If you haven’t harnessed the power of Facebook, you’re missing the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s one of the most popular websites on the internet, ranking only behind Google in traffic. And, more importantly, Facebook provides marketers with an opportunity to directly engage with current and potential customers.
There are a lot of things you can do to build your Facebook following and convert customers. But maybe you haven’t had the time to invest in or master the power of this social channel. Don’t worry, because we’re to help.
We have some basic tips to help you get started with Facebook advertising.
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1. Establish Goals
You need to know exactly what you want to accomplish. This should be the first step in any marketing campaign. Often, it’s completely overlooked, and that leads to campaigns falling short of expectations.
Before investing in Facebook ads, you need to know what you want to accomplish.
Maybe you want to grow your Facebook audience, drive website traffic, raise attendance to an event, or even drive app downloads. All of these are possible objectives for your ads. Luckily, Facebook provides you with different ad types and formats to help you accomplish your specific goals.
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2. Select Bidding Options
There are a number of bidding options that you can use to control your Facebook advertising costs. Facebook allows you to constantly adjust and tinker with your bidding option selection. You can even choose your max bid.
But that’s not the only thing that bidding options are designed to do.
You can bid per clicks, likes, page likes, and for other objectives. Bidding for clicks and likes allows you a bit more customization, and it can help you adjust for ad reach. The objective based bidding options, on the other hand, are set up to automatically accomplish your goal.
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3. Budget
Facebook also allows you to set up a daily or lifetime budget. A daily budget controls your spend per day. Your ads will stop showing as soon as you hit your daily ad budget. This helps you budget Facebook ad rates based on the daily cycles. Lifetime budgets let you select an amount to spend over the entire span of a campaign.
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4. Advanced Targeting
Facebook has a number of different targeting options for paid ads. Many of these are completely unique to this specific social media network. While you can target your audience by using basic demographic information, such as age, gender, relationship status, and language.
Facebook also allows you to target even more specific groups.
Fortunately, you can get very specific in your targeting. A few of these advanced options include geotargeting, cookie lists, behaviors, and mailing lists. By using these more advanced options, you can display your ads to the audiences most likely to purchase your products.
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5. Mailing List
A great way to target very specific audiences with your Facebook ads is to directly upload your mailing lists. This enables you to target users that you already have a relationship with.
Creating a custom audience with mailing lists will lead to higher conversion rates.
To create this custom audience, simply go to your ad manager. Click the audiences tab on the left hand side of the page.Then click the create audience button on the top right of the screen. From there you can either upload a mailing list or connect directly with Mail Chimp.
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6. Old or New
Facebook provides the option to target your ads exclusively to users who are already connected to your page. You also have the option to target previous connections and their friends.
By targeting followers who have already liked your page, you can encourage conversions from those who already know you. You can reward these loyal followers with exclusive offers, discounts, and promotions.
This can be useful for pages that have built large audiences.
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7. Audience Meter
Always keep an eye on your potential audience meter. As you add targeting options and narrow down your audience, Facebook generates an approximate number of people you can reach. This is only an estimate, but it helps you understand the size of your audiences.
Remember, ads perform best when they are targeted to at least a few thousand people, so consider removing some restrictions if your targeting becomes too specific. But it’s important not to build too large an audience. If your audience is too broad, you may miss out on the people most likely to purchase your products.
Rule of thumb: build an audience of only those most likely to engage with your brand.
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8. Use Images
Ads with images get a much higher engagement rate than those without. This is because they stand out more in a crowded news feed. As people scroll they usually only look at a post for a second or two. An image focuses your audiences eyes on a post for longer, increasing the likelihood that they stop and read.
Be aware of Facebook’s ad image policies.
Facebook does have a few policies regarding ad images. The most important thing is to make sure you don’t have text on more than 20% of the image.
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9. A/B Test
While there isn’t a native A/B test function through Facebook advertising, you can do it with a little extra work. The best way to A/B test is to upload a number of different images for an ad set. You can also change the text in your different ad sets.
For instance, we used A/B testing to improve the results of one of our recent page like ads. We ensured that everything else stayed the same, but used different photos in the ad set. For that ad set, we found that one of the images increased conversions by 300%.
Moral of the story: don’t be afraid to adjust things to improve ad performance.
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10. Sponsored Stories
A sponsored story is an ad format that can really boost your campaign’s performance. When someone interacts with your page, offer, event, app, or etc. the action triggers a post (“story”). This post is then delivered to the user’s friend’s news feeds.
These stories are generated naturally, but are often buried in the news feed. Opting for sponsored stories basically allows you to increase the likelihood these stories will actually be seen by other users.
You can opt in for sponsored stories in the left column of the ad creator tool.
Now you have a better understanding on how to build great Facebook ads, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. There is still a lot you need to learn. Fortunately, we have you covered with a webinar specifically for marketers trying to use Facebook and YouTube to reach the trucking industry.
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