Created by four Harvard University students in 2004, Facebook started life as an online forum for students at the university to chat and connect. Today, it’s one of the most visited web pages on the net.
At the beginning of 2016, Facebook was getting over 1 BILLION daily visits – with 27 million of these coming from the UK.
And amongst those 27 million could be customers who are interested in what you’ve got to offer, so for brands and businesses, it holds huge marketing and advertising potential.
The only trouble is, a lot of brands and businesses don’t utilise this potential and are making a big mistake…
They only view Facebook as a FREE marketing platform. After all, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to set up a business Facebook page than it is to create a Facebook Ads campaign.
But that’s not going to bring in customers effectively. Why? Well, we like to think of Facebook Advertising as the Sniper Approach. If you just have a business page, you’re relying on anyone and everyone who visits that page to be interested in what you have to offer.
With Facebook Ads, you can target people who ARE actually interested in what you have to offer. That way you’re not exhausting your efforts on people that don’t really care.
The type of people that only use the free aspect of Facebook are the same people that get no results. Facebook operates a ‘pay-per-click’ style advertising system to promote your business on targeted Facebook feeds, whereby you – quite literally – pay every time a user clicks on one of your adverts.
AND don’t worry about being stung by a big bill at the end of the month; you can set exactly how much you’re prepared to pay for those clicks, guaranteeing that Facebook keeps within your budget.
The best thing about Facebook Ads is that they don’t even have to have “liked” your page! You can promote just about anything to a completely new audience who may have never even heard of your business.
You set how much you want to pay, who sees your adverts and how long they’re displayed for. Ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat and it’s up to you to use the tools at your disposal to drive your Facebook campaign forward.
What do we mean by Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are paid-for advertising that appears somewhere on your customer’s newsfeed.
Brands, businesses and advertisers pay the social network to promote their business to Facebook users.
These adverts fall into several different categories, here are the main ones:
– Traffic Driving Ads
– Engagement Ads
– Event Responses
– Video Views
We’ll look at the differences between these ads in the next section.
All you need to know for now is that they’re all paid-for advertising options that allow you to promote your product/service to users across Facebook. These users may already like your page, be friends of these fans, or fall into specific audiences based on a whole host of criteria, such as their age, location and relationship status.
Who sees my ad?
Your advert will then only be shown to people who fit into any demographic you choose, meaning none of your budget is wasted. You then pay every time someone clicks on your ad (Cost Per Click) or every time your advert is displayed to a user (Cost Per Impression).
For example; you could choose to show your advert to 1,000 people and set a price for this. When your advert has been displayed 1,000 times to 1,000 unique users, it won’t display again. Likewise, you could choose to set a cost-per-click of £1 and a maximum budget of £100. When 100 have clicked on your advert and the money is burned up, it won’t display again. You only pay when the audience you want to see your Ads clicks on them.
The beauty is; you’re totally in control. You can create an advert that is only displayed to 1000 people who are based within 15 miles of Birmingham. It wouldn’t matter if all of them or none of them clicked, once those 1000 people had been shown your advert, it would disappear. This is an example of a cost-per-impression (or CPM) Facebook advert.
You could choose to run a CPC advert. With these adverts, you set a daily budget and a maximum cost-per-click (CPC). For example, you could set your daily budget at £10 and a maximum CPC of £1. When your advert has been clicked ten times and the daily budget is used up, your advert won’t be shown again until the next day.
Never be out of pocket…
This means you’ll never spend more than you can afford, and you’ll never be met with an extortionate bill at the end of the month because you only pay when you get results – we recommend CPC!
One of the biggest reasons why we’d recommend adding Facebook advertising to your marketing mix is that you can experiment with relative low risk – reducing and increasing your budget as you need to – to see how well your campaigns are performing. You can take a ‘mix and match’ approach to choosing which adverts types, budget, and targeting work best for you and continue to test and change your adverts as you progress.
Now you know what Facebook advertising is, we’re going to explain why you should be using it…
Why Facebook Ads Should Be Part Of Your Marketing Plan
We’ve touched on some of these ideas earlier on, but we’re going to look at them in a little more detail here:
They put you in control.
There’s so much you can control when it comes to Facebook Ads. You not only decide exactly how much you want to spend but you also decide exactly who sees your adverts. Facebook gives you the power to target your ads to very specific demographics and characteristics so not a penny of your budget is wasted. You can target ads based on location, age, gender, relationship status, sexuality, interests, job roles and much more.You can also decide exactly how long your adverts run for. Whether you want to run campaigns for two weeks to test things out, or a whole month to promote a special deal; you have total control.
They’re manageable.
Even if you’re not a marketing pro, it’s super easy to manage your Facebook ads. The advertising interface is really user-friendly, and Facebook talks you through every step of the way. It’s really easy to increase or decrease your budget, change how long your adverts run for or tweak your targeting. Facebook’s advertising platform is definitely easier to manage than a lot of pay-per-click marketing dashboards, which makes it a really good “entry level” advertising platform for business owners.
You can maximise your Facebook potential
In this day and age, it’s hugely important for brands and businesses to have a social media presence. But a business page on Facebook alone will only get you so far. And yes, your business page can be effective, but there’s so much more you could be doing on Facebook.By supporting your Facebook page – and other online marketing efforts – with paid-for advertising, you can reach a wider audience and create a much more varied marketing mix. You can experiment with different types of content, target different audiences, and give exclusive offers to your loyal fans. Facebook Ads are a great addition to your marketing plan and are one of the best ways to maximise your online marketing potential.
Let’s take a look at some different Facebook Ads
Facebook allows you to run all sorts of different campaigns…There are four main types of Facebook Ads that we’re going to take a quick look at:
- Traffic Driving Ads
- Engagement Ads
- Event Responses
- Video Views
We’ll explain the differences between these categories – from what they look like, who they’re shown to, and what goals they achieve – to help you decide which you could use to promote your business.
Traffic Driving Ads
Facebook Ads can be used to drive traffic towards your website or a dedicated landing page. When you choose an objective for your campaign, “Send people to your website” is the one that you’ll find yourself using 90% of the time. It’s pretty easy to understand:
- You run an Ad to your chosen audience
- Someone in your audience clicks your Ad
- They go straight to your designated web page
See? Simple! If you’ve already had a dig around in Facebook’s Advertising platform, you’ll have noticed another type of Ad that drives traffic directly to a webpage – Website Conversions. When you use this, Facebook will optimise your Ad to people who are more likely to engage with you.
You see, Facebook is pretty intelligent. It knows who buys stuff online and who is likely to opt in for any lead magnets you have to offer, and it can target your Ad to those people. Facebook will charge you per “opt in” or “conversion”.
Engagement Ads
If you want your Ads to support your social media strategy and boost engagement on your website, then you’ll want to be opting for ‘Boost your post’ and ‘Boost your page’ Ads .
Boost your post Ads will boost the ‘reach’ of your posts, by promoting a particular post to an intended audience. All you have to do is choose which post you want to promote!
You might be running a competition and want people to get involved. If it’s likes you’re going for, then “Boost your page Ads” will be the better way to go. ‘Boost your Page’ Ads ask people straight out to like your page, as well as making it really easy for them – all they have to do is click!
Event Responses
There’ll be times that you’ll want to promote an event, and for that, you’ll need to ‘Raise Attendance at Your Event’ ad type.
Once you’ve created an event on your Facebook Business page, you’ll be able to get people to interact with an invitation. That can opt into your event and keep up to date with updates, find out who else is going and create a buzz.
Video Views
If using video as part of your marketing, you may want to considering embedding your video directly into the news feeds of your target audience.
This works similarly to ‘Boost your Post’ Ad.
You put the video up, write a couple of lines of text (don’t forget to include a link to your page) and then promote the video to a specific target audience.
Your Facebook Strategy
So what strategy should you be using for your business?
It’s up to you what Facebook strategy you choose to run with. From generating leads to selling your product, the possibilities are endless. But we’ll let you into a little EC secret…
We’ve had tremendous success over the last few months when we’ve used Facebook Ads to generate leads. What do we mean? Well, in our Facebook Ad campaigns we choose to offer our prospects something of value… completely free of charge!
We’re not trying to sell our services or give them a good deal on our membership levels. We just offer them something that would be useful like a downloadable guide. The thinking behind this is, that why wouldn’t they click the advert to claim their free guide? They don’t have to pay anything and they get something of value.
This kind of approach can work for practically every business. It doesn’t have to be a downloadable guide, you just need to give something away that won’t cost you more than you make back from them if they choose to do business with you, but is still of considerable value to them.
For instance, a driving instructor might offer a Highway Code book for free to anyone who enters their details, or a children’s nursery might offer a children’s storybook. By harvesting a list of potential customers you are able to nurture that list over time with the aim of turning them into valuable customers.
Another important part when you get started on Facebook advertising is to make sure that you test which ones work the best.
