Syncapse Helps Businesses Plan Their Annual Facebook Advertising Budget

From Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

by Jay Baer

Capitalizing on seasonal creation of marketing budgets for the following year, Syncapse created an online Facebook Advertising Spend Calculator (ar.gy/syncapse) and launched it in September 2012. A technology company that helps large business-to-consumer marketers understand and optimize their social media, Syncapse is trying to get companies to think about social media (especially social advertising) as an annual program, rather than a series of short-term campaigns.

Users of this free tool answer a series of questions about their businesses, their objectives, and their use of Facebook, and the tool scans their Facebook page in real time, providing a recommended annual budget for Facebook advertising for the following year.

As companies continue to expand their social media participation, two big questions become important, according to Max Kalehoff, the vice president of Product Marketing at Syncapse. The first is “What’s the ROI of what you’ve already invested in?” Then, secondly, “What decisions are you going to make differently in the future?” Kalehoff says the Facebook Advertising Spend Calculator helps answer those questions.²¹

“What we’ve done with the Facebook Ads Calculator is provide a very easy, nearly spoon-fed methodology for surfacing the most important questions about your brand and about its situation in the marketplace, in order to extract the strengths of Facebook,” says Kalehoff.

“As one of the first tools of its kind online, the calculator is being used often, spreading throughout organizations, with multiple people kicking the data tires. They’ll put in various parameters and then they’ll run it several more times, changing the parameters, and then within the next twenty-four hours you’ll see anywhere from two to ten of their colleagues come back on the site,” Kalehoff asserts. “It’ll help you contextualize and have a reference point for budgeting if you’re looking to see how much money of your total pie you should allocate to social media. We’re really hoping to sort of stretch the thinking of what’s possible.”

Syncapse is just one of the companies stretching the thinking of what’s possible. Dan Deacon is doing it. So is Vanderbilt. And Clorox. And Charmin. And Taxi Mike. And River Pools and Spas. With them, we’ve looked at the three ways to build Youtility: by providing self-serve information, by answering every question, and by being relevant in real time. We know what Youtility is, and how companies are focusing on help, not hype. In the last section of this book you’ll learn the six-step process for how you can create your own Youtility.

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