While most of the focus in social media marketing has fallen on targeting local audiences, this isn’t always relevant for a certain business. There are some firms that are actually looking to target an audience that is located far away from where they are associated with. As travel around the world becomes easier, and many people decide to up sticks and move to a warmer or more pleasant culture and way of life, there is a growing ex-pat market. This is something that many businesses have tapped into, knowing that there is an audience of people keen to stay in touch with their roots while they are very far from home.
There are a number of ways in which businesses can tap into this market. The most obvious targeting of ex-pats can come with providing flight information to allow people to return home or to provide them with information that they can pass on to friends and family members to encourage them to come out and visit them. There is also a big market in providing food and drink from “the old country” to people who are now living in a different country. There is also a great marketing opportunity for one of the recent business models that has thrived on Facebook.
If you use Facebook, you will surely have seen an advert for t-shirts based around a topic that is close to you. It may be a t-shirt based on your name, your educational body, your favourite sports team or any other interest that you have, but there has been an explosion in the market for individualised t-shirts. These campaigns usually require for a certain number of sales to be made in a set period of time for the order to be completed, which is why targeted Facebook marketing is essential.
You can see that a Facebook advertising campaign based around t-shirts being sold to ex-pats would be a big success because it offers a chance to reach out to an audience who will be keen to have as many reminders of their home as they can.
Facebook targeted marketing has already been a success in some quarters
The new targeting feature provided by Facebook is set to allow marketers the chance to reach out the millions of expatriates around the round. The initial roll-out of the feature is only focusing on people hailing from India, South Africa, China, Indonesia and Brazil but if the early indicators continue, it looks set to be a feature that will be rolled out for many other countries. The targeting feature is said to allow a focus on expatriates who have settled in a particular country and people from a certain country who have moved abroad. An example of this first would be targeting the United Kingdom and then highlighting people from Brazil who are living there while an example of the second method would be targeting people from Brazil who no longer stay in Brazil.
Etihad Airways were allowed to test the feature and they had great success in targeting Indians around the world in the run-up to the Diwali holiday. Etihad Airways posted on Facebook, saying; “Using expat targeting, Etihad connected with expats with messages about traveling home for the holiday, reaching 536,00 Indian expats living in the Middle East, leading to 700 bookings and a 50X return on investment.”