Using Facebook Ads to Get My Wife a New Job

The USPS has a weird system for mail carriers that want to transfer to another post office. Rural carriers can’t directly ask for a transfer, they must go out and find another carrier to trade offices with.

I mention this because my wife works for the post office and we were recently looking to move to Washington from Florida.

Finding someone to trade with is ridiculously difficult. People often spend years trying to find someone in the state they’re looking for.

We had spent months posting on forums and looking through transfer ads without making any progress. We were losing hope and getting desperate. I was racking my brain for a solution but couldn’t think of anything.

Luckily, around that time, the awesome Noah Kagan sent me an AppSumo video on Facebook advertising that blew me away. I immediately saw how with the insane targeting that Facebook allows, I could effectively reach rural carriers in other states.

How it works

First thing I did was create a landing page for each state that we wanted to move to. We wanted Washington and Oregon so I had two landing pages:

Washington – http://www.earthlingworks.com/washington.html

Oregon – http://www.earthlingworks.com/oregon.html

Note that I probably could’ve made it easier on the person by adding a Wufoo form in there but I thought that it might feel too impersonal so I gave out my email address instead.

Also, I know the beach images are kinda cheesy but I wanted to paint a picture of what living in south Florida could be like for them. Trust me, that sorta stuff helps 🙂

Anyways, after I created my landing pages I created my ad:

 

It’s just a very simple ad that speaks directly to the person viewing the ad. I made sure to include “WA” and “rural carrier” in the title because I knew that seeing an ad that can identify where you live and what you do is a powerful way to get someone’s attention.

I made sure to target the right people by choosing Washington as the location and USPS for work:

This is why Facebook advertising is awesome. Where else can you do this type of targeting? The estimated reach was only 850 people but when we’re targeting like this, that’s more than enough people.

I created another one just like this for Oregon and set my bid to 88 cents per click.

How effective was it?

Once my ads passed the approval process and went live, I started getting visits to the landing pages. I was only getting a handful of visits but this was the right type of traffic.

I ran the ads for about a month and got about 5 people to email me in that time. It just so happened that we ended up doing the transfer with someone from one of the forums, but I’m positive that one of those Facebook leads would’ve eventually worked for us.