Facebook has become a marketing platform in addition to a social network. As one of the arsenals in any social media marketing strategy, it is not only a place for brands to talk to their customers but also a channel that can help to promote brand awareness and increase online sales.
Although Facebook’s advertising ROI has been declining and it is facing rising costs and targeting difficulties due to evolving privacy policies and regulations, it is still a vital channel to consider. After all, with roughly 2.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook continues to dominate the social media landscape and provides advertisers some of the best targeting possibilities available.
To reach potential customers where they already are, your online store should take advantage of third-party platforms as distribution networks. Among others, Facebook advertising is a highly efficient tool for this purpose.
Let’s look at how to use Facebook effectively, and how to create successful campaigns.
Promoting your business on Facebook has many advantages.
While Facebook advertising may have lost some of its luster in recent years, the platform still boasts the most extensive user base and provides access to Instagram. To avoid wasting your marketing dollars on ads that don’t help your bottom line, it’s important to develop your Facebook ad strategies properly.
Advertising on Facebook has several benefits:
- Ads can be targeted to specific audiences and interests using advanced targeting tools
- Seamless integration of e-commerce
- Analytics that provide valuable insights
- One of the biggest social media platforms
- Accessibility to the whole Facebook Ad Library
- Options to suit all budgets
It’s an excellent tool for reaching out to new customers and expanding your reach, as well as maintaining strong ties with your current customers. For every Facebook ad, you actually get to choose from three main goals:
Awareness. If you want to draw in new clients and are new to running a business or Facebook advertising, use this target. Promoting an event or introducing a new product offering are two examples of how you could employ awareness goals.
Consideration. Once people have heard about your product or service, you can follow up with ads that explain it in greater detail. These ads should either increase participation or increase the number of leads you generate.
Conversion. Convert visitors into customers, or leads into prospects. You want to implement a call to action strategy, where people take some action—like making a purchase, visiting your landing page, getting driving directions to your location, or filling out a form giving you their contact information.
The best time to start thinking about Facebook ads is when you have a business goal. There are many ad types available, and businesses of all sizes can use them in a variety of ways and price points.
5 Must Have Strategies For A Successful Facebook Ad Campaign
1. Select targeted audiences to personalize your ads.
If you want to reach a very specific demographic or run highly targeted promotions and/or ads, Facebook is an excellent platform for you to do it. If your company doesn’t already have an extensive database of consumer information, this will be a huge benefit.
Using Facebook’s Core Audience function, you may narrow down your target audience based on the following five factors:
Location
Target particular regions, provinces, villages, cities, ZIP codes, etc. It’s also possible to specify a radius from a given spot; for instance, users within a 10-mile radius of the ZIP code 12345.
Demographics
Options for targeting include age, gender, education, employment, language, political affiliation, income, marital status, and others.
Interests
Activities that your target people would enjoy include hobbies and other interests.
Behavior
This portion of Facebook takes into account customers’ online activity, including device usage, network speed, and purchasing habits.
Connections
With the help of this targeting feature, you can choose whether you want to focus on Facebook page followers who are somewhat familiar with your brand or if you wish to exclude them in favor of increasing brand recognition and client acquisition.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature can help you figure out who your audience is. You can customize your Core Audiences by using the information provided by Audience Insights, which details the geography, demographics, interests, behavior and connections of your present followers.
2. Grow your consumer base by using Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook Custom Audiences are sets of Facebook users who have some familiarity with your brand. They are users who have already visited your website, interacted with your Facebook posts or page, subscribed to your emails, bought something from you, or interacted in some other way with your brand.
Facebook uses the information you provide about your clients to compare them to its own database of people, in order to identify commonalities and establish specific connections. After that, Facebook organizes these individuals into groups so that you may target them with various ad campaigns.
Custom Audiences can be made in four different ways:
Website Custom Audiences
These groups are from people who have visited your website or a particular page there.
App activity Custom Audience
These groups of users are those who have interacted with your mobile app or performed a particular action there.
Customer list Custom Audience
When you import a spreadsheet with customer information, Facebook will create this audience group by matching the data to its users.
Engagement Custom Audiences
Individuals or groups that have previously interacted with your Facebook content or advertisements, such as by watching a video, completing a lead form, or visiting your Facebook page.
3. Utilize “lookalike” targeting to increase your market
Your Custom Audiences will help you develop new targetable groups over time that have comparable traits. These groups of people are known as lookalike audiences.
Lookalike Audiences share many characteristics with your current audience, making it easy to tailor your marketing efforts to them and increase conversions. You can reach these new audiences by recycling the campaigns you’ve already got going for your primary demographic.
This method of Facebook advertising is excellent for attracting new clients. You may introduce your brand to these demographics with ease by using tried-and-true ad campaigns that have already resonated with them.
The degree of similarity between your Lookalike Audience and the source audience is measurable. You can target a more limited yet focused audience if you keep it reasonably similar. Targeting a larger but broader audience is possible if you give the audience a lot of room for variation. With a limit of 500 Lookalike Audiences allowed by Facebook, there is ample potential for experimentation and creativity.
4. Retargeting past visitors to your Facebook and Instagram pages
Facebook retargeting advertisements are displayed to those who have previously visited your e-commerce site or engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.
This Facebook advertising technique is perfect for reconnecting with your existing customers. You can target users based on their activities on Facebook, such as likes, purchases, or even websites they visit.
This Facebook advertising technique has various uses, and retargeting alternatives include users who have:
- Used Facebook and/or Instagram to interact with your brand
- Checked out your website
- Used your mobile app
- Spent a specific length of time on your website.
- Visited particular pages on your website
- Checked a product (also known as “viewed content”).
- Added an item to their shopping cart
- Prompted checkout
5. Evaluate your competitors in the Facebook Ad Library
Advertising is about pulling people’s attention to you. To capture attention, you must understand what attracts people to your message. After you establish your brand’s Facebook ad tactics and construct promotional campaigns, research what competitor businesses are doing in this area.
Facebook created Facebook Ad Library in 2018 in an effort to boost openness surrounding advertisers (now Meta Ad Library). The database holds all of the Facebook advertising that has ever been published, both past and present.
Keyword searches are available for all classified ads, and users can narrow their results by area and four ad categories: issues, elections, or politics; housing; job; and credit.
If you study your direct and indirect competitors’ Facebook advertising, you may be able to develop a winning ad strategy for your own page. Consider the creativity of their ads—both in language and visuals—as well as variations on those themes.
Finally…
While it’s possible to “set it and forget it,” the most successful Facebook advertising undergoes continuous optimization.
To maximize the success of your Facebook advertisements, you must test different approaches and make adjustments based on the data you collect. For example, you could compare the performance of video advertisements to that of photo ads. One way for you to measure the success of your ads is through cost per click (CPC), then from there, you can decide if that strategy is working out for you or not.
Facebook advertising is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Trial and error are necessary while identifying what works for your business, but once you find the methods that benefit your business it is time to enhance those strategies and build on them.
