by Ilan Nass from Taktical Digital: NYC’s Leading Digital Marketing Agency
TW, LN @TakticalDigital | FB @Taktical
Facebook advertising has a lot to offer just about any business. With billions of active users, the social media platform has a reach that is incomparable to other outlets, digital or not. Along with a massive audience, it also provides businesses with a powerful set of tools that can help them to optimize their campaigns for the maximum ROI.
While Facebook can be good for promoting your brand and its products, there is a significant level of planning that goes into a successful ad campaign on the platform. Before you can start to grow your business with Facebook ads, you need to learn about the best practices and familiarize yourself with some of the tools that come with the platform.
Consulting with an experienced Facebook ad agency can be a good way to get started with your efforts to market through social media, but there are some things you can do on your own to get started. Here are a few tips that can help business owners as they start to work on their Facebook marketing strategy.
Target Custom Audiences
If you want to maximize your ROI through Facebook advertising, you have to take advantage of the custom audience tools that come with the platform. These tools are fairly easy to use, and they provide you with the ability to target very specific audiences. You can target people by broader categories (i.e. age, gender, geography) and more specific and creative options (i.e. type of device, hobbies, income).
Among the targeting tools that are available, you can choose to build a custom audience out of people that have visited your website or engaged with another part of your brand. You can even target website visitors that have taken specific action while browsing. These targeting options allow you to reach the right people with your ads, and this will help you to get the most from your Facebook advertising budget.
Use Split Testing
If you want to get Facebook expert-quality results, you have to run your campaigns like a pro. In the course of running ad campaigns, a top digital marketing agency will use split testing to evaluate the different features of an ad. This helps them discover the tactics that offer the best results.
Along with identifying the most successful components for a Facebook ad campaign, split testing can also help to reveal and remove strategies that are not having the desired result. Everything from the visual you use to your headline should be tested to see what yields the best results.
Fortunately, Facebook has features that are specifically designed for split testing. The Ads Manager has the options to run split testing on ads, and you can test for different metrics like cost per click and clickthrough rate.
Audience Insights
As a Facebook advertiser, you will have access to Audience Insights. With this tool, you can learn about your customers’ interests, behaviors, demographics, geography, and more. This can be valuable information for when you are trying to build a custom audience, and it can also help when you are trying to create content for the ads that you will send to these users.
Link to the Right Location
If you are spending time and money to advertise on Facebook, you want to make sure your ads are sending people to the right place. The more specific the link within an ad can be, the better. If it is an ad for a product, direct users to a landing page that is for that product.
Directing people to your homepage or your Facebook page might be good for some campaigns, but for most marketing goals, the best results come from directing people to pages that are related to the purpose of the ad.
When done right, Facebook advertising can be an affordable way to increase brand awareness and boost sales. To achieve the best return, you need to target the right customers, learn about your audience, and make content that is relevant to them. And don’t forget to test, test, test!