Do American seniors use social media? According to Statista, many do, with 69% of 50-64 year-olds on at least one platform. Though this percentage falls away when applied to Americans over the age of 65 (40%), there’s still a significant number of retirees who can be accessed online.

As per Senior Tech Club, the overwhelming majority of seniors are on two platforms – Facebook and YouTube – as evidenced by the table below.

With that in mind, we’ll be focusing on these two titans in the article to follow.

And the good news? Both Facebook and YouTube offer robust advertising tools to take advantage of.

Let’s get started.

Marketing to seniors on Facebook

Step 1. Create an account – then a page

You’ll need an account to run ads on Facebook at the very least, but a Page is advantageous, as you’ll have a single point of contact for people to reach you on. With a Page, you can use Facebook Messenger to respond to potential/existing customers in real time. A win-win.

Step 2. Use Facebook’s advertising suite

Facebook for Business is a powerful tool in the right hands. You can run an attention-grabbing post across all devices by having the social media giant automatically place your work. In essence, Facebook will decide where the ad is most likely to get traction, and it will free you from having to resize images or rewrite what you’re saying.

Step 3. Experiment with Facebook videos

Experiment with Facebook Live and broadcast directly to your followers, or attract more people to your page with a video ad – they’re a great way of livening up a timeline.

The bottom line? Advertising to seniors is eminently doable on Facebook, but as Search Engine Journal reports, elder statespeople are more loyal to the brands they’ve used in the past, so be sure to stand out from the crowd.

Marketing to seniors on YouTube:

iProspect notes that “Fifteen percent of those aged 50-59 watch a movie or a video on YouTube at least once a day, and 33 percent of those aged 60-69 watch videos on YouTube a few times a week – the same proportion as the 30-49 year olds.”

In fact, many studies suggest that seniors are spending as much time watching content on YouTube as they would on normal television.

In short?

YouTube is too good a platform to miss out on.

Step 1. Create a YouTube channel and a Google Ads account

The Google Ads account will be the central hub you control new advertising campaigns from. It’s from here you can set an objective and define the type of ad you want to show.

Step 2. Choose the type of ad you want to display

Pre-roll ads play before a video and they can be skipped after 5 seconds.

• The good news is that you only pay if a user keeps watching past these 5 seconds and for a full 30; alternatively, you pay if they click on the ad.
• An ad can’t be shorter than 12 seconds and should be no longer than 3 minutes.

Non-skippable ads play in the middle of a video and can’t be skipped.

• The downside? You pay for every impression (i.e., every time someone is served the ad), and you also need to make sure your creative is on point… or it’ll be downright annoying. (After all, foisting something unskippable on people is controversial. It’s estimated that more than 70% of YouTube’s audience skip ads when given the choice).

Discovery ads will show up in the search results with a small yellow icon that reads “Ad”.

• If you consider that YouTube is as much a search engine as a video platform, these are a useful way of bringing attention to your product, though they might get overlooked in favor of organic results.

Non-video ads show on top of video content, or in the sidebar, with a static image that links through to your website/channel.

We recommend a combination of non-video and pre-roll ads to capture seniors’ attention. Both are cost-effective and likely to generate leads in the long term.

Step 3. Target your audience carefully

• YouTube, like Facebook, gives you a host of tools to get targeting right.
• Set the audience by using the filters provided.
• However, the more filters you employ, the more you’ll end up paying, so resist the temptation to be too specific, and rather target your seniors market in broader strokes.
• One thing you’ll want to definitely check is the age metric in demographics: target both 55-64s and 65+.

Step 4. Add some keywords and keep following the steps

• Keywords will help YouTube understand your content and provide clarity on the type of videos your ad should be shown alongside.
• The good news is that you can get “Keyword Ideas” from the ads manager tool.
• Once you’ve selected your keywords, head through the final steps before finally setting a bid amount (this is the maximum you’re prepared to pay per view) and the creative you want displayed.
• Don’t set the bid amount too low, or your ad won’t get shown. Early on, it’s often a good idea to set a very high bid amount and track performance accordingly. You can always adjust things on-the-fly.

The bottom line

Facebook and YouTube are powerful tools, and with a captive audience on the platform, they make all the sense in the world to use. Keep your targeting specific, be generous with the budget, and persevere. You should see results in no time at all.