If you’re looking for an easy, cost-effective way to promote your business online then social media advertising might be the option for you.
According to Hootsuite and We are Social's Digital Trends 2022 report, Facebook boasts an ad reach of 2.1 billion users every month, with Instagram reaching 1.48 billion users via ads. Facebook Advertising could be a simple but effective way to reach and grow your audience as it incorporates the two platforms.
Getting started with Facebook Ads is simple, so here’s 5 points to help you create successful ad campaigns.
What do you want to achieve?
The very first thing you should do is think about your goal, for example:
• Building your brand awareness
• Managing your brand’s reputation
• Driving traffic to your website
• Improving your community engagement
• Increasing your conversions or sales
• Generating leads for your business
Your goal could be anything from signing up to an e-newsletter to completing a sale. Whatever it is - be focused. This will help to inform and shape every other part of your ad campaign.
"The beauty of Facebook advertising is you can target and narrow your market down, which means you can spend less and get a greater return on investment.” Read more on how we helped Anglesey-based glamping business Wonderfully Wild
Wonderfully Wild owner Victoria Roberts
Who do you want to reach?
Once you’ve planned what you want to achieve, think about who you want to take that action. Facebook’s Ads Manager allows you to be extremely targeted in your approach so take advantage of this.
Although you could aim to target your entire audience, you may also decide to only target a particular segment of your audience with a particular campaign.
Here are some of the key things you may consider when targeting your campaign:
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Demographics: Age, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, job title
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Location: Could you target the area around where your business operates? Could you reach a particular radius around a shop to target walk-ins?
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Interest and hobbies: Favourite films, music, books, TV shows or other entertainment. What are their hobbies or favourite activities?
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Behaviours: What are their purchasing behaviours? How do they use their device? How recently have they engaged with your business? Are they followers of similar business pages to yours?
There are many other elements you can incorporate into your ads to get closer to your target audiences. Installing a Facebook Pixel into the back end of your website will entice users who have visited your website but left and will serve the business ad to those users when they next use Facebook. Creating custom audiences based on actions will influence which of your ads go to which audiences. For example, a user may have saved a product post from your business’ Instagram page to view later. Being served an ad on that product will remind them to review and possibly make a purchase.
By using insights that you gather from marketing on Facebook, you can find new audiences who have similar interests and behaviours which may be interested in your business and are more likely to convert into an actual customer.
What’s your budget?
You can run a Facebook ad on any budget, whether you have £1 or £100 to spend.
Ads Manager is the most common way to purchase ads on Facebook. Once you’ve created an ad, you submit it to the ad auction. However, you’re always in charge.
You can set your maximum budget and bid, as well as choose your objective (such as impressions or conversions) and only pay for those.
Start small with your budget, test the water, and see how well your campaigns are working before you invest more money into advertising.
It is also important to remember that dependant on your ad dynamic, your ad will display on many placements at no added cost. Depending on the audience reach target you have set you could have a range of placements for very little cost.
What content and messaging will you use?
This is crucial. It doesn’t matter how well you target your desired audience if the message and visuals you’re sharing aren’t right.
Think about testing different wording, different images or videos and landing pages to understand which segments of your audience respond best to different ads. Every time you test a specific type of ad, you should use the response to tailor your future ads. This is called A/B testing.
To start with, you may want to think about the type of marketing that has worked well for you before and use this as a guide.
A lot of businesses have numerous ads running at the same time but with different goals in mind. One ad may be to raise your brand’s awareness, another ad may be to showcase a particular product or offer you have running at that time.
Measure and optimise!
Finally, it’s important that you understand the performance of each campaign.
The Ads Manager portal gives easy-to-read reports about how all your ads are performing. These reports will automatically give you basic info about your ads, but you can use their tools to measure more specific goals that you’d like to track.
Once you understand how the creative elements and placements are working, you can then refine your campaign to increase performance.
You can even see how your ads are affecting your offline sales by using Facebook pixel, as well as Facebook’s offline measurement and offline conversations API.