Welcome to the new digital world where things work differently. Having trouble figuring it out? You’re not alone.
The truth is that people are changing and so are their needs. Today, a huge number of people prefer to shop online which is why marketers have to be wise in where and when they spend their budget. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses have not been able to cater to buyer’s changing demands and thus have failed to find success in today’s online business world.
When we say digital world, we have to keep in mind that the world has not only changed for buyers but also for sellers. There is no point in advertising your product in the manner you used to promote it a decade ago simply because those methods are not that valid anymore. Imagine this situation, if a person wants to buy a gift item online, say a teddy bear, would they really care about the print ad they saw in a magazine? The answer is no! They will go to Google and search for the item using relevant keywords. Better yet, they’ll just log in to their Facebook account and ask friends for suggestions. As you know Facebook is a huge social media network with the power to create and break businesses so one has to cater to it, and today we’ll look at how you can do so.
The vast number of Facebook users gives you access to a large audience for your Facebook ads as well as the simple and easy way of placing ads are just a few reasons why Facebook is such a great platform to run ads.
Facebook advertising can be done in multiple ways. Let’s first talk about the advertising that comes without you having to spend a single penny. Yes, that is possible and this comes in the form of your buyers suggesting your products to others or spreading the word (At times unintentionally). Features such as Shares and Likes make it possible for more ‘potential buyers’ to be aware of your product. And how to do that? You have to post the right kind of content. However, in this article we’ll cover the paid version, i.e: Facebook Marketing Campaign.
Tips on How to Run Your Facebook Advertising Campaign
With per quarter earnings singularly from advertising revenue that round to $1 billion, one wonders what Facebook is offering in terms of advertising services that mount to such ginormous earnings. While you may be using Facebook as an advertising forum for your business, you are not necessarily taking advantage of the range of tools and services it has to offer as part of its advertising platform. The features and tools it offers are unique to the Facebook users. To get you a hang of Facebook’s advertising tools and how they can be used to improve your ads, we have put together some of the tips that might help you with Facebook advertising.
Audience Insights
A terrific tool for marketers, Audience Insights is one of the most popular Facebook tools to manage your ad campaign. It allows businesses and companies to get comprehensive insights on their customers and targeted audience before planning to run ads for them and potentially risking budget on them.
By simply clicking on the Audience Insights in the Ad Manager, you will be taken to new tab on the pop up window which will show your Audience Insights. (as shown below)
The rest is easy as you only have to select the metrics (demographics, page likes, location, Facebook activity, household, purchase etc,) you desire to use to get aggregate information regarding your audience.
Here’s what these metrics will take into account:
- Demographics: Age & gender of your targeted audience, their lifestyle which is based on their purchase behavior, brand affinity and various other activities. It also accounts for their relationship status, education level as well as the title of their job.
- Page likes lists the top pages that different segments of people like and follow.
- Location: Where your audience lives and what languages do they speak.
- Activity: This is basically the Facebook activity that your audience indulges in. As in how many comments they posted, or the posts that they liked and shared as well as the adverts that they clicked. Also, how frequently do people log in and what devices do they generally used to access their Facebook account.
- Purchases: This metric gives great insights to customer behavior based on their purchase activity – whether it is clothing, household products, sports, food and drink or business purchases.
Thus, if you make use of Facebook’s Audience Insights effectively and efficiently, it will give you extremely meaningful data that can be used to create and publish ads that are specifically directed at your target audience.
Integrate Your Ads With Landing Pages
In order to maximize and fully exploit the perks Facebook advertising has to offer, your ads need to be aligned and well-connected with your landing pages. Landing pages, if effective, hold promise to higher conversion rates. Make sure that your landing pages include an email submit box so that you are easily able to track conversions. There are two benefits of aligning ads with landing pages;
- It ensures that you have a higher Advert Relevance Score. Ads with high relevance score ensure better performance which in turn means that you will have to pay less per click. This is because ads with higher relevance are more preferred by Facebook.
- Further, if your landing pages and Facebook ads are integrated, it ensures higher conversion rates. Because once people click your ads, they expect the exact services that they are promised. If your landing pages are in sync with the ads, it means that your potential customers get what is promised on the ad. This positively impacts the reputation of your brand and increases your overall credibility – customers are more likely to trust any future ads from your brand as well as click them.
Target Separate Audience Through Facebook Ads
Facebook’s advertising system allows marketers to create unique adverts to cater to different segments of audience. This means that you can now create two (or more) different ads that will be displayed to the audience it is meant for. Thus, targeting separate audience and catering them based on their unique characteristics or tastes and preferences makes your ad more effective and productive in terms of the results they deliver. While you can still create a single ad since you are dealing with the same product, it is always recommended to create adverts that target specific audience.
Target New People and Users
Again, Facebook’s advertising platform is absolutely incredible and formidable in the sense that its advertising features provide you with an option to target new people who have not already liked your page. By simply logging in and going to the advertising setting, you can choose whether you wish to target the audience which has already liked your page or the audience that is out there but has not liked the page yet.
Refine and Improve Targeting With Custom Audiences or Lookalike Audiences
Targeting a custom audience, also known as conversion audience, means that you choose the targets that you will include in your audience when preparing an ad campaign. Rather than addressing random masses, it allows you to target people who are aware of your brand and with whom you possibly have some sort of a relationship. You can create your custom audience by importing contacts from Google+ or even adding emails and phone numbers of your existing clientele in the Facebook custom audience category. Basically, you can add people or clients with whom you already share a strong relationship and connection with, irrespective of where those connections are complied. For instance you can type in the email address of your client, which then Facebook will search for in its database and successfully match (presuming that the users have added this information to their profile) – thereby, creating your custom audience list. So, creating a custom audience is a great way to manage and keep the existing customers rather than focussing on an entirely new customer base – which, mind you, is more expensive and exhausting than the former.
Again, when choosing the type of audience you wish to pursue for your ad campaign, along with custom audience there, Facebook offers another unique option i.e. lookalike audience. A lookalike audience lets you target people that share similar characteristics with another audience segment who are well-known. These lookalike audience can be based on lookalikes for websites, pages as well as mobile users. Furthermore, this feature will automatically exclude people who are already accounted for in the original audience so you don’t need to worry about potential repetition. Targeting through lookalike audience is immensely beneficial as it allows you to reach a vast audience while keeping the audience relatable to your brand.
Take Advantage of Geographical Targeting
Since Facebook profiles of users more often than not includes the geographical location of individuals, it is fairly easy to run an ad campaign based on geography. Not only is it an extremely useful metric to assess and analyze individual characteristics, it is also highly cost effective. This is because the cost per click is different for various areas – by setting up different advertising strategies for different countries and cities, you can save on the unnecessary expenses. For instance, you should bid higher for locations where people are expected to be more enthralled and captivated by your advert rather than places that will generate only a few click through rates.
Set-up A Game Plan for Bidding and Form a Budget
In order to avoid overspending it is exceedingly important that you set apart a proportion of your marketing expenses for carrying out and managing Facebook advertising campaign. Again, Facebook rises above the rest of the social media sites by featuring tools like Optimized CPM. Such tools allow you to manage and adjust your bid by choosing the objective of advertising without exceeding your budget. Basically, by activating this feature you are permitting Facebook to place bids for you based on the budget constraints and advertising objectives set by you. While some people may not find this acceptable, it is highly recommended especially if you are new to Facebook advertising and are not aware of costs charged for ad spaces.
Make Use of Cover Photos – the Ultimate Free Advertising Feature
What better way to do Facebook advertising than making use of space in the form of cover photos of your page. Not only can you put up promotional content on your cover photo like a 40% discount via debit cards, but you can also create competitions among the fans and award the winners by making their picture your cover photo for the week. This will make your post and cover photos more shareable – thereby, granting you free publicity and advertising.
Go Visual – Using Eye-catching Imagery and Videos
Visual content has been gaining a lot of attention as people find it more appealing and alluring. Thus, it’s only fair and logical that you ensure that the images that you use in your adverts are utterly striking and meant solely to attract the audience’s attention rather than display a message. In fact, Facebook’s ad policy doesn’t allow images to include more than 20% words. This shows that visual content is far more appealing than the textual display, especially when your sole purpose is to grab the audience’s attention and have them read your ad. If you get this done, rest’s the history!
Even better, you can create videos as part of your advertising campaign. Many studies have shown that compared to texts and images, uploading videos on Facebook serves as the most effective medium to generate customer engagement. So, get your advertising creatives to create a dazzling video to promote your brand.
Facebook advertising is a great marketing channel for businesses today. Even though you may require some level of understanding of the Facebook’s Ad Manager to get a sense of familiarity with respect to creating and running ads on Facebook, the benefits they have to offer to your business are untold.
We also understand that this is a complex job and one needs thorough understanding of the business to be able to get the right results. So, if you are having trouble in preparing your Facebook marketing campaign please do not worry as help is here in the form of AOK Marketing.
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