Get In Front Of Your Prospects and Their Friends With Facebook Ads!

As you may of read in my previous post, if Facebook were a country then by its population it would be the 3rd largest country in the world. Right now Facebook boasts somewhere in excess of 600 million users and growing. It even gets more traffic than Google!

So I think it’s safe to assume there’s a pretty good chance that some members of your ideal target customer group reside in and visit Facebook land, but the trick is to find them.

Facebook’s ad platform is an amazing way to do exactly that and it should be a feature of any social media marketing strategy.

The tool allows you to place small display type ads in the right sidebar of Facebook pages and profiles (as you can see in the red highlighted area in the picture below).

But the great part is you only pay when people interested in your ad click on it. So you don’t pay in advance like you would normally do for Yellow Pages or an ad in the newspaper or trade journal.

So this month what I thought I’d do is take you through five steps that you need to consider when setting up a Facebook ad campaign.

Finding Prospects & Buyers

One of the amazing things about Facebook advertising is how ‘relevant’ you can make your advertising with the ability to select who sees your ad using a number of variables.

I know of someone who wanted to send a birthday message to his wife and targeted so narrowly that she was the only person who could see the ad!

Facebook advertising offers nine different ways to target audiences:

Thanks to an incredibly detailed search targeting feature, you can pinpoint potential customers through details as specific as their interests, Facebook pages they ‘like’, and location.

Advertise To Friends Of People Who Like What You’ve Got!

You can even target ‘friends’ of Facebook users that have liked your own Facebook page (I’ll do a post on Facebook pages at a later date).

This is great because the ad shows to all of Fred’s (Fred Bloggs that liked your page that is) friends and it says at the bottom of the ad, “Fred Bloggs likes this Page”. In essence this type of ad gives your Facebook page an implied recommendation. How clever is that?

Another great advertising strategy is to target your competitors. You can do this by targeting people that have liked the pages of your competitors.

So if you are a local coffee shop and you want to attract more people to your store you could target people in your local area that have ‘liked’ a Starbucks page by getting your ad to appear when they go onto Facebook.

I’m sure you can see how powerful this kind of targeting could be for you and why it’s an excellent social media strategy.

What To Show Them

The first thing you must do is decide whether you want people to be directed to your own web page or something on Facebook like a Page, Application, Group or Event. If you are already the administrator of your Facebook Page, Group, Event, or Application, you can select it from the drop down option when creating your ad.

The thing that’s nice about using ads to promote your pages and events is that Facebook puts a “Become a fan” or “RSVP to this event” button right in the ad. People don’t even have to visit your page to ‘like’ it.

There are some pros to sending them to a link on your web site (better tracking options) but by sending them to places on Facebook you have the ability to multiply their actions through the natural social wall activity that occurs when someone RSVPs to an event or ‘likes’ a page.

“Social Activity”

What I mean by ‘social activity’ is when you RSVP to an event or ‘like’ a page all of your ‘friends’ on Facebook automatically see that action. This in turn makes some of those friends click on the link and go to your page. In effect you get free advertising based on the action of someone they know!

Some users find Facebook ads a good tool to promote events or get new fans to the pages. From an engagement standpoint think in terms of using the ads to promote content and value and not so much to sell something.

The most successful use of ads on social networks is to create a more engaging experience so you have the ability to sell more because people know and trust you more.

Think about putting information offers on your Fan Pages e.g. free reports, videos, etc. and promoting that content or creating a free event, like a webinar, and advertising that event. In both of these cases you’ll have the opportunity to sell a bit once you’ve proven you know your stuff. (one quirk of note – when you promote an event created with the Facebook event app the title of the ad will automatically default to the title of the event, so name your event wisely! )

You don’t get much space in these ads so how you write dramatically effects your results. Your headline (25 characters) should grab attention immediately with a benefit.

You’ll get another 135 characters to describe and entice in the body of the ad. You also have the option to upload an image. Take this option. It may be the most important aspect of your ad so choose wisely. Pictures that shock or stand out work well. You see Facebook users are very image driven (it’s the largest photo sharing site in the world) and the visual graphic you choose will make or break an ad. This is an element you must plan on testing (see below).

Start Small

Facebook advertising works a bit like AdWords in that you bid for keywords and compete to get your ads shown. How effective you are at this depends upon the competitiveness of your keywords. You can choose between a cost per click (CPC) model where you pay only for clicks or a cost per thousand (CPM) model where you pay per 1000 ad views.

I’ve only ever used a CPC model and research suggests that the CPC model is slightly more effective in terms of ROI.

To start your campaign you must determine a bid per click and daily budget. You can set both of these numbers very low, but don’t expect much to begin with. Initially you are just testing so you’ll want to set your click bid somewhere around the Facebook suggested amount and a daily budget you can live with, something like $50 or more to start. You can always adjust these.

A tip that I’ve learnt through testing is you can sometimes bid a 1/3 of the lowest recommended bid and still get the same level of impressions (number of times your ad shows) and sometimes even more clicks. I have no idea why this works but try it and see if it works for you.

Find Out What’s Working

No matter what you do you should always test your advertising. Online ad platforms like Facebook make it very easy to do this. You can and should create multiple ad versions (changing the headline and the image are the two big variables to test to begin with but don’t test both at once otherwise you won’t know which variable made the difference!).

Once you create an ad you will have the ability to create similar ads and run those as well. You’ll be able to easily view which ad is performing the best based on clicks. Facebook does need to approve your ads so make sure you are familiar with their guidelines.

As I’ve just mentioned, the simplest thing to test is your image. I’ve seen ads go from no response to mega response with a better picture. Mind you I had no

idea it was a better picture or I would have used it in the first place, but testing told me so.

Track Your Results

Once you create and launch your campaigns you need to start tracking and tweaking. Facebook has a tool that gives you some information on actions taken inside the Facebook platform. So, if you are running an ad for an event or Facebook page you can use the Facebook Insights  tool to monitor interaction.

Facebook Insights is a nice reporting tool as it can give you information about the actual, not targeted demographics and interests of the people clicking on your ads and keywords that drew that interest. This will help you narrow or broaden your targeting. Page admins can access Insights by logging in and viewing the box titled Insights in the left sidebar. This is only visible to Page admins. If you click on See All you will get full reporting.

Facebook does allow you to run ads that point people links outside of Facebook and in order to track these ads you simply and monitor them using your own analytics tool such as Google Analytics. If you are using Google Analytics simply use the URL builder tool in Analytics to create a link to your page that contains tracking parameters and place that in your Facebook Ad as the destination link.

OK that’s it. If you have any questions please leave me a comment under this post.

Until next time….  Grant

 

Tags: facebook, facebook ads, facebook advertising, social media for business, social media marketing strategy, social media strategy