What’s the best time to advertise?

I love this question because it actually allows us to dive into our audience and dive into the data to help make better decisions about the choices we make when it comes to our marketing objectives.

Anyone that knows me and has done business with me, and my clients will all attest to the fact that when I talk, I want to use data to make decisions and recommendations. I don’t like assumptions, I don’t like opinions, everybody’s got one of them. What I like is looking at what is actually happening out there, knowing and understanding exactly how my audience behaves so that I can make better decisions and use the data and information to direct and govern what I do when it comes to my marketing, digital and social objectives.

So, when it comes to advertising, and let’s just say your objective is primarily around Facebook and Instagram advertising, the best thing you can do is firstly go into your insights, on Facebook and Instagram and you’ll actually be able to go through and see your audience. Here you are able to see not only the demographics of your audience, but you can actually see when your audience is online.

So, presuming you have an audience, you can actually go into the insights and it will say on what days of the week your audience is online, and on those days, the times your audience are online. For my clients in Australia I find that regardless of which day of the week it is, there seems to be common time of the day that their audience is online. For example, we find that at around 06:00 am – 07:00 am there is a spike in online activity, and then again at around lunch time, and again from around 19:30 pm to 21:30 pm. When you come to know your audience more, you can also start to gauge the types of behaviour of your audience during these times. For example, between 06:00 am and 07:00 am we can assume that your audience is commuting to work, and between 19:30 pm and 21:30 pm people are vegging out at home relaxing. Once we understand this behaviour we can start to style our content to suit this behaviour. For instance, producing content that is easy to absorb and provides value while people are relaxing after a long day of work is more likely to get engagement and appeal to your audience.

So, when it comes to placing your ads, you actually have the ability to schedule them to the times that match your peak periods, as shown in the analytics.  Recently, a client of ours wanted to tap into an audience that was commuting. So, what we did was geo-target the train line between the two cities and we only set our ads during transport times. This was a tactic that we found worked really well and the beauty about it and the reason it worked so well is because we understood what our audience was doing. We realised that they where on the train consuming content, everybody’s on their phones like the zombie apocalypse, and that’s what we tapped into.

For our other clients that wanted to target mothers between the age of 35-40, we found that mothers are very active around the 21:30 to 23:00 mark when the kids have gone to bed and they are chilling out, consuming content. And so that was the time we sent out ads to tap into that audience.

So hopefully that helps. Use the data, make educated decisions and allow that to govern your advertising placement strategy. Make it as relevant as possible and as timely as possible for your target audience.

 

Thanks guys.