Resources
This week we are starting a series on who to actually use each platform to enhance a company’s digital marketing strategy.
Over the last few weeks we released a series of blogs regarding each social media platform and how they can assist small and local businesses.
We are going to start this series off with Facebook – The biggest and baddest of them all. This is a bit long but bear with me, I believe you will greatly benefit what I’m about to discuss!
What are the reasons why Facebook is good for digital advertising:
The Amount of Users – Welcome to the home of 2.6 billion users. This is over a 3rd of the entire population on earth. As a marketing if that doesn’t get you excited…nothing will.
General Cost Per Lead – The destiny of your digital advertising on Facebook is completely up to you. Spend as little or as much as you want. But the average CPL of $1.72…should keep you using this platform for a very long time to come.
Targeting & Retargeting – The segmentation level of Facebook has no peers. Bar none the best you can get outside of Google. Then the ways you can remarket to those same people is ridiculous.
It is also extremely easy to use and the analytics are legit.
So let’s dive into how we can start using Facebook advertising.
Launching a Facebook ad campaign
It is going to start out with your company’s or products value add proposition. What is your company or the product you are advertising going to do that sets it apart from the competition.
For some companies this is very clear and simple to understand. For others it might not be that simple. Here are some steps you can take to work this out:
Some of you might be wondering why this is the first step. Understanding what you are advertising and how this will improve your clients or consumers is a must before even starting to advertise.
Determine your Audience
This is where you will learn how in depth Facebook can know your audience. Facebook has something called Facebook Audience Insights.
This is a tool that anyone on Facebook can use in the Facebook Ads Manager.
There are a couple ways this tool can be used to determine your audience on Facebook.
If you already have an exact understanding of who your target audience is then you can use this tool to narrow down to market to only those types of people.
If you don’t know exactly who your target audience is, this tool is very helpful to understand people with similar interests to help you determine who would be the best audience to send your marketing to.
When you open up Facebook Audience Insights it will ask you if you want information about the people already following your page or if you want to extract information from the entirety of all Facebook users.
When you pick people connected to your page it will request that you input your page into their program. You will also be able to input other pages similar to yours or that you think would be interested in your product or services.
From here you can start narrowing down your target. You can pick geographically where you want to concentrate. Nationwide, state, city, county, etc.
You can then determine the age group you want to target. You can determine if you want everyone or pick between male and female.
Here is where you can really start to narrow down the audience. The next category is interests. Facebook has hundreds of interests already picked out and you can use these or you can type in keywords and many of these will already be in the system and you can use these to narrow your target down.
You can then widdle it down even further with language, relationship status, education, work, market segments, parents, politics and life events.
All this will happen along the left hand side of the screen. While you are refining your audience on the right side of your screen Facebook will populate statistically information.
Percentage of Men compared to Women, Relationship status, education level, the percentages of job titles held by all these people or their work, etc.
There will be another tag called Page Likes. Facebook will break the top categories based on the demographics you picked. It will also give you location and device information. It is very, very detailed.
When you have fully determined who your audience is, you can then save that audience to use for any future campaigns that will be applicable.
Setting Up Tracking with Google Tag Manager and Facebook Ads Manager
Regardless of what you do in business, it needs to be effective. How does any business track effectiveness. Statistics or analytics. The same applies to any marketing campaign that you run.
There are a few things that a business needs to do to ensure they properly track the campaigns they are running.
The first thing you need to do is ensure that you have a Google Tag Manager. Once you this set up work your way to the website container and hit the “Add Tag” button. You will want to ensure you pick “custom html” and add a name for your tag.
Now open up Facebook Business Manager and head to the Events Manager. Then select “add event”. You will be given an option and ensure you select “install code manually”. You want to ensure that you get the entire code so select the option “copy code”.
Make you way back to Google Tag Manager and insert this code into the HTML container. Go to advanced settings dropdown and pick “Once per page” that you will find under “Tag firing options”. Then under “Fire on” pick “all pages”. Then hit the create tag button and you are all set.
If you have any problems with this, use this link – Facebook Tag Help
Call to Action & Conversion Goals
Now that you have set up the tracking as covered above, we will need to determine what is being tracked.
Based on the marketing strategy you are executing, your call to actions (CTAs) and goals will be different.
Most people assume that marketing = leads. While this is true, marketing is responsible for so much more.
A business could be running a branding campaign and they are not looking for leads, but they are working on exposure.
How a company tracks the analytics will be determined by the CTAs and goals.
There are many different CTAs that can be done with Facebook. When creating an ad on Facebook there are many different campaign objectives
Are you going to send them to a landing page? Fill out a form on Facebook, etc. You need to know what you are working for.
This is the first thing you will be asked for by Facebook when creating an Ad. So ensure that you have this worked out beforehand.
Setting Up the Advertisement
After picking the objective for your campaign Facebook, it will take you New campaign set up page.
There is a place to name the campaign. Just click inside and rename what you want it to be.
It asks if this is a “Special Ad Category”. If your ad has anything to do with Credit, employment, housing, social issues, elections or politics then you will need to turn this on. Facebook will reject it otherwise.
The next section will be for A/B testing. I highly recommend that you do A/B testing and continue to do A/B testing for every single ad campaign you run. So create two ads when setting this up.
There will be a button to press to activate this. Make sure that you do.
The next section is called “Campaign Budget Optimization”. This is a bit of an advanced feature. If you are running multiple ad sets within a single campaign and don’t want to individually set up each budget and watch each budget, you can set up a daily spend budget and let Facebook decide where to spend the most money based on performance. I recommend this when you get to this level of advertising.
Now hit the next button on the bottom right of the page to move onto the next part of setting up your advertisement.
Ad Set Page
The next page is called the Ad Set Page. There are a couple of important aspects of this page you need to pay attention to.
First section of this is for “Conversion Location”. It will ask you:
Website
App
Messenger
Whats App
You will need to pick where you are trying to get your conversions from. Most will be done on this website.
The next section is “Dynamic Creative”. This is a tool that Facebook offers where you can add images and they will put together an ad for use based on the demographics you picked in the beginning for what they feel will work the best.
Sometimes this works great and sometimes it totally misses the mark. Based on what you see you will have to determine if this works for your Facebook ad. Turn it on and follow the instructions. If you don’t like what you see you can also go back and turn this off and make your own.
Now we get to “Create Offer”. This will allow you to create an offer that people can save and get reminders about. This helps drive conversions if you have a specific product or service or special, etc.
I highly recommend this option. Click this feature on. It will open up a popup window. Fill out all the information for the offer. You can make it online only or in-store. You can add a promo code. There are a lot of options for this.
Now we get to the budget. You can set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Make sure you understand the budget amount you have to work with.
If this is going to be an ongoing campaign that is not going to stop, then choose the daily budget. Facebook will ensure that your advertising does not exceed this budget daily and you can ensure to stay within your monthly budget range.
If this is a set budget for a specific event, special, etc and you only have an exact number to spend and after there will be no more advertising the lifetime budget is the option you should choose.
Now you can schedule out exactly what day you would like to start the advertising. So, if you have a very organized marketing department they can have ads planned out well in advance. Makes life a bit easier. If needed you can select an end date as well.
The next is where you can determine the audience. If you already save an audience from earlier, you can just pick that. If not determine it here.
The next section is “Placements”. You can have automatic placements where Facebook decides the best place to put the ad, or manual placement where you decide exactly where you want the ad to go.
Unless you have a very, very specific group or place you want the ad to go, I would do the automatic placements done by Facebook.
Once this is done, go and hit the next button on the bottom right hand corner to move onto the next page.
Ad Creation
Create the name of the ad. Just click inside the box to update the name. You can select posting it to instagram as well if you have a connected account.
The “Ad Set Up” section. Pick Single Image or Video, Carousel or Collection. Videos are by far the most viewed media on any social media platform. So if you have video, USE IT. If not I would recommend having a single image. You will not have a lot of time to get people’s attention so don’t try and overwhelm them.
That being said you can use an option called Instant Experience. This will open up a pop up and allow you to give an eye catching image and text. Then put multiple products that you are selling with buttons to take them directly to pages connected to that product. I would only suggest this to those companies that have e-commerce with a lot of products.
The next section is called “Ad Creative”. Here are some tips that you can use.
Images
1. If you have the single graphic, ensure that you use text as well if your goal is conversion based.
2. If you have an education type post such as a blog, not having text is ok.
3. Whenever possible use real people in your visuals. This creates a more personal relationship with your audience.
4. The visual needs to stand out. You do not want to look like every other ad on Facebook. Be original.
Videos
1. Short. Don’t use long drawn out videos. Facebook suggests 15 seconds if you want people to watch the entire video.
2. Over 85% of people will not have their sound on when scrolling through Facebook. Ensure you have captions for the video. Facebook can provide these for you.
3. Real People. Just like the images, in your videos as much as possible use real people.
Earlier I mentioned A/B testing. I highly suggest that you use this. So you will want to ensure to create two ads that are slightly different in images and copy. This will be important in tracking the effectiveness of your campaign as time goes on.
Campaign Analytics and Testing
Once you have started the campaign you will want to see which of the two ads you create performed the best. Scrap the one with the worst performance and create a new ad to compete against the best performing ad. Keep doing this through the life of your campaign until you get optimal results.
If necessary, play with your audience to see if you get better results with a different type of audience. You might be surprised by what happens.
Once you have an ad that is performing very well, increase the budget to get even more results. But continue to watch this. If it drops then pull back on the budget and get back to A/B testing.
As part of your A/B testing ensure you are playing with the CTAs. Change it up a bit between the ads to ensure you are always working on having the best CTAs.
Ending
Facebook can be extremely lucrative. It can also waste a lot of money if you just randomly throw money at it. That is why you are always playing with the ads and forwarding the top performing ads and scraping the ones that are converting.
To make it worse, Facebook changes its algorithm all the time. So what was working could suddenly stop working and you need to move fast to avoid losing money.
A lot of local or small business owners don’t have the bandwidth to work on Social media advertising continuously and therefore just throw money at it. As this isn’t effective a lot of businesses feel that social media doesn’t work for businesses.
Either they should hire a marketing person directly within the company or hire a marketing company that has success in working with Social Media.
I hope you found this article helpful. Go ahead and follow any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog to continue to get great articles such as this.
I hope you found this article helpful. Go ahead and follow any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog to continue to get great articles such as this.
