Looking for advertisers can definitely be a challenge at times for any yearbook committee.  Who should you reach out too? How do you get in front of the decision makers? Will it be awkward?  Remember, yearbook staff members aren’t professional salesmen and women. They are usually students.

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While reaching out to local businesses via door-to-door, by phone and/or email are all good methods; you may want to consider this year thinking “outside-the-box.”  One-way to do this is with social media, specifically Facebook.

Besides creating a Facebook page for your school yearbook and posting content on the progress of the book, you may want to put together a small budget for Facebook advertising.

With Facebook advertising you can do some serious “laser” targeting so you are marketing your book to the right audience and not people who have absolutely no interest.

One way to do this is to target locals in the area. You can do this by going into the Facebook ad manager.

Once you get there you will want to put in a radius of people within 10 miles of your school zip code. After that, there are a variety of options you do for your targeting.

One recommendation that should get your ad seen by the right people is to target by behavior.  Facebook defines behavior as reaching people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. Within that category are charitable donations and within that is a subcategory of children’s causes. Choosing that option will help tremendously. This way your ad, which you will be able to create later in the process, will target people that in the past have given donations to children’s causes. You can always adjust your targeting and see which performs better as you go.

Note: You have the option to use an external website as a landing page where people can go to get more information on the yearbook advertising, rather than using a yearbook Facebook page.

Facebook is the world’s biggest social network and has a slew of information on people. By targeting the audience you are looking for can find new sponsors and advertisers you may never have thought would have been interested!