With an array of options to reach digital customers, it can get confusing for entrepreneurs and business owners. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube have all dramatically increased the chances of reaching your perfect customer. All thanks to data analytics and targeted demographic information. This basically creates an avenue for B2B and ordinary businesses to explore social media marketing. For this post, we’ll focus on achieving awesome Facebook ads, as it’s the world’s social industry leader.
First Things First
Before we kick of this journey, certain pointers have to help us get our gear on for the Campaign:
1. IDENTIFYING AUDIENCE: First and foremost, you need to know everything you can about your existing customer base. From social media habits to digital routines and preferences.
2. FIGURING OUT THE RIGHT APPROACH: After identifying your audience, how do we most effectively communicate with them. What do they respond to and why?
3. START CAMPAIGN AND SCALE: Once you’ve started a campaign, there several ways to scale your marketing on Facebook to optimize results:
● Custom: Using your customer database, upload phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook user IDs, and app user IDs. That information will then be matched to as many user profiles as possible.
● Location: Similar to geolocation techniques, this can help a local business. Ads will specifically target a region, city, state, or country that can purchase your products.
● Age, Gender, Language: Facebook can get the most out of age, gender, and native language of users for effective marketing.
● Lookalike: With pictures of your customer database, Facebook can find similar users to open up a whole new set of potential customers.
● Detailed Targeting: This approach is used to target new customers or people who’ve never heard of your business before. It involves deeper demographics, interests, behaviors, and other categories.
4. REPORTING AND MONITORING: Data is everything. So monitoring your campaign is key and analyzing the statistics of its progress is key. It helps you measure your return on investment. Furthermore, plays a role in engagement with fans and followers to build relationships.
Targeted Users
Targeting is foundation of an effective Campaign. Facebook normally targets ads for users based on their interests, digital footprint and information they provide into their profiles. Almost similar to digital ‘stalking’ as per se, where a boat ad can follow you around. Simply because you mentioned sailing on your hobbies. This is great because you know the person who clicks on your ad is active on Facebook and is in your target market. The possibility of repeatability is improved too. No wonder many Fortune 500 Companies are taking it seriously!
Getting Your Campaign Started
There some additional factors which could affect the effectiveness of your campaign:
-Campaign Goals: what are you trying to achieve? A certain number of “likes,” subscribers, contest entries, sales? What’s your motive?
-Campaign Duration: How long will you run the campaign? Have enough ads to test and allow for rotation of the ads every 2-3 days. Have backup ads to replace an underperforming ad if needed.
-Campaign Budget: what will be the overall budget and daily budget?
-Ad Design & Targeting: Design the title, body, and targeting for several ads in your campaign
-Click-through Thresholds
Facebook ads don’t get as good click-through rates as Google ads because people are not actively searching for something. Your ad has to pick a user’s interest to get a click. A clickthrough rate of 0.02 – 0.05% can be a decent benchmark, but it depends on your campaign.
-Conversion Rates: Track how many conversions you are getting according to the goals that you set. If your goal is sales on a website, make sure you have a tracking system in place to see how many sales your campaign is creating.
So what does the Perfect Ad look like?
Title
Keep the title at maximum 25 characters. Try to avoid unnecessary abbreviations or excessive capitalization. Make it interesting and address the potential customer’s issue. Questions make for great titles. Offers also go a long way to get attention like ‘Get our Free e-book or report’. Events also send out a call to action.
Body
Ideally, you have 135 characters of text in the body of your ad. Always work to answer the question that’s on the mind of the customer: “What’s in it for me?” Always include a call-to-action if you didn’t already put it in the title of the ad. In addition, mentioning the customer in the ad is very powerful and eye-catching.
Image
Have a high definition and clear image of at least 110*80 pixels. If you are advertising your Facebook page or event, the image will be automatically populated with the profile image. Images of people tend to convert better than a logo but you can test. Another smart strategy you can implement is to have a picture that also conveys your message. Using both the title and the picture to tell a story. Keeping the call-to-action is short and sweet is a trick of mastery.
Social Proofing
When setting up the ad, do check the box, “Show stories about people interacting with this page with my ad”. In that way you will get the benefit of what we call “social proof.” When somebody “likes” your page, their friends who also fall under your target marketing, will see that. the fan’s name showing in your ad increases the chances of attracting new “likes.”
Facebook Stories
Typically forgotten at times are ‘Facebook Stories’. You can also effectively advertise using the Sponsored stories option, which will increase the visibility of News Feed stories. They allow you to amplify the effect of News Feed stories. Facebook explains that sponsored Stories can broaden the reach of actions your followers take. They also tend to be less expensive than traditional Facebook ads. They can build your campaign design and help you start split-testing process. All in order to determine what the best vehicle is for your type of advertising.
Final Caution
There some rules and regulations on Facebook ads. You may occasionally see ads that violate these terms. Remember, Facebook ads are reviewed by a team of experts. That means, sometimes an ad that was rejected by one of the individuals can be approved by another. Even some which violate the basic terms of how the ad appears such as capitalization, abbreviations, etc. The process is not always perfectly completely consistent. Though there some things which are strictly rejected such as: Sites that promise easy money for little or no investment, Multi-level marketing opportunities, domain forwarding sites, alcohol, gambling or pornography sites.