5 Ingredients for the Facebook Ads Secret Sauce
Surely by now, you’ve heard the mantra – organic reach on Facebook is dead, and the only way to get ahead in the game is through paid advertising. While I wouldn’t go as far as saying Facebook organic reach is dead, it’s certainly on life support.
Sharing quality content is your first step to reaching more people on Facebook. Getting followers to engage with your posts is, of course, your ultimate goal. You do that by posting content that they want to interact with.
But beyond that, what are some ways to optimize your company’s presence on Facebook? Paid advertising is certainly a viable option. Even though it’s been around for a while in internet years, it’s still a relatively new marketing channel. Here are five proven strategies for success that can help you as you wade into the waters of paid Facebook advertising.
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Set Your Goal - With Facebook Ads, you have multiple goal options. Common ad goals include driving people to your website, getting app installs, motivating people to claim your offer, or collecting leads for your business. There are others as well. The bottom line is you need to come in with a goal in mind. That will drive the strategy we’ll discuss in the rest of this post. One last thing, if you’re going to pay for Facebook advertising, don’t set your goal as “Promoting your Page.” While it may be tempting to see your page likes increase, that’s not the best business goal. Page likes do not equal more revenue for your business. They help, but directing people to your website or driving installs of your app are goals that will help you move the needle in much more meaningful ways.
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Target, Target, Target - This should come as no surprise to seasoned marketers, but targeting your audience provides you with the best foundation for success. But the sheer amount of targeting options provided by Facebook can be daunting. A simple place to start is to decide on your location. Do you want to solely advertise locally, or do you want to cast a wider net? After that, really try to nail down your buyer profiles. Who will be interested in your product or service? What are their interests? Where/how do they spend their time? Chances are Facebook can provide you the options to answer those questions and more. While it may be tempting to display your ad to the largest audience possible, a far better strategy is to actually narrow your audience to the people most likely to interact with your brand.
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Good Creative Trumps All - You can put all the time and effort into strategy that you want, but if you don’t have good creative, you’re in trouble. Strategy sets the foundation for a quality Facebook ad, while creative builds the house. Striking images that draw people in are key. Just think about your own Facebook experience. In all likelihood, you only notice ads in which the image or headline catches your attention. This is especially true if you are using the Facebook Carousel Ad format – something I highly recommend. These are the ads that display multiple images that allow users to flip across the ad. Each image is linkable back to your website. Facebook will monitor which image performs best and serve those first. This option gives you a lot of creative freedom.
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Monitor and Test - An advantage of Facebook advertising is that you can monitor campaigns as they are running. If you notice an ad is not performing as well as you had expected, you can make changes to it. A good strategy is to run short test campaigns to see which ad creative works best. Then, you can run a longer campaign firing on all cylinders. Test different image/copy combinations or try a different headline. You can run short, inexpensive campaigns as trials so that you have your best ad ready to go for a longer run.
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Decipher the Data - Making sure to check the data of your ad performance once the campaign is finished is crucial to success. Based upon the goal you defined at the beginning, you should have a good idea of which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to look at. The information gleaned from this stage will help you fine tune further Facebook ads.
Advertising on Facebook can be a daunting task at the outset. But following simple guidelines such as these will help you see sustained success from your paid marketing efforts on social media.
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