ad was sent to, was 26,323. Before I cranked up the ad spend, the reach was only 4,890. So, apparently, Facebook saw that we were serious about spending money and shot out our ads to a lot more of our target audience.

This community has been visited by several candidates recently from the colleges that we have targeted. So the system is working, and we’re going full speed ahead.