If your inbound marketing campaign needs a little kickstart, Facebook advertising might be a good place to start.
Your business’ Facebook ad is seen by specific groups on desktop and mobile. You choose the demographics based on location, age, and interests.
If you are just getting started, you’ll probably want to build your audience and encourage people to like your page. When someone likes your page, it shows up in their list of likes and their friends can see they’ve liked you. The more likes you have the more popular you look, which expands your reach and encourages more people to like you. Well targeted ads with creative content get more likes, comments and shares.
It’s not enough to just put up an ad – it has to be well-written. This can be tricky since the title of your ad can be up to only 25 characters and the content of the ad 90 characters. The ad must be catchy and a call to action. The call to action may be to click on a link to your website or fill out a subscribe form on your Facebook Page. Facebook will automatically set up the headline to be the same as your page’s title so you will definitely want to customize your headline to be more enticing. The headline is one of the key ways your ad will make an impact. Create multiple versions of your ad’s text to see which gets the best results.
The next aspect of your ad is the image. Use engaging, eye popping images to make the most of your ad. You can upload up to six images for variety and to test how difference images paired with your ad text perform. Most ads allow an image size of 100x 72 px. One thing to consider is Facebook’s recent image policy on ads, stating that text cannot take up more than 20% of the total ad image. Facebook is attempting to guide admins to make better use of images in ads
What is your goal? More website visits? More Facebook likes? Do you want people to install your app or do you want to build your brand through Page engagement? Establish your goal before you get started. You can choose an ad objective depending on what you want to achieve and Facebook will guide you in recommending which type of ad to place.
Some marketers activate sponsored stories as an add-on to their advertising campaign. When someone engages with your Page, event or offer a post or “story” is triggered that the user’s friends may see in their News Feed. If you choose to have sponsored stories you are paying to boost the likelihood these stories will be seen. You don’t have to opt into this extra tool. This year Facebook nixed domain sponsored stories (which promote a friend’s interaction with a domain (website) and open graph sponsored stories (such as Pandora advertising that a user is listening to a certain performer.) There are several other types of sponsored stories that still exist such as Page post like sponsored stories and Page post share sponsored stories.
If reaching a targeted audience is one of your goals, Facebook allows you to create very specific demographics. You have several options to choose from:
- Location – pick a city, state, a country or worldwide
- Demographics – base you ad on age, gender, education, etc..
- Interests – reach people that have interests, hobbies and Pages they like on Facebook
- Behaviors – find people based on their purchase behaviors or which devices they use
- Connections – engage users you are connected to your Page, event or app as well as their friends
- Custom Audiences – build an audience from your own customer data such as emails or phone numbers
Facebook ads use a bid type of payment service and the type of bid you choose depends on your advertising objective. There are four types of bids:
- Cost per mille (CPM) which is best for getting users to view your ad
- Cost per click (CPC) which is used to get people to click your ad
- Optimized cost per mille (oCPM) which is best for showing your ad to people most likely to take action on your ad such as clicking a link
- Cost per action (CPA) which lets admins specify a bid amount for an action. Advertisers are charged by the amount of conversions they get. This is different from CPM and oCPM which charge per impression served on the site.
If you care more about users clicking through to your website/page you will want to use CPC. If it’s more important users just see your ad then CPM will do the trick. CPM suggested bids are lower than CPC suggested bids. Once you decide which type of bid you want, you set a Max Bid for your ad. Facebook will provide a suggested bid to help guide your decision. However, you can set a different bid by clicking on “set a different bid” on the bottom.
Your first order of business is to choose a currency for your account and account time zone so the system will understand when your campaign begins and when it finishes. Pick a name for your campaign and set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Then you can schedule your ad campaign’s starting day and time or let it run continuously.
Important note – make sure you have a budget cap. If you don’t want to spend more than $25 a day on your ad, set your cap to $25 daily. You can change your campaign’s end date or budget after it has started running.
Another marketing strategy to employ is Facebook Offers. These let you promote a deal exclusively to Facebook users. You can offer an item such as an ebook in exchange for an email address or have a discount to be used in your actual store. First, target your Facebook Offers to only your fans and then if it is a success, open the arena to a wider audience.
Facebook advertising can be daunting to navigate at first. Fortunately, there are customer service reps that will call you if you request help with setting up your ad campaign. If you are looking for a targeted and engaged audience to increase your customer base, Facebook ads could be another outlet for your business.
Contact Stern LLC and lets “sternstorm” an inbound Facebook marketing campaign with Facebook ads. Call 303.353.4354 or contact us.