I put together a little guide to Facebook marketing ads. Take a look…
At present, there are more than 1.94 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide. What’s more, Facebook’s Like and Share Buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites on a daily basis.
It’s clear that Facebook is still a critical resource when it comes to developing your brand, branching out to new prospects and boosting your customer base.
In fact, a staggering 92% of marketers are using Facebook for advertising. Defining your audience and setting up your campaigns can seem overwhelming at the start but these four practical tips for optimising your Facebook adverts will help you boost lead generation and ROI.
Define your target audience
Your Facebook advert may be quirky and creative but if you’re not targeting the right audience, you’re unlikely to see much engagement, if any.
If you need a helping hand understanding your target audience, check out this beginner’s guide to defining buyer personas, a step-by-step tutorial on how to create the kind of customer profile that will help you encourage people to connect with your brand.
When you boost an existing Facebook post or create an advert from scratch, you’ll have the option to set certain parameters including age, location, interests or hobbies to help you squeeze the most value out of your potential leads – this is where your buyer persona will come in handy.
By creating a comprehensive buyer persona, you will be able to use the data and insights you’ve gathered to populate each targeting option in your ad settings and get the most impact from your advert.
As you can see from this boosted post, you are given the option to edit the settings to tailor your ad to the needs of your customers. You can also add a call to action button from the drop-down menu (in this case, it’s a ‘Learn More’ CTA to drive readers to the article).
But what if your users already know about your company or product? Targeting the users who are curious about your product or service can prove very effective. By creating a custom audience, you can reach out to people who have visited a particular page or product with highly relevant offerings that fit their need state.
Using the power of customisation, inbound marketing specialist HubSpot set up this Facebook ad to target people interested in data visualisation…
As you can see, this particular advert performed incredibly well, encouraging 1,000 likes, 31 comments and 212 shares. As a result, this longform blog post earned a sizable 741 shares on LinkedIn, a fine performance enhanced by Facebook advertising.
Tip: If your business is in its infancy and you’ve yet to gain a warm audience, one way you can do so is by creating an informative eBook or whitepaper in exchange for people’s’ email addresses. This will give you a platform from which to engage with those who downloaded your eBook, making them familiar with what you have to offer while warming them up over time.
Direct people to your offline business
If you want to reach a highly-engaged local audience, Facebook’s local awareness ads are cost effective and prove to be very powerful when it comes to reaching people that are active in your neighbourhood.
To help you get started, here is an official tutorial from Facebook Business…
Over a billion monthly active users access Facebook on mobile devices. Local Awareness adverts present a prime opportunity for local businesses to reach people who are within walking or driving distance from a physical location, whether it be a brick and mortar store or a nearby event or promotion.
By adding a ‘Get Directions’ call-to-action button to your Local Awareness ad, you’ll offer potential prospects a simple means of finding you without having to use a separate app or geographical search, increasing your chances of success.
Logo’s and T-Shirts published a series of local awareness ads with a ‘Get Directions’ call to action button to reach people within a five-mile radius of one of their stores.
These adverts reached 12,500 people within five miles of the business, with each user seeing the ad three times on average. This particular campaign resulted in a 12-time return on ad spend.
Facebook video ads: use the automated caption tool
Facebook users consume 100 million hours of video in their news feeds daily.
According to data from Facebook, captioned video ads increase view time by around 12% – after all, if you can’t understand what you’re watching, you’re unlikely to stick around.
In 2015 alone, video content counted for 55% of all mobile-based traffic and as so many people like to watch video on the move, enjoying it with sound isn’t always an option – offering captions is far more likely to entice views and in turn, shares and engagement. 85% of Facebook video ads play with the sound turn off.
At this point, you might be asking yourself, what’s the automated captioning tool?
In a nutshell, Facebook has developed the automated captioning tool to create automated video captions or subtitles for English-speaking video adverts.
Alternatively, if you’re running a video advert in another language, you can create subtitles or captions manually by using a SubRip file.
To help you boost your Facebook video ads by up to 12%, reach a wider audience and optimise your promotional efforts, check out this step-by-step tutorial…
On Facebook, video posts enjoy 135% higher organic reach than regular photo posts, according to one study, so optimising your videos to their full potential will provide you with an excellent return on investment.
Use Facebook’s optimisation pixel
The Facebook Pixel is a line of code that you can add to your website to track how visitors interact with your site in relation to your Facebook ad campaigns.
Facebook pixel gives you the power to track conversions and leverage Facebook analytics to get consolidated demographic, location, and consumer behaviour data for your website’s visitors, as well as detailed information on how users interact with your site.
When it comes to optimisation, this tool helps you make sure you display the right ads to the right people based on the actions they’re most likely to take. It’s possible to retarget users who have already visited your site, and find new prospects who are similar to your most valuable customers. Facebook Pixel offers a world of insight and will help you craft your advertising campaigns to their full potential.
To find your Facebook pixel code, go to the Facebook ads manager and find the Facebook Pixel Tab.
Click Create a Pixel, and then name it to something relevant to your ad campaign. Finally, accept the terms and conditions and confirm the creation of your pixel. For full instructions, follow this tutorial video…
By using data from the pixel tool to tailor the Facebook ads it offers its readers based on website interaction, The New York Times has seen a steady 25% reduction in cost per subscription and more than doubled the volume of its subscription conversions.
Based on pixel data, this is the Facebook ad that regular readers are most likely to see on their feed (those more likely to pay for a subscription)…
And, article recommendations like this are targeted at occasional readers with a view to increase engagement with the publication as well as the content it provides….
As you can see, when optimised to their full potential, Facebook ads prove very powerful. Take the time to understand your audience, collaborate with your team to conjure up the best possible ideas, follow these tips, and you’ll increase your customer base in no time.
Catchy Content Writing 