#009 How Can I Target CEOs And CFOs On Social Media?

If your target audience consists of savvy executives, you need to start taking an active role in both your brand and personal social media strategy. The truth is, CEOs and CFOs (and all of the other C-Suite peeps) are spending time on social media. We get distracted by titles, income, and different creepy categories that we can use to target these humans, but we need to remember that they’re just that. Humans! Beth Trejo and Kelsey Martin give opinions on where C-Suite members are spending their time on social media. How they would target CEOs and CFOs using ads. And how many CEOs and CFOs they found on Facebook and LinkedIn In Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

88% of CFOs are on Facebook; 57% on LinkedIn; 46% on Twitter; 44% on Instagram; 42% on YouTube. Read more from the study by Robert Half Management Services.
You can target 980k CFOs and financial managers with Facebook and Instagram targeting alone.
Don’t take a traditional approach to targeting on social media. The best part about this tool is that you can deliver content to the audience that really makes sense to them. Think about what differentiators really stand out to their demographic when it comes to behavior.
Make sure your campaign audience sizes don’t get too small unless you’re ready and willing to pay for the higher quality. An audience less than 1,500 can get expensive. Let’s keep this in perspective, social media ads are almost ALWAYS going to cost you less than any traditional advertising.
Targeting ideas: titles, associations, interests, publishers, groups, magazines, software, hobbies, fine wines, travel, watches, apps.
Make sure your content matches your audience. Really create enticing or exciting content that will really add value to your targeted audience. Solve their unique pain points.
LinkedIn has so many great new features but a lot of people aren’t on that platform on a day-to-day basis yet.
Ideas After The Podcast: We didn’t share this but these targeting ideas really had me thinking. Try targeting the serious leisure groups: private helicopter enthusiasts, flying in general, yacht racing, charters (vehicles, yachts, aircraft), Equestrianism, world traveling, art collectors, car collectors, ballroom dancing, sky diving, scuba diving, exotic pets, yacht racing, polo, sailing, high stakes poker, antique collection, country clubs.

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Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

You don't have to be a millennial to be socially savvy. We believe anyone can join generation social media. And your journey starts now. This is The Generation Social Media Podcast by Chatterkick.

Hello, this is Beth Trejo and welcome to Generation Social Media Podcast. Today on the show I have Kelsey Martin, our COO. Kelsey has done a lot of targeting and ads in the past. And today we are going to talk about CEOs and CFOs. The question we get a lot from clients and from friends and colleagues is, well CEOs, CFOs, they're not on Facebook. And so our goal with this podcast is really to break down the barriers and the stereotypes. So we're going to look at are they on Facebook and if not, where can we target these individuals? Kelsey, what's your thoughts on that? So when I got this question, of course, my initial response is to be a total nerd and be like, Oh, are they not on Facebook? Where are they? And so I just started searching like, where are these people spending their time?

Are there any reports? Are there any studies? And so the first thing that I found other than just our obvious experience that we've had in targeting these groups of people, but there was a study on... Robert Half Management Services did a study and the most popular platforms for CFOs, and this is already gonna break the norms a little bit, but the very first one is Facebook. So 88% of CFOs are on Facebook. And then the obvious one which is where I think everybody thinks CFO's and CEO's spend their time LinkedIn. So it goes Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit in that order. But obviously Facebook is still far beyond the very first and almost only platform that these people are on. And I think just from this question alone, we always get this like Facebook or CEO's and CFO's are not on Facebook. I mean, you're a CEO. Do you spend time on Facebook?

Yeah, for sure. And I think the problem that people have is they really try to take a traditional approach to targeting, right? Like if you're going to use a radio station, kind of like we did 10 years ago, right, you would say like who is the demo? And like how can I target that demo? And so you pick one station or maybe two, but that's the difference with social media. You really need to spread out your efforts so that you can hit the people on face with Facebook, with content that makes sense to them. Now when you go over to Pinterest or Snapchat, that content may look a little bit different. But the reality is is people are spending time on more than just one platform. And so you really need to leverage your efforts so that you're not just using only one platform. You're trying to get them in the attention mindset that they are at on the different platforms.

Yeah. I want to talk about, um, I really wanted to dive into the numbers cause one thing that we see all the time with targeting, you know, if you get too narrow on targeting with Facebook and Instagram, like for instance, your numbers get so small and your campaigns just can't even get off the ground. So I wanted to actually dive in and see how many people I could target with just these interests. And so I'm going to go through some of these just like targeting things again, nerd. But, and this is through the Facebook family of apps is Facebook. I used Facebook/Instagram. Um, and my targeting specifically was just CFOs, financial managers. Okay. So there were 980,000. If you just had CFOs and financial managers, just that in your targeting for job titles in the U.S. There were 980,000. So I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper. So just in Iowa alone, again, this is Facebook and Instagram, there are 7,400 CFOs. You CFOs and financial managers that you could target in Iowa, there were 4,600 in Nebraska and 3,100 of those were in the Omaha DMA alone.

So if you are in Omaha and your target is CFOs, you can easily run a campaign on Facebook and Instagram with the right content and reach this group of people. There's a pretty large number there that are pulling into these interests on the platform. There was also 2,000 in South Dakota. Um, so I think all of those numbers are substantial, like they're good enough to run a campaign on. And so I think just that stigma of these professionals are not spending time on Facebook. They are, their platforms are there. I just think, like you said, the content just needs to be a little bit different. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, you know the threshold to say, Ooh, not enough people there to run a campaign, but a lot of people, if they've never ran these campaigns or you know, they're just getting started in Facebook ads, they don't know.

Is it 20, is it 200, is it 2000? Is it 20,000? Um, Facebook does have like a little speedometer gauge, but what is your thoughts on that? Like the threshold, what number would be like, uh, just not enough people are too narrow? Tough. And it completely depends on the objective. Like for example, I used titles but there are a lot of objectives that you cannot use titles on. Some other ways to build that audience is by using like interest magazines, associations that these people would be involved in. But I think that number is really hard for me to come up with off the top of my head. I remember Facebook suggestion is no less than 100,000 people. And when you're targeting and running campaigns in these smaller communities, like 100,000 people is this entire area. Yet, if not all 100,000 people in this area are even qualified to purchase our products or purchase our services.

And so I think, you know, I used to say there needed to be at least a couple, like 10,000, but I've ran campaigns with really small audiences and even though Facebook said, this is really not going to go well for you. It was so narrow in the content just hit that even with I think 3,000 people was like the smallest even might've gotten like one that was around 1,500 when we were doing an awareness campaign for Hard Rock. Like way back in the day, it was just super expensive, like really expensive. I think our click, our cost per click, which never really happens on Facebook, it was like $15, just to click. So I don't know if that's really worth it for some businesses, but if you're targeting like the only thousand people that are qualified to buy, like maybe it is. Right.

And honestly like people see those results and if you're trying to target a very narrow group of people like CFOs, CEOs, um, sometimes it's not about the "performance" of the campaign is the performance of the results. So if you put $5,000 in and yeah, you got expensive cost per click and you have expensive, um, you know, impression, um, cost per impression that could look like your campaign isn't doing well, but in the end if those people are high buyers and your services cost a lot, your return on investment all of a sudden is a whole different conversation. So sometimes it's worth it to pay a little bit more if your audience is, you know, gonna spend a lot of money with you.

Yeah, definitely. Beth kind of talked about this earlier, like this little gauge that's on the right hand side of like how like are we in the green, are we in the red? I would really use that as a really great guide because at the end of the day, if Facebook says this campaign is not going to run, it's not going to magically go into the review and approval and get into the algorithm and be like, guess we were wrong. Like they're the ones that are telling you how well this is going to enter into the auction. And so I'd really use that as the best. Like that's your first check. You have to get that into the green or at least a place where you feel confident that the, that the campaign's gonna start. Um, but I really think the key here along with targeting and I kind of mentioned just different ways to target. Like there you can use titles and a lot of the objectives they take that away. But thinking about what is unique to a CFO or a CEO, like are they reading different magazines? Are they a part of different associations? I mean, specifically in Omaha, I know there's groups like Vistage that almost only CEO's and top level C-suite members are a part of, if you can target those types of groups of people, like that helps your targeting a little bit rather than using only titles and interests.

Right. I think the other thing really to think about is, you know, CEOs, CFOs, those top level decision makers, like they're humans too. Like they're looking at cooking magazines, they're looking at sports magazines. Like we're not these one dimensional people. And I think that it's the, yes, for all CEOs here. I just think that sometimes we get caught up in these job title mentalities of like people in business suits or like, you know, just completely non associated traits anymore. But there are some associated traits. I've re read a lot of research that says, you know, some of the most successful people have similar habits, right? Like waking up early, like exercise in the morning. Um, cooking and creativity tends to go very hand in hand with visionaries or people that are um, you know, looking to kind of use their creativity in different ways besides business. Fine wines, travel, all of those things are the things that you can target. Um, watch brands. We've used that before. Any kind of parallels are really great things to target where, you know, you don't always have to just go straight to the like I am a CEO, this is who I want to target.

And this is how much money I'm making. I feel like those are like the top two is like a title and then income. And those are amazing tools that you have in social and digital that you don't have in a lot of other like marketing platforms. So I understand like the, this is an amazing tool. We should use this for everything, but you've really, the best way to navigate your platforms is building an audience that caters to the behavior and interest of the group. I mean you kind of mentioned just brands and not like you can't just throw luxury brands in there because at this point most people who cannot afford luxury brands are still following them on social. But like the niche ones, right, of like these are so different. I, we used to use this all the time, but like magazines that people subscribe to or you mentioned like the travel and the watch brands, like the watch one was like a huge differentiator for us and some of the early campaigns that we ran. But you really have to kind of think about the interactions in the day to day of CEO's and CFO's. And I think getting away from using titles and income is kind the best way to do that.

Right. It just really clears through the noise. I'm speaking about that watch brand. Give people a little background to what we did with that. So we were targeting a higher income individual and we knew that there was a handful of watch franchises. I didn't actually even realize this until we started doing research, but obviously there's some very expensive watches out there. And like you said, not just the obvious, right? It's not just the Rolexes of the world, but there are these niche brands across different categories. Specifically, we were looking at watches and you only know about these brands if you know about these brands. Right? Right. People don't even follow this unless they are an avid, you know, kind of collector of these things. And so it was a really interesting study how we could create an audience or a pool of people that were interested and the affinity or the chances that those people would be in the buying circle.

Were definitely higher than just using a title or a location. One other interest. I feel like that we bring up a lot, but I feel like we add this into, I feel like we added this into a couple of campaigns and then took it out. But like CFO's and CEO's are notoriously like super busy, but when you target the products that are out there to help like Plated, right. And so you know, those subscription services or anything that's helping save people time. Like everybody in every demographic in every income level wants to save time. So they're not just not that unique anymore. Even with some of the price points were a little bit higher. Yeah, I agree. I think that you know, the, when you look at some of the automation in, in food and cooking, that's what I would target. Like they have these full like robots now that you can get in your home and they're expensive and so when is yours?

I don't have one because I love to cook, but they are very well positioned in the sense that they are targeting the busy person that can afford to have one of these devices. And you have to have, you know, the special food for it. But these brands have gotten enough leverage and have built enough audience. There's a handful of them out there that the audience is probably large enough out to start targeting. Again, you don't follow that stuff unless, you know, they were targeting, they probably have these crazy custom audiences that they've built. So just piggy back off of that, if you're a small to mid size brand because you're already getting some of their research and audience build up, are there any other fancy kitchen, whatever, like would a luxury espresso whenever those machines, like what do you think? Um, no. So it's funny, like I, I'm not like speaking at the, as the bougie CEO.

I'm really not like that, but, I do know people that if I wanted to target them, a couple of things that I would use. So, uh, high-end alcohols, that's another one like scotches whiskeys. There's very collectable brands and different, um, I don't even know what types of those liquors that people that have enough disposable income tend to do travel and specific travel magazines. Um, that are maybe not mainstream, but ones that really cater to those luxury travelers. That would be a good way to kind of differentiate those, um, you know, travel enthusiasts and then like, you know, business travelers or people that are, you know, traveling for work. Even if you're not trying to, to target the very top of the income bracket, but you're looking for people with additional spending power or flexibility in their finances.

Just the marker of traveling I think is a really good way to start. Um, targeting your audience, layer that in with some of your other targeting. Because if people are traveling, whether that's for entertainment or you know, kind of leisure or for work, it's expensive to travel these days. And so that kind of shows some of that disposable income. Okay. So we talked a little bit about Facebook and the Facebook family of apps, which includes Instagram, the audience network. But let's talk about LinkedIn because LinkedIn is definitely a power player when it comes to targeting CEOs, CFOs, and um, what, how would you know if you're a business, which one to use and should you try to use both of them all at once or really start with one and then move to the next? I mean, my gut is you should use all of them, any of them that you can create content and kind of move people through a journey or build better relationships.

Um, people, CFOs and CEOs are using these platforms a little bit differently. Like Facebook has really become a hub of info, but also kind of a scrapbook. It holds all of our photos, all of our memories. So people were posting their vacation photos. People are not necessarily posting vacation photos and kind of taking over LinkedIn in that way, but it's such a big platform for learning and personal branding. So I feel like just the content needs to change a little bit, but I think keeping as many of these that you have time for in your marketing mix is super important. Yeah. And I think too, um, when you look at advertising, it's really about what resources and budgets that you can put into that. Um, Facebook is a great starting point because it's typically less expensive. LinkedIn has great quality. One of the things I love the most about LinkedIn is that those job titles are self identified.

So you usually get kind of a cleaner audience when you're trying to find that individual, but it's more expensive, right? Yeah. I mean it is more expensive, but again, like would you rather target the 10,000 people or the 1000 people that are pretty spot on a quality question. So I also looked at LinkedIn on the CFOs and financial managers. There were 230,000 so again, Facebook was 980,000. LinkedIn was 230,000 in the U S there was about 1.6 million CEOs on LinkedIn. So a little bit drastic difference there. But again, I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into like our specific networks and these areas. The local regional areas I guess. So there were 1,600 financial managers and CFOs on LinkedIn in Iowa, 1,100 in Nebraska. Again, the just 700 in the greater Omaha area, that that area is just so active on social platforms. 410 in South Dakota. So respectively Facebook, there was a lot more people on Facebook and so there was a little bit more people to target on Facebook than LinkedIn. But I think these are still really good numbers to do some targeting on. So there were also, I looked up CEO's and how many there were on these platforms. So this is LinkedIn. There were 6,800 CEOs in Iowa alone that you could target. for Nebraska there were 5,000 CEOs, 3,400 of those in Omaha, and 1,900 CEO's that you could target on LinkedIn. I mean, those numbers kind of shocked me that how large they were.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because people forget about using these platforms. So that, and I say that in the most respectful way because you know, a lot of people are still doing direct mailers. They're doing events and relationship building and I think those things are all still valid, but using social media to layer that on, especially if you're doing a trade show or an event or event follow up, all of those things can be added to your marketing mix and or your recruitment mix in that regard too. If you're looking to recruit, this is a great place to start putting out your message, especially that cultural message of those for those passive candidates that may move if there was the right opportunity.

Definitely. I think with LinkedIn advertising specifically, you know they had, they've come a long way and the just they used to, I think they used to only have like two objectives. You can either do job ads or you can promote your content. They've created so many more objectives in there and I think it's been a couple of weeks since I've been in there, but I think that you can always add a layer of like, do you want to collect leads so you can run a click campaign and have the ability for people to submit their information? Right. And so they kind of include some of that lead generation within a lot of their other objectives. Whereas Facebook and even Twitter, they're completely separate objectives. So I think that there's just a lot of opportunity to do advertising on LinkedIn. But we talk about this in another podcast, just the employee advocacy and the buy in when employees and CEOs at this level are publishing content on their personal LinkedIn platforms. I think if you are working with CFOs or CEOs and your consulting firm or whoever, like you also need to be leveraging these platforms from a personal brand perspective to engage with them. Right? Right.

Don't run a Facebook or a LinkedIn campaign if your profile isn't how you want it as the CEO or the leader or the marketer even. Right? I mean, you need to have all of that kind of professional but yet completely filled out just for sure. Get a profile picture and that, what is it called, the banner image in the background or the header image. Um, because I see a lot of people who still have the default of that. And it's been a while since they've added that functionality. One other thing I wanted to talk about quickly is, um, how people can use those targeting like CEO's and CFO's to not just target their buyers but to target their influencers. So we see this a lot in the banking community, but CFOs kind of fit into that category. And even CEOs, there's a lot of times when maybe the CEO is not the decision maker that you're going for.

You're looking for the agent or you're looking for, maybe the marketing person is making that decision, um, or someone in operations. But you also want to think of who is influencing that decision, right? So targeting people who have influence especially loud influence or strong influence into those decisions, which we know people in charge of money and people in charge of vision and culture typically do. So it's a great place that even if those are not your buyers, you may want to still target them. So that they can help influence the rest of the, their organization or the people that you actually need to say. Yes. Yeah.

One of the, if I were going to set up a campaign to target or change an influencer, at least just be connected to somebody who was going to then be an advocate and speak up and like a C-Suite meeting or executive meeting to pitch our product, I would run a campaign to those decision makers with a downloadable or some value that literally only talks to their pain point. Right? Of like, here's one thing that's going to help you put this social, like a social media report to help you communicate the value to your decision-makers and kind of go that one level below, solve their pain point with some free thing and then, and then have them like help them pitch it to their decision makers. Right. You definitely want to match that pain point with the targeting. Exactly.

All right, so this is called generation social media because we like to break the barriers of what people think about who's spending time on what platform. So I have here a screen-time report and we like to use these because they are more than what we say they are, what we do. And so I have one for a CFO. The CFO is in his early forties, and is I have kind of the, the different applications. It's a male. It's, it's interesting. So the top, um, apps that are used, the category is definitely productivity and those are going to be like Chrome and calendar and a couple other productivity tools or clock. And then the second is entertainment. So that, and that's neck and neck with social networking, that's Spotify is included in that, which I think is really interesting because it's a really great, um, opportunities for ads these days. Spotify is, has a really easy self-serve ad platform easier than some of the other ones out there.

From a creation standpoint, a targeting standpoint and an implementation standpoint. I think we're not sponsored by Spotify, but it would be, but Spotify's advertising is such a lower barrier to entry for you to like set one up. They have a voiceover for you, don't you? Like you can do different languages as opposed to other online streaming things like Pandora onto the next thing. There's some of the other, yeah, the self serve ones are just hard. And you know, most people are digital marketers that

are trying this stuff. I mean we have a great team around us that if we get stuck we can ask questions too. But these things change all the time. They, most people don't have kind of a shared network in their internal team that they can say like, Hey, what do you think I should be bidding on this for? Or do you think I should do a lifetime or a daily budget? All those questions though, they are, um, you know, sometimes common knowledge for marketers, it's hard to share those ideas if you don't have any other marketers in your space or you're in HR and you're trying to do this right. Yeah, definitely. Okay. So the, the social networking at this person on first is Facebook, then Instagram and then Twitter. So I thought that was interesting. Um, Facebook is by far the most and then a little bit of Instagram, no LinkedIn at all.

That just completely bust. Yeah. Busts our a theory. That's a question. Well, not the theory, but the question in the first place, I mean was CFO's and CEO's aren't on Facebook one. And that was the number one of everything that I've found. But the fact that LinkedIn wasn't even in the top, I mean, again, this is like a one individual, so there's a lot of anecdotals, there's a lot of information there. Like what kind of business, what's their, are they service, are they product? There's a whole lot of information there that you don't know. But the fact that that platform wasn't even in the top was like really interesting. Well, and I think, you know, the screen-time reports really just the one that I pulled, um, was just, or that I have here is just one day, right? So I think that is a pretty good testament to LinkedIn because I see that a lot people are in on LinkedIn every single day, right?

In some regards, some people are, but I see a very like, intermittent pattern pattern with LinkedIn because people don't feel like they're going to miss out on something. They're using it to kind of get information or to source learning opportunities or maybe see what's trending in their industry. But Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, those are, you feel like you're going to miss out because the feeds kind of go so fast. And I think that is probably where that comes from. It just like that daily check-in, even though if it may not be very many minutes, it may not be very much time, but you don't wanna miss anything. Right? True. We all have that FOMO. I'm on LinkedIn, like I'm just gonna make a case for LinkedIn, but I spend so much time on that platform. I think from a, I think I've said this in another, maybe the employee advocacy, I can't remember it.

I know it's in another podcast that we talked about, but the organic reach in the algorithm and just what's happening on LinkedIn, it's crazy. So I find myself spending so much time there right now. It's very easy to get connected to business leaders. It's really easy to hop into a national conversation. I, you know, they send that notification almost every day of like what's trending. I've hopped on a couple of those threads and like instantly people are engaging. I mean I've had like involved at a 40 person conversation with people all over the nation. I just, there's no way I can do that on Facebook unless it was a group. Yeah. That I could get connected to that many people in a conversation instantly. So I'm obsessed with that platform and I'm watching it and they're releasing like LinkedIn live. I think that that's really dope. I think there's a lot of cool stuff happening on that.

But uh, I digress. Since this person didn't even spend any time on it. So I think just me, the other thing with LinkedIn is most people don't, we know of all these changes because we're watching these platforms, but a lot of people, if you use LinkedIn three years ago, regularly and now you've kind of faded off, you don't think about the fact that there has been kind of this resurgence of it. You don't think about all the different features they've added. You don't think about that prompt that they send and they've sent so many of those that have really helped lift their entire user base. So, um, if you're not using LinkedIn right now, you're missing out. We'll give a good plug. Co-sign LinkedIn. All right, well I think that is everything for today. Thank you so much Kelsey. And until next time, this is Generation Social Media Podcast.

That's it for this episode of Generation Social Media Podcast. If you had an aha moment or just a haha moment, I would be so grateful if you'd leave a review with the moment you love the most. If you have a question you'd like us to answer in the next episode, fill out the form on generationsocialmediapodcast.com.

Digital Paid AdvertisingChatterkickNovember 19, 2019targeting, advertising, strategy