Facebook advertising is one of most diverse and flexible ways of advertising your business. Whether you like it or not, Facebook has gathered a lot of data about us over the years. One of the (only) benefits of this is the sheer scope of opportunity for marketeers and advertisers to promote their products and services to their exact target market. After using the platform in significant depth with a large number of diverse clients, here’s some tips to get the most out of Facebook ads…
Campaign goals – GET IT RIGHT
This can make or break the success of your ad. Social media is often used as a brand awareness platform rather than direct lead generation, so the “Engagement” choice is popular to further the impact of your message. Once you click the button there’s a dropdown, where you can choose “Page Likes” and “Event Responses” as sub categories – both very important options that seem slightly buried in my opinion.
Facebook Ads also has other useful goals, especially useful for E-Commerce businesses. Optimise your ads for conversions, with the aim of actually making a sale there and then. In the service industry? The Lead generation and Messages tool can start a conversation with your potential customers, offering an instant way to get a dialogue going.
Whatever your business’ aim is, I’d recommend picking 3 of the most relevant goals and testing them with small budgets to see which works best for you! You might be surprised.
“Invite” to like page button – Free likes!
A few months ago we stumbled across this incredibly useful Facebook hack. Say you’ve spent some budget on getting some great engagement on your Facebook post, now you can turn those post likes into page likes. Here’s how you do it…
- Find your engaging post on your timeline
- Click on the likes (eg. 40 👍)
- Scroll down all and click “invite” to all those where the button is available
- Watch your page likes go up!
then…
This little trick helps you add value to your posts, and potentially get longer term fans/customers who will engage with your future posts!
Lookalike audiences – quick win
Only for businesses who have grown their audiences in the right way (any spammy paid likes make this feature obsolete). Lookalike Audiences automatically research the type of people that like your page right now. This enables you quickly identify a target market on Facebook without second guessing who they might be!
You can choose your own page as the audience, or if you’ve identified a key competitor who has built a great social following you can target their lookalike audience! What are you waiting for? Go test it out! 😉
Ad scheduling – it’s all about timing
We use Facebook every day, all day – don’t we? Well, maybe not when we’re sleeping… 😉 Different audiences will have different usage patterns from day to day. As a rule of thumb, most adults will work 9-5 and an hour for lunch, so your ads would be best scheduled for 12-1pm then 6pm – 11pm in the evening to get maximised results. See below for a mock up ad schedule…
If your audience is younger, chances are they’ll be at school/college university and be getting up later/staying up later with probably more consistent usage. So tweak the ad schedule based on your likely usage. Unsure? Run an ad all the time to begin with, and check out when the most popular engagement times are! 🙌
I could go on and on here, but there are so many cool features in Facebook’s ad platform that it’ll keep you occupied for hours. Testing and testing some more with small budgets will enable you to find those sweet spots where your ad spend will go further than almost any other platform currently available.
Don’t have the time or resource to do all of this? We can manage your campaigns for you! 😊
