 Hitting the Boost button and hoping for the best? Spent $100 on ads and not sure where it's gone? Facebook has made it super easy to promote your business, but easy doesn't equal effective. See below for more. A lot of business owners have explored Boosting posts and running Facebook Ads to promote their business, if you're reading this I'm sure you have too. Facebook is becoming increasingly 'pay-to-play' and almost aggressive in how much they encourage page managers to promote their page, often with the 'Boost' button. While they make it easy, many business owners are hitting Boost with no clear goal or understanding of how these ads work and as a result often end up wasting their money, thinking they need to spend $1,000's to run ads properly or dismissing Facebook Ads completely. With a few simple tweaks, it's very much possible to use Facebook Ads to run cost-effective ads to reach more people. I believe effective advertising is all about reaching the right people, with the right message at the right time. A lot of business owners running Facebook Ads for the first time get one of more of these wrong. Let's break this down: #1: Reaching the right people - effective targeting “Everyone is not your customer.” — Seth Godin It's important your ads are reaching the right audience. You only want to be paying to reach your ideal customers and those most likely to make a purchase, so you need to be specific in your targeting. If you're boosting your posts, Facebook can often default to reaching everyone 18+ across the country unless you specify otherwise. Facebook will show your ads to whoever is most likely to 'engage' with them, this isn't always your ideal customer unless you've set your targeting parameters accordingly. Facebook has four key ways to target - location, age, gender and interests (there are more but we'll stick to the basics to keep things simple). Having your ads show nationwide when you have a specific service area is wasting your money. I see many ads come up on my Facebook feed that do not apply to me, often because of the location. As an example, my own Facebook Ads target audience might look like the following:
Here I'm trying to reach business owners who are currently responsible for looking after their social media presence and may find my content, such as this blog, helpful. Facebook then gives me an estimated audience size between 24,600 - 28,900 (at time of writing) so I know how many people meet this criteria. Expanding this out to all of NZ, keeping the other targeting consistent gives an audience of 904,100 - 1,100,000. Putting the location back to Palmy but targeting all ages (18+) makes it 49,100 - 57,700. This gives a lot of insights into audience size and how much it changes as you widen or narrow who you want to reach. Facebook's targeting options are one of the biggest strengths of the platform but also one of the most underutilised among small businesses. Too many people are paying to get their posts in front of a very general audience and then wonder why their ads aren't 'working' #2: Promoting the right content - effective copywriting What are you trying to achieve with your advertising? The content or "Ad Creative", as we marketers often call it, is primarily made up of two things, "Primary text" (ie the post caption) and "Media" (ie. the post image, photos, graphic...). These are important as it what dictates whether someone will give your ad any attention or will scroll right past it. Your Ad Creative offers the most room for creativity, two businesses running ads with the same goal and targeting the same audience can get vastly different results depending on their Ad Creative. It's important to note that speaking to people who already follow your business is different to people who have no idea who you are or what you do. You want to ensure your ad gives a good first impressions of your business. Your Ad Creative should try to answer these key questions:
If you're wanting people to make contact, you have to give them a good reason to. For example, if you're wanting more calls, make this obvious, have your phone number front and centre and give people a reason to call you ie. to book an appointment, arrange a free quote etc. If you want people to visit your website, include a clickable link to your website in the post caption. These points sound obvious but are often neglected. #3: Selecting the right goal - letting Facebook know what you want Using the wrong goal for your ads is probably where most beginners go wrong and get lost when trying to compare ad results. While all business obviously want more clients and more sales, we need to work backwards as people are unlikely to hand over cash after seeing one ad on Facebook. Facebook has 6 key campaign objectives, these are:
While Leads and Sales objectives sound great, it's important to note that runnings ads with a Leads or Sales objective certainly does not guarantee leads or sales from your ads. These are tricky to get right and often require working with an agency and having a high ad spend to work well and get a good return on investment. I focus on Awareness and Traffic Ads to respectively get maximum ad reach and quality web traffic which are both helpful for small businesses looking to build their brand and increase their online presence. From Facebook: The objective you choose determines which results or metrics you use to understand your campaign performance. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of people who visit your website but you choose the engagement objective, you may be surprised to see a high number of Page likes but no link clicks. You should have therefore chosen the traffic objective instead. Checking results Comparing the results of different Boosted posts can be tricky as there are many variables at play. I recommend using the Ads Manager interface which lets you view your ad results in more details with a range of filters and sorting tools to make helpful and fair comparisons. Common Facebook Ads metrics you should know:
These are all metrics you should be monitoring to evaluate and compare ad performance. This data is best accessed via the Ads Manager interface. Conclusion It can be easy to spend $100's on an ad, have it fail to deliver results and write the ad platform off as something that doesn’t work for you. Likely it was a particular ad that failed to deliver because of poor targeting, a weak Ad Creative or mismatched goal. Want advice on your next Facebook Ad campaign
Reach out if you'd like a second opinion or a point in the right direction. My area of focus in helping business owners reach more of the right people for less. |