Facebook advertising: It\u2019s one of those things it seems like everybody\u2019s done and no one\u2019s really been satisfied with the results. If you\u2019re like many businesses who\u2019ve advertised or boosted a post on Facebook, you know that you’ve reached your audience at a price that didn\u2019t make you want to cry, but you ended up with not much to show for it, and probably left feeling a little disheartened.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, effective Facebook advertising doesn\u2019t have to be an inside joke you feel like you\u2019re on the outside of. These are five of our tried and true tips to get more out of your Facebook advertising efforts.<\/p>\n
This is the first tip because it\u2019s both crucially important and regularly neglected. The go-to answer to the question of \u201cWhat do you want from this?\u201d is often \u201cmore sales,\u201d which is a good end point, but it will likely take more than running a limited Facebook ad to get there. To help you align expectations with your efforts, check out the categories below and pick the one that best defines your audience. As with all things marketing, none of this is written in stone and there are always exceptions, but you should be able to see some similarities that pull you toward one or the other.<\/p>\n
Most of our audience doesn\u2019t know who we are:<\/strong> If this sounds like your company, you\u2019ll be mounting branding and awareness campaigns. It\u2019s going to be awfully difficult to convince someone to buy from you if they\u2019ve just met you. At this stage, you\u2019ll want people to see your brand logo and\/or products often, so that when it comes time to make a purchase decision, you\u2019ll already have a trust and awareness that your competitors (hopefully) don\u2019t. No matter the stage or size of your company, branding and awareness is always important. Just ask Coca-Cola and Nike. The goal of your campaign is to familiarize your audience with your brand and products or services.<\/em><\/p>\n Some of our audience knows who we are, but we want to increase the rate at which they are purchasing: <\/strong>There\u2019s a lot of good news at this stage. Your audience has enough brand and product familiarity to consider you when it comes to time to make a purchasing decision. In this stage you will want to focus on delivering value propositions that resonate with your audience. The primary goal of your campaign is to win clicks from your audience. The secondary goal of your campaign is to win conversions, be that a sale, newsletter sign up, an event RSVP or a lead.<\/em><\/p>\n We have a large volume of one time purchasers that we would like to turn into more frequent customers:<\/strong> This is fantastic news. If the statisticians are correct, the cost to get this audience to convert again should be at around an 80% discount from what you\u2019d pay to gain that new customer. The primary goal of your campaign is to win clicks from your audience. The secondary goal of your campaign is to win conversions, such as a sale, an appointment, or an event RSVP.<\/em><\/p>\n This will be most important if you\u2019re running a campaign with clicks and conversions as your goals. The reason for this is because, unlike in a branding campaign, you\u2019re looking for your audience to take action. The big question to answer in your campaigns is:<\/p>\n What wins a click with this audience?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Having to guess the correct answer to that question the first time out is an incredible weight to bear, and an unnecessary one. Make sure that you have a budget that\u2019s large enough to allow you to learn what makes your audience respond so that you can communicate with them better. To that end, think of your Facebook marketing as a science (yuck, we know, but we promise it\u2019s easy science!):<\/p>\n Make a hypothesis<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cI think X is my audience\u2019s pain-point\u201d<\/p>\n Test<\/strong> – Run an ad offering a solution to that pain-point.<\/p>\n Evaluate<\/strong> – Review your results. Did your audience respond to your message?<\/p>\n Judging the success of a campaign is tough if you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re testing against. For that reason, we always recommend running one idea against another. If you want to see if people in New York respond better than the rest of the country, run those ad groups at the same time. If you want to see if an image of a dog gets more clicks than an image of a lawyer, run those ads at the same time.<\/p>\n To make sure that you\u2019re learning what specifically drove your better results, we always suggest tests where you\u2019re running (almost) the exact same ad but with only one changed variable. The variables can be (but are not limited to):<\/p>\n Headline Another obstacle that may be derailing your paid Facebook efforts is entering with too low of a budget to accommodate the size of your audience. While no one can seem to agree on how many times someone needs to see your ad in order to take action, it\u2019s almost universally agreed upon that it\u2019s more than once.To correctly budget for your audience, especially without a strong history of results, you\u2019ll need to rely on some general rules of thumb:<\/p>\n Estimate that you will reach 75% of your potential audience.<\/strong>\u00a0If Facebook says your potential audience is 10,000 people, you should estimate that you will actually be able to reach 7,500. The reason for this is because some of the potential audience won’t be using Facebook while your campaign is running. Another reason is because your ad is competing in a real-time auction for ad space, which means you may lose impressions to another advertiser competing for that user’s attention. If you stink with figuring out percentages, like me, you can rely on this percentage calculator<\/a>\u00a0to help with your estimates.<\/p>\n Estimate that you will be able to deliver 1,000 ad impressions for $10.<\/strong>\u00a0This will almost certainly fluctuate, but I’ve found that estimating a $10 CPM generally puts my budgets in the right ballpark. If my estimated reach is 7,500 people and I want each person to see the ad once, I should have a budget of at least $75.<\/p>\n Aim to deliver 8 ad impressions to everyone in your audience within the campaign\u2019s duration.<\/strong>\u00a0With this estimate, if it will cost me $75 to reach everyone once, I need to multiply that budget 8 times for the correct hard cost spend. This means my budget should be $600.<\/p>\n If you find that your budget won\u2019t allow you to execute properly on your audience size, the next step is to either increase the budget or decrease the audience size. A great starting point for reducing audience size is to reduce your geographic footprint. Perhaps your national campaign needs to be reduced to a single state, or your city campaign needs to be isolated to just the city, rather than the city +25 miles.<\/p>\n Test. Test. Test.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\nAs your ads run, you\u2019ll inevitably have to decide which variable won out. How do you decide? You\u2019ll know that you can safely pick a winner when one more click won\u2019t make a difference to the outcome.<\/p>\nLearn How To Create a Facebook Username for Your Business Page<\/a><\/h3>\n
Budget Correctly for Your Audience.<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Track Your Results<\/strong><\/h2>\n