By no means all your Facebook followers will see all your publications. As the timeline of the average Facebook user is overcrowded and all getting fuller, organic reach will only decrease in the coming time. If you plan to get serious about social media, then advertising is an absolute must. Fortunately, Facebook has an extensive advertising programme, from which you can get returns fairly quickly. With a small budget, you can reach a large part of your target audience. Provided, of course, you know what you are doing. With these 5 Facebook advertising tips, you will at least take a big step in the right direction. Because although Facebook brings you closer to your target group, it is ultimately up to you to take the first step.
Advertising on Facebook
Too often, advertisers still use Facebook without really knowing what benefits the social media channel offers. A shame, because the secret to advertising is to show the right ad to the right person at the right time. Thanks to the handy Ads Manager targeted advertising on Facebook is easier than you think.
Step 1: Choose your target audience
The power of Facebook is that you as an advertiser can very precisely set the target audience for an ad, you are in control. For example, the target audience of an ad can be determined on a (combination of) the following characteristics:
- Geographical location: select people who live in a particular place, have been there recently, or are travelling in that area.
- Demographic characteristics: language, age, gender, marital status, education and employers.
- Interests: interests, hobbies, and pages that your target audience likes.
Be specific about who you want to reach
For any advertiser with a bit of experience, this is obviously a buy-in. Because if all goes well, you know exactly what characteristics your customers meet. Do you sell shoes and want to promote the new collection? Then you obviously want to show different shoes to a young 19-year-old woman than to a 48-year-old man whose main hobby is tennis. So it is important to be targeted and specific. Segmenting not only gives you a better reach, but also makes it a lot easier to analyse the results. After all, if you select a large number of interests, you can say something about the overall performance of the campaign, but you don't know which specific interests are decisive for the success of the ad. Try allocating your budget to the two best-performing interests and you'll be able to draw hit conclusions straight away.
The easiest way is to familiarize yourself with the Facebook Ads Manager. Pick any target so you come out to the targeting options. There you can experiment with all the options and Facebook will immediately tell you how big this group is. It is important not to make the target group too specific, e.g. less than 3,000 people. This can have negative consequences when advertising on Facebook, such as too high costs. It is also not advisable to lump everything together. For instance, you don't want to set up one target group for users who like hockey and tennis; instead, you want separate target groups for both. Spread your opportunities, but be selective.
Match your mailing list
One of the most interesting targeting options is 'Custom audiences'. This allows you to easily convert a contact list such as a database or e-mail list into an ad target group. You can also use this option for remarketing on Facebook to create a target group of website visitors. The idea is simple. You upload a file of email addresses or mobile phone numbers and/or install a remarketing pixel on your website. Facebook then looks at whether this group can be matched with its users. This is done completely anonymously, as Facebook does not store any data. Is a match found? Then you have an interesting prospect at your fingertips.
Friends and connections
Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding and constantly share their experiences through social media. Product comparisons are increasingly based on the experiences of others, and even forming an opinion is already happening via social media. The social character therefore offers plenty of opportunities to give your company a face. By selecting the target group based on friends and connections, users also get the feeling that they know you. Can you compete on the level of a friend, acquaintance or colleague?
Step 2: set your budget and bid
The least fun part of the campaign: the Facebook ad costs. Fortunately, it only comes at a cost if the campaign is weak or poorly set up. If all the steps are used strategically, advertising on Facebook will soon pay for itself. But how do you decide exactly how much budget you should allocate?
More budget is more momentum
Fair is fair, if you have a big budget as a company, you can also put a lot more momentum behind the ad. After all, many more people see your ad and the chances of the first users creating a viral effect are not only much higher, but also come sooner. And precisely that viral effect is important. Because if a few people cause interaction, the others will quickly follow. However, you have to give your ad enough power to get the ball rolling. So don't be afraid to use too much budget.
Choose a maximum budget
It works quite simply. When setting an ad budget on Facebook, you always choose a maximum budget you want to spend over a certain period of time. You have two options here; a daily budget and a maturity budget:
- Budget per day: basically speaks for itself, this is the average budget you want to spend per day.
- Running-time budget: the maximum budget over the entire duration of your Facebook ad set. The amount to spend is evenly distributed over the chosen period.
Once you have set the budget, an ad auction follows in which you compete with other ads for the same target audience. The ad with the highest ad bid, the greatest relevance to the target audience and the highest estimated number of actions has the highest chance of being shown. So, advertising on Facebook is not only about who bids the highest, but also that the ad is relevant to users. You cannot know in advance exactly how much an ad will cost. In all cases, of course, the available budget is taken into account.
Step 3: define the advertising objective
The average timeline is bulging with the amount of information that comes before it. To still ensure a wide reach, more and more advertising options have been added. Which type of ad is right for you depends entirely on the objective. What do you want your target group to do after seeing your ad? Click through to the web shop? Or do you want to build brand awareness or simply get more page likes?
There are several ad objectives to choose from. You can also combine these objectives with each other:
- Promote posts: raise awareness of posts even more, ensuring more likes, reactions and shares. In short, more interaction.
- Page likes: Get more likes on your Facebook page and build a bigger network. Once the page is liked? Then this group can be reached at a later date through the normal, free, publications.
- Clicks to website: Generate more visitors to your website or webshop and try to boost conversions.
- Leads: Generate enquiries or registrations on your website and collect information from people. This includes newsletter sign-ups, for example.
- App installations: increase the number of downloads of your mobile or desktop application.
- Engagement with app: Encourage users to use your app more often.
- Event promotion: Increase brand awareness and attendance at your event.
- Local reach: Reach people who are near your business.
- Claimed offers: Create a temporary offer to boost sales, enquiries or registrations.
- Video promotion: attract users' attention by highlighting your video.
- Product catalogue promotion: highlight products from your webshop
Step4: create the ad
The moment for the truly creative: creating the ad. After having set all the campaign guidelines, it is now time to add the photos or video, header, ad text and call-to-actions choose. The challenge is to impress with a maximum of 90 characters and a catchy image. The first step is to choose the right format for the ad. In doing so, you have the following options to choose from:
- Carousel: an advertisement with two or more images or videos displayed horizontally and allowing scrolling from left to right.
- An image: create up to six ads with one image.
- Single video: A video ad with one video.
- Slideshow: a slideshow with up to ten images.
- Canvas: a combination of photos and videos.
Choose the right dimensions
When selecting one of the above options, all advised design guidelines are displayed. All ads are then assessed for compliance with these criteria. This includes specifications such as the Facebook ad format, colour usage, text usage, but also the technical requirements for videos, for example. For instance, textual content is only allowed to take up a certain percentage of the image. Using the Facebook ad preview, you can easily check whether your image meets these before submitting the ad. The recommended guidelines So make sure your ad always looks as professional as possible. If you follow these rules, the message should have the most impact. Note that Facebook may reject the ad if the design recommendations are not met.
Timing: choose the right moment
Once the campaign has been active for a week, Facebook has collected enough data to analyse the results. A lot can be gleaned from this data, including peak and off-peak times. If the data shows that the results at a certain time are underwhelming, you can decide to stop showing the ad at that time. This option ensures that the budget is spent in a more targeted way and the ad is only shown at relevant times. So if the time of day of an ad makes little difference to you, it's better to send something out into the world when your competitors aren't posting anything for a while. That way, you will get more space and won't be snowed under by other posts during "rush hour". What applies to times of day also applies to days of the week. From Monday to Wednesday, for example, interaction is lower than on other days. So it is up to you to find the perfect time to advertise on Facebook.
Make it fun
It is important not to forget the social nature of the medium when advertising on Facebook. So keep in mind that Facebook is a leisure activity for most users. The trick, therefore, is to make the ad as entertaining as possible. That means the right tone-of-voice adhere to and thus speak the same language as the target audience, or participate at the level of friend or acquaintance. Being entertaining also means having a visual presence. An image that is fun, makes people laugh, or simply stands out is more likely to be shared by the target audience.
Step 5: Analyse, learn and optimise
After you have sent your ad onto the net, it is very important to keep some regularity in this. In fact, just as important as a high-quality ad is to actively follow up on efforts. For many companies, x-number of likes or a certain amount of clicks already works satisfactorily, but try to think much further than that. Analyse, learn and optimise. After all, advertising on Facebook should pay for itself.
A/B testing: more results for less money
You want your ad to strike the right chord and there are often several ways to do this. By launching several variants of an ad, you can compare the ads to assess which one performs best. The premise is crystal clear: you deactivate the worst-performing ads and keep the best-performing ads. You can then keep optimising these well-performing ads. So never be satisfied with the current score. A different colour or different text can make your ad score even better.
Install a conversion pixel
As an advertiser, you want to know as much as possible about your target audience. A conversion pixel makes this possible. This is a code you place on your website and link to your ad on Facebook. When people land on your site via the ad and perform an action, these results are sent back to Facebook. You can then view the results in Facebook, so you know exactly which ad generated a conversion.
Retargeting: the power of repetition
Many social media channels allow ads to specifically target certain users, and Facebook is the best example. Of course, it does become attractive if you can reach people who have already shown interest at an earlier time. Via retargeting can. Retargeting is therefore a perfect way to catch the eye of your target audience again. Previous visitors are thus enticed to complete the conversion. Two scenarios are conceivable here when advertising on Facebook:
- Not converted: Retargeting on Facebook works in the same way as retargeting on other websites. Via Facebook, the viewed content is highlighted again with the aim of converting this time.
- Converted though: if a customer has already gone through the entire sales funnel and made a purchase, you can use personalised retargeting to increase loyalty.
It's all about frequency
At the end of the day, of course, it's all about the cost per conversion. However, within Facebook advertising, results also depend on frequency. This simply means how many times a particular ad was shown to someone on average. So a frequency of 6 means that the target audience has seen the ad six times on average. If the cost suddenly shoots through the roof from one moment to the next, chances are that the ad is starting to irritate people. Facebook responds by charging more to still show the same ad to users. So the trick is to always stay below the irritation threshold. More is not always better.
Differentiate between desktop and mobile
To conclude. With a myriad of settings at your disposal, you can segment endlessly to reach your target audience. In doing so, though, it is important to keep ad groups for mobile and desktop separate. Ads often perform differently on a desktop screen than on a mobile device. When advertising on Facebook, it is therefore important to take this into account, especially with a view to measuring results.
Outsource advertising on Facebook?
Facebook is constantly changing. It can therefore be difficult to always keep abreast of the latest developments. The Fully Bookers will be happy to tell you more about it and keep you up-to-date.
