Plenty of businesses use Facebook as part of a larger marketing strategy. But Wendy Gavinski used it to market her business almost exclusively.
Her company, Divas SnowGear, is a retailer of women’s snowmobile clothing and accessories. Since snowmobiling has long been considered a male-dominated sport, Divas SnowGear was meant to be the alternative for women who wanted gear that was actually flattering instead of big and bulky.
That lack of female options is why Gavinski started the company in the first place. But it was that same hurdle that made her turn to Facebook for her marketing efforts.
Gavinski explained further to CNN Money:
“It was the only way I could reach my target customers. If I put an ad in an industry magazine, or a banner ad in a forum, the readership for both are men.”
Gavinski used $30,000 of her own money to start Divas SnowGear in 2010. Today, the company is profitable thanks in no small part to its Facebook page, which currently has more than 43,000 likes.
Gavinski uses the site’s targeted regional advertising to reach women between 20 and 50 years of age in areas near the more than 500 local stores that carry her products.
For companies like Divas SnowGear, Facebook offers a unique opportunity to target a very specific subset of customers. In this case, a specific media outlet for female snowboarders where Divas Snowgear could advertise didn’t exist. But Facebook has so many users in so many demographic categories. There are groups for snowboarders and snowboarding pages, not to mention the ability to target users who have visited certain websites.
And there are plenty of other businesses that could potentially benefit from this targeting. Small businesses are getting more and more specialized. So their target audiences are getting smaller and more specific. If there’s not a specific media outlet for your target audience, there’s still Facebook.
Each business and situation is different. But in Gavinski’s case, she had a very specific problem problem to solve with her marketing. Facebook ended up being the solution both because of the number of customers the platform reaches and the way it allows marketers to target specific segments of that audience.
In this instance, it’s hard to imagine a platform that could have allowed the targeting of such a specific type of customer so precisely.