With more than 1.4 billion people on Facebook, this platform is a no-brainer to connect with your customers where they already spend time as well as grow your business through strategically reaching similar people that might become new customers through Facebook advertising.
However, the task of effectively reaching your core audience can seem like a daunting task if you don’t first know the different ways of Facebook advertising, how to target your ideal audience, the basic tips for effective ad design, and how to measure and evaluate your campaigns. In the next eight minutes (or less), we’ll review this.
1. Pick your Facebook advertising method
There’s four core ways to advertise on Facebook:
- Increase your page likes
- Increase a specific post’s visibility
- Promote your call to action button
- Remarket your web visitors on Facebook
The first way to advertise — create an advertisement to increase your page’s fans/likes — is something all brands should do to increase their fan base on Facebook because once you have people connected to your brand, they can get your future posts in their newsfeeds organically, instead of you having to pay for it.
The second option is to boost a specific post. I encourage my clients to do this when the post’s message is on mission to their business. Typically, these types of posts refer people to a landing page to get a product or service. Investing significant money in a post that isn’t mission critical doesn’t help your ROI.
The third Facebook advertising method is to promote your call to action button. Currently, you can choose the following things to promote: book now; call now; contact us; send message; use app; play game; shop now; sign up; watch video; send email; and learn more. Once you pick your call to action button, you’ll be taken through a series of options of where to send people if the button is clicked.
The fourth way is to remarket to those that visited your website when they get on Facebook. You might have experience this yourself. Perhaps you were browsing a clothing shop to find that perfect cocktail dress, and you later saw the exact dress you favorited when you were looking at photos of your friends in your Facebook newsfeed. This is strategic remarketing; continue to put in the face of your potential customers what they expressed interest in to remind them of what they want and make it easy for them to click back over to your website and make the purchase.
2. Determine your Facebook advertising audience
Facebook has made it easy to filter exactly who you’d like to reach with your message. No longer do you pick a radio station or TV station based on few demographics they know about their listeners/viewers, or put out an ad in the local newspaper that has little targeting other than location. You can now have full assurance that you’re reaching the right audience based on what they personally disclose about themselves as well as their past buying habits big data has stored.
There’s three main ways to determine your Facebook advertising audience:
- Filter and Reach options:
- Target your current page connections
- Geo-target potential customers in a certain radius of your business address
- Target a specific age, gender, and other demographics
- Filter specific interests, behaviors or shopping habits of buyers and strategically advertise just to them
- Pick additional categories to filter your ad to so it reaches the right audience
- Custom audiences
- Upload a .csv or .txt file of current customers to reach them directly, if they’re on Facebook
- You can then reach them with a specific ad
- Here’s how it works
- Lookalike audiences
- Find more people who share the location, age, gender, and specific interests with your customers, so your ads reach even more people who’ll care about your business
- Here’s how it works
3. Design effective Facebook ads
More than 700 million people each day jump onto Facebook using their mobile or tablet device. It’s important for your ad to stand out among competitors as well as their close friends and family in newsfeed. To do so, follow these tips:
- Jolt them in use of color
- People scroll their newsfeeds insanely fast. Slow them down when they see your ad because it’s so different.
- Facebook uses blue and white primarily so something that stands out from those colors would be primarily gold, red, black, and green. (Gold and red are among my favorites.)
- Check out this article and video for more details.
- Use a high-quality visual
- Choose a clear photo that’s easily understandable of what the item/person is.
- You have just a couple seconds to pique their interest as they scroll through their newsfeed.
- Pictures that feature people’s faces tend to get more engagement because after all, it’s why we go onto Facebook– to catch up with family and friends.
- Try to choose a photo that shows emotion
- People are moved by emotion and reason.
- Make sure your text on the photo or headline match with the feel of the photo to get better conversion rates.
- Be short and direct in your headline text
- Facebook gives you limited characters to make your case before your headline gets cut off.
- Get straight to the point.
- Make the call-to-action clear
- State your call to action and the benefit(s) your audience will receive for taking this action.
- Make it easy for them to say yes. Entice them!
- Test your photos so they include the full picture
- Many times I see organizations posting an ad with a photo that chops off a person’s head or part of the text they’ve added on the photo.
- Avoid looking like a amateur; test your ads and posts before publishing.
4. Evaluate your Facebook advertising
There are some great tools to evaluate your Facebook advertising performance so you can make adjustments and continually improve your metrics of success.
Brand pages have a Page Insights section that tells you how many people you reached this week, or with a particular post, as well as their age, gender, number of post clicks, reactions, and comments.
Each boosted post also has the metrics easily accessible on that particular post so you can see how many saw the ad organically versus paid as well as how many clicked over, reacted or commented, and the data on those that shared your post.
Of course, Facebook gives you the ability to also track your website clicks and for more advanced folks, you can monitor your website conversions through installation of a pixel on your webpages.
Facebook Ads Manager and Business Manager are a must-use source for those who spend a great deal of time and treasure creating ads, especially among multiple brands.
With these best practices in determining what Facebook advertising method to employ, which audience to target, how to design and evaluate your ad, you’ll expand your brand’s reach on the most popular social media platform, get your message out affordably, and increase sales. Contact us for help with Facebook.
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