4 Insider Tips to Run Your Facebook Ads like a Professional
Despite the emergence of advertising on different social media websites, Facebook remains one of the best platforms for marketers to reach their audience. With its many business tools and huge user base, the website is an ideal place to launch an advertising campaign.
However, you need to use Facebook’s features effectively to avoid wasting money on unproductive marketing pushes. Figuring out a strategy that takes advantage of the platform’s options will help ensure a good ROI, as long as you fully understand the system and its inner workings. Here are some strategies to keep in mind so that you use your Facebook advertising campaign to its fullest potential.
1. Optimize Your Bidding
There are two camps when it comes to Facebook bid strategy: those who believe that you should allow Facebook to handle it for you, and those who argue that you should control it on your own.
On one hand, Facebook makes it easy to set a bid strategy and budget through its Optimized CPM feature. This tool allows Facebook to bid for ad space on your behalf, based on constraints you set. Some believe that this helps you maximize your budget while refraining from spending too much money accidentally. This is an ideal option for those less experienced in Facebook ad space costs and budget allocations.
For the more experienced, others argue that you should handle your bidding on your own terms. By selecting the advanced pricing model, you can set your own CPM bids and switch to CPC pricing if you prefer. This can save you some money, and provide you with a lot of flexibility regarding your ad campaign.
2. Always work on Targeting
Most companies have different customer bases with different expectations. Catering to those distinct groups will help you serve your audiences better, as well as making your Facebook ads more appealing to those groups.
Facebook’s Audience Insights is an excellent tool to start digging into what makes your client base tick. Basically, it grants business account owners access to data about specific audiences, allowing you to research your target market based on users who have liked your page. Since users who display interest in your business by liking the page are probably the types of people who would pay attention to your advertisements, Audience Insights is a treasure trove of information for crafting buyer personas.
You can then focus your advertising campaign based on the geographic locations, interests, ages, genders, and other characteristics of your target personas. Create ads to speak to your target audiences; luckily, Facebook makes this easy by allowing marketers to create separate advertisement sets for different audiences.
3. Test, Test, Test
One of the cardinal rules of creating a successful Facebook advertising campaign is to never assume that anything will work. Test every ad design and targeting attempt if you want to maximize your campaign’s reach and effectiveness.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be patient with seemingly low-performing ads; oftentimes, businesses pull ads too soon because of low conversion rates. It’s important to remember that Facebook ad campaigns can take some time to gain traction, so run your advertisement for about a week or so before you make changes to your campaign.
Another important aspect of testing regards ad variations. You should test variations in target audience, copy, images, design, and more to see what’s working and what isn’t. Consider running several different variations of an ad at the same time, then switch up pictures and copy on low-performing ads to make them more successful.
4. Leverage the “Social” Part of Social Media
Many people rely on recommendations from others when making purchasing decisions. Luckily, Facebook provides the social medium to provide this resource to your potential customers.
Testimonials from your customers are a great way to make your Facebook campaign more convincing to your viewership. Compelling stories from real people who have enjoyed your product or service on a platform as socially-oriented as Facebook could be all it takes to increase conversions.
If you aren’t able to get testimonials, you can also focus on your large user base to convince other Facebook users to click on your ad. Describing how many clients you already have immediately gives your advertisements a more social tint, and encourages others to join the party by seeing what so many others are enjoying through your company.
Although other platforms like Twitter and Instagram are certainly gaining ground, Facebook is still one of the best social media websites to launch your advertising campaign. If you take advantage of all the tools it has to offer, you can create a marketing push that will drive conversions and improve your ROI.