Get Started With Facebook Advertising - Universal

If you’re using Facebook for business, by now you may have already heard about or noticed in your Facebook Insights – organic (unpaid) reach has dropped down to 1 to 2 percent. What this means is … unless you “pay to play” your Facebook Business Page followers are not being shown the majority of your content.

It was bound to happen. More businesses than ever are now on Facebook and they’re at constant war fighting over space in the News Feed and consumers’ attention. What may seem like a negative thing (forcing you to spend more money), there’s actually an upside to this — targeted reach. Facebook Advertising allows users to get their content seen by the right people. Where does one get started? Before you spend a single penny on Facebook Advertising, be sure you have a solid Facebook Marketing strategy is in place (businesses like ours help with such). Post engaging content often and give customers and prospects a reason to want to follow you. Then do the following.

1. Identify an objective.

When you access “create ads” Facebook will prompt you to choose an objective. It will look like this:

Consider what you wish you achieve with your ad and select an objective accordingly. Of course, we all want sales but consider raising brand awareness first. For office products dealers, we often recommend choosing the following objectives:

Page Likes
Clicks to Website
Page post engagement
Website conversions
Offer claims
Video views

In my experience, the page post engagement and page likes objectives are best for driving brand awareness. Clicks to website (and blog posts), along with website conversions and offer claims are best for getting people to directly purchase products and services. Videos provide an interactive experience for customers and prospects to engage with your brand. You’re ahead of the game if you have custom videos and can promote them with Video Views.

2. Create copy and graphics that sell.

The images you choose should be sized appropriately, be clear, and grab attention.

Your copy should be free of grammatical errors and should not mislead. You’ll also want to keep your copy concise. Get to the point in letting people know what they can expect from clicking on your advertisement.

Here’s an example of a Page Likes campaign we ran for one of our independent dealers.

We let our audience know exactly why they should like the page and also promoted a back to school contest. The colorful imagery stood out and the copy was short and to the point.

3. Target accordingly.

From age to location, interest, purchase behaviors, and so much more, we can get quite granular with our targeting. Identify your target audience per campaign and target accordingly.

4. Run A/B Testing.

Create two different ads for each campaign. Run them for a brief amount of time (around five days). Observe which ad is performing best and stop the one that’s not doing well. I recommend having one variable be different at a time during your testing. Your testing may look something like this:

Each ad has the same objective, targets the same audience, has the same graphics, uses the same body copy, but have different headlines.
Ad A targets people who are between ages 30 and 50 while ad A targets people who are ages 18 to 29. All other variables remain the same.
Both ads have all the same variables but their images are different.

5. Price your campaign right.

Depending on which objective you select, Facebook will give you a cost structure. Stay far away from the automatically optimize option. Opt for manually setting your bids, as this gives you more control with your money. Facebook will provide you with a suggested bid. The average number is a good place to start. Bid up only when necessary.

6. Monitor, analyze, and adjust.

To get a better bang for your buck, monitor the progress of your campaign frequently. Carefully observe key performance indicators such as:

Total actions
Reach
Frequency

If you don’t see some action within 48 hours, adjust your ad; something is likely not working if your potential reach is in the thousands or higher.

If you have any questions or would just like to pick someone’s brain about your Facebook Advertising efforts, please feel free to contact Marisa:
Marisa Sanfilippo, Content and Social Media Marketing Director, Fortune Web Marketing
marisa(at)fortunewebmarketing.com.