Understanding the fundamentals of Facebook advertising can help you avoid those easily avoidable mistakes that cost you valuable time and money.
Setting Up Goals & Objectives
In order to begin we must first ensure you have a place of acton prepared, otherwise you will have no clear idea of how you want to move forward. To do so, these questions can help you define this strategy:
Facebook advertising requires objectives, what are your goals?
Do you have existing or consistent traffic to your website?
Do you have an email list? is this active, and if so how many people are on it?
Can you create unique content about your business?
3 Advertising Strategies
Our first recommended strategy is to provide free content initially. Creating unique content is extremely effective in differentiating your business. Specifically, free content entertains or educates your ideal customer. This can be achieved using videos, lead magnets, or blog posts.
Another effective strategy is engaging people via your email list. This is because your message will be seen in both their
emails inbox and as they browse their facebook, hence twice as effective.
Finally, retargeting website visitors. Targeting people who have already visited your site (a potential second stage to content first strategy), allows you to build on an audience who have engaged with your video content, running direct-response campaigns to promote your product or service is then very effective. This can be achieved through Facebook pixel.
How to: Campaign
1. Choose Objective
There are three levels in a campaign: the campaign, advert set, and avert. The campaign level is the basis of your ad. This lets you choose your objective. The three categories within this are: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.
This is dependent on your strategy. If you have opted for a content-first strategy, because video is currently the most effective type of facebook content, you would run campaigns with video views objective. A retargeting campaign would work best with traffic or conversions objective.
The best way to do this is work backwards from your goal.
2. Build your ideal custom audience This is accessible in your advert set. The second stage will specify how your ad will run. Targeting your audience is one of the most important steps in your campaign as it completely dictates performance.Your audience can be defined as: Target Demographics and Interests This approach is used to target new people who haven’t previously interacted with your business. Here you’ll choose demographic constraints such as location, age, gender and language. Then in detailed targeting section, narrow your audience by interests from demographics, behaviours and more… Selecting a various and mixture of these interests will allow you to identify your ideal customers. To narrow audience further here you can add a condition, or layering a variable such as income level, or purchase behaviours. Target a lookalike audience similar to existing audience These are effective because Facebook uses the algorithm to create them. Facebook takes the data points from a source audience that you specify and uses them to find similar people. Target a Custom Audience of People Familiar with you Business Custom audiences let you target people who have had previous interaction with your business, whether its facebook, website or email marketing. This can be very effective as your targeting people with pre-existing relationships, they are already aware of the business, may have built a trust and therefore are great for retargeting campaigns. To create a custom audience, choose from four categories: Customer file, website traffic, app activity and engagement on facebook. Customer File – allows you to upload or import a list of data and Facebook cross-matches the people on your list to find them on facebook. This is great to target your subscriber list. Website Traffic – based on people’s activity on your website – you can then use Facebook pixel and conversion tracking to track visitors and their actions App Activity – include people who have completed a specific action in your app Engagement on Facebook – includes people who have interact with your content on facebook, then choose from video, lead ad, canvas and page.
3. Build and Test Your Ad Creative Finally its time for you ad creative! Here you choose your ad format and creative; this is choosing from images, videos, news feed text, URLS display links and CTA button. What the ad looks like depends on the campaign objective, ad format and advertising strategy. The 5 ad formats include carousel, single image, single video, slideshow and canvas. The best practice of Facebook ad creative is to create multiple ads as you run your campaign. This allows for testing with different variations, and you can improve performance over the life of the campaign.
Conclusion
So, take the time to define your campaign strategy and where sales come through you can use facebook ads to grow your business further.
What do you think? Have you tested any of these in your Facebook campaigns? Share your comments with us!
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