Marketing MVPs: Testing Demand on Social Media
Our students live on social media. But do they know how to make the best use of it (or how they’re being used by it)?
With this exercise, your students can . . .
- Launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram
- Use social media to test demand for their MVPs
- Learn how their personal information is used to target them with ads
Step 1: Ad Targeting
The incredible depth and breadth of the information Facebook and Instagram (also owned by Facebook) have on users is astounding.
If your students use Facebook or Instagram, Facebook likely knows things like:
- How much money they make
- Whether or not they’re in a relationship (and if that relationship is local, long-distance, or even “open”)
- Their political leanings
- And much, much more . . .
How much more? The first step of this exercise is to introduce your students to how much information Facebook knows about them.
You’ll send your students a link to the “Facebook Ad Targeting Options Infographic” above and ask them to review the dozens of pieces of data Facebook collects and identify the 3 most interesting, obscure, or surprising things Facebook might know about them (they’ll use this information later in the exercise).
Step 2: Design an Ad
With a sense of ways to potentially target social media ads, your students will have an opportunity to design their own ad for a product you provide for them:
A solar-powered phone charger.
Using our free Social Media Ad Generator each student mocks up different ad images, different ad copy, target audiences, etc. to get a feel for how to create ads.
Step 3: Design Their Own Ad
Once students have a feel for how to design an ad using a product you assign them, you can ask them to create one for their own product.
Students repeat the same process they did with the solar power charger, except this time they work with their teammates to design a targeted ad for their companies.
Step 4: Launch Their Ad
(Optionally) You can actually help your students launch their ad.
Using the video below, your students will see how they can design a real ad for Facebook or Instagram and share the ad with you so you can launch it for them and measure how well it performs.
Customizing the Marketing MVP Lesson
This lesson is designed to be easy to customize based on the skills of your students:
- An Intro course may only complete Steps 1 – 3, mocking up their ads but not necessarily launching them.
- A New Venture Creation may complete Step 4 so students actually see how well their ads perform.
- In a capstone or graduate course, each team could produce two different ads and you can run them as A/B tests to see which ad variation performs the best.
There are so many ways to leverage this lesson that demonstrates to students the power of social media marketing!. We hope you give it a try!
Get the Marketing MVPs Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Marketing MVPs” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share more exercises to engage your students.
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