Responses

Jayamuni — Wed, 20 Feb, 2019 - 11:08

I’ve been using Facebook ads to advertise meditation courses in Clermont-Ferrand for over a year now by advertising the Facebook events (rather than the page). We spend 20€ for a 2 week campaign before the start of the course and they tend to fill up well (12 people max). We also advertise by putting out posters and flyers but 90% of the people coming find us through Facebook and the ads.

Beware that if you advertise a course or event that requires booking, you’ll have to keep a close eye on the event page and on people cliking on ‘attending’ but not contacting you directly, even if you specify in the description that they need to book by phone or email.

It also seems to lead to many last minute bookings.

Dhammakumāra — Thu, 28 Feb, 2019 - 23:13

This guide suggests using the “Demographics” thing to target people who are interested in things like “Religion” and “Yoga”.

This is a common mistake people advertising on Facebook make. In my experience of running lots of Facebook advertising campaigns (both in my professional life and for Buddhist centres) this will have the opposite effect to what you want. People who are already interested in say, “religion” are the people who are least likely to be interested in what a Buddhist Centre has to offer (people generally don’t change their faith based on a Facebook ad). Likewise, people who are already interested in yoga probably already have a place they practice yoga and don’t need a new one.

I’ve found for the best results, just leave demographics blank. After all, we want to reach everyone.

Another tip this guide doesn’t mention is to choose your wording and images well. For wording, use of the imperative (e.g. ”Learn to meditate” rather than something ”Interested in learning meditation?” or in the example given in the guide: “Find Peace…” would be better than “Finding Peace…”) would be better. For images: avoid images which are symbolic to Buddhists which non-Buddhists won’t understand (for example, lotus flowers) or are overly generic stock images (white woman doing yoga, forest, sunsets, etc.) and go for something eye-catching (the Buddha image in the example in this guide is pretty good but a bit disconnected from the wording which is about “finding peace in a turbulent world” - instead you could do something that indicates the turbulent world with a Buddha image overlay or something).

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