5 Steps to Succeed with Facebook Advertising - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice

You will be aware that Facebook is one of the largest potential sources of Internet traffic and engagement; it’s more popular than Google in some countries! You"€™ve probably also heard that if the number of Facebook users were equivalent to a country it would be the 3^rdlargest country in the world after India and China with 400 million users.

So if you"€™re not looking at Facebook to engage your audience and promote your products and services, you are missing a big opportunity.

You will know you can setup a Facebook Page for your company. But did you know you can advertise on Facebook, using Facebook Ads on a pay per click (CPC) or impressions (CPM) model?

This is a similar option to Google Adwords but the main difference is you can micro-target your audience with the a number of features for which I will share tips below.

What are Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads can be seen in the right side column on Facebook pages where they have an allocated space. In that space, up to three ads may show at one time on any given page. These right-hand spaces might include three Facebook ads or one Facebook ad and one banner ad. In the second case, the banner ad will always appear below the Facebook ad.

Facebook Ads are different to previous pay per click internet marketing tools where you had to select keywords to target your audience as you now can choose your ideal profile. You can target your ad by location, sex, age, keyword, relationship status, job title, workplace, or college. As you select each targeting criterion, Facebook will display the approximate number of users that your targeting encompasses "€“ really impressive!

Marketing Using Facebook on YouTube

The structure of the Ad is the title or headline, the image (110×80 pixels max), and the body text. You have a small area to attract your audience to click, read on for my top 5 tips.

Step 1 "€“ Set Your Goals and Identify Your Audience?

Before setting up a campaign, you should define the goals. Is the goal of the campaign to drive traffic? raise awareness? build Facebook fans? or generate leads?

This will define the purpose of the whole campaign, so it"€™s important to get this step clarified before starting. As a marketer paying for clicks, the goals will help identifying what is most important to you when driving traffic to a page on Facebook or your own website. You should focus on making sure your advert is highly targeted to the most relevant, appropriate audience.

So, the next action is to think about who will be interested in the product or service you want to advertise. Is there a main age group, sex, location etc that buys (or is interested in) that product or service more than the others. Targeting this group will give you the best chance of finding success.

Step 2 "€“ Targeting Options

Facebook has a number of different targeting options, make sure you set the criteria is relevant to your business. For example if you have a service that only sells in a certain location, make sure you select the relevant country, city and the advert is better received if it is in that country"€™s primary language.

Think like the audience "€“ what interests might they have that would qualify them as being interested in the campaign?

It is important to have a clear target segment in mind when launching a Facebook Ad so that you can take full advantage of the fine targeting that is possible based on the following filters:

General demographics such as location, age and sex.

Birthday – This is one of Facebook"€™s latest advertising targeting filters and helps you to engage on a more personal level with customers on their birthdays"€¦wishing them a happy birthday with the offer of a free gift can only help your conversion rates.

Education "€“ You can use this factor to target based on people"€™s level of education or on the schools that people went to e.g. announcing a ten year university reunion.

Workplaces – Often you will know the types of or specific companies your target audience work for. If you want to gain new customers or spread awareness of your product within specific organizations this filter can be priceless.

Relationship "€“ Married. Single. In a relationship. This helps you target people based on their relationship status e.g. a bar or club targeting single people. But don"€™t forget! Selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven"€™t selected a relationship status in their profile.

Interested In – If a user"€™s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising this can be useful.

Languages "€“ It might seem obvious but trust me, a lot of people fall in to the trap – don"€™t display ads to your target audience in a language they don"€™t understand! Geo target your campaigns well. If you don"€™t ship to Spain, don"€™t advertise there. If you do, make it clear for your international visitors. If you offer free shipping in the ad, show different ads to locations that don"€™t qualify.

Step 3 "€“ Using Images

The image of the ad is a key part, make it attractive and relevant in your advert that is appropriate for the product or service being advertised. The maximum image size is 110 pixels wide by 80 pixels tall, so any text in images that are shrunk down to that size may be hard to read.

Ads without images will underperform compared to those ads with images. It"€™s difficult to tell exactly what type of image will bring the most clicks so you really need to split test multiple images.

Step 4 "€“ Keep the Ad Copy Simple

Create your advert so that it is as simple and easy to read as possible. Avoid long sentences or complex punctuation. Try to use simple, grammatically correct, complete sentences and language. It is good practice to use proper punctuation, punctuate the end of sentences, put spaces after full stops and commas, and avoid using hyphens instead of full stops.

Read the Facebook ad guidelines! Do not ignore these. If you do you have zero chance of getting your ad approved.

Don’t try to fit every detail about your product or service into the advert. Make it clear what your product or service is so a user can tell what your website will be about, but save the details for your landing page.

The Facebook ad copy is also very important for a good, attention-grabbing ad. While the image pulls in the users eyes, the title and body text are what cause the user to click onto the ad. In your copy try to ask questions, write like a testimonial and appeal to the user.

Step 5 "€“ Call to Action

Your advert should communicate a call-to-action along with the benefits of your product or service and avoid common ad mistakes. A call-to-action encourages users to click on your advert and this should explain to the user exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page.

Useful call-to-action phrases include: buy, sell, order, browse, download, sign up and get a quote. Calling out the users attributes is an excellent opportunity to engage for example if you a targeting an audience who went to a certain college, mentioning that college in the copy would work well.

Summary

I would advise Marketers and Advertiser try this tool for yourselves, all you need is a Facebook account, which is free! Browse Facebook case studies to get an insight into how other companies are using this platform successfully. Once your own campaigns are up and running it is important to check monitor and make changes to the targeting, bid price, ad copy, and the array of other options that need to be tweaked and tested to ensure the campaign stays up to date. It is also critically important to measure the campaign budget and ensure that the spend is appropriate and generating a return. If the campaign is not reaching enough people, or the impressions are not high enough, the bid prices or targeting may need to be adjusted to make sure the campaign continues to run effectively and achieve the goals you set out at the start.

When you get some campaigns up and running which are successful, multiply the campaigns that do work and then cut out the ads with low click through rates. Let us know what you think of Facebook ads? What type of ads have made you click? and let us know about your challenges and share your stories below.

http://marketingassassin.wordpress.com/ Rene Power

Thought provoking stuff Imran. I think businesses and brands are now realising that their professional audiences are demanding more personalised and tailored content regardless of the platform. Yes, there has been a clear demarkation between Linkedin as a business networking site and Facebook as a social networking site but the barriers are blurring more every day.

With hundreds of millions of potential customers, and millions of well formed niches, advertising on Facebook is undoubtedly growing as a powerful way to give your brand some profile, reach, to drive trust, engagement and over time advocacy and transaction.

An example is a new network I am aware of called Deco Devotion (http://www.facebook.com/decodevotionfan?v=wall) which uses Facebook advertising to target users interested trading art deco pieces. They spent less than Â£10 initially and built an audience of several hundred.
http://blogbymikeberry.blogspot.com/ Mike Berry

Great post Imran. The clearest explanation of Facebook Advertising I have ever seen!

Everyone who is even considering testing this exciting new brand building/ traffic driving opportunity should read it and learn!
Claire Hazle

Really interesting and useful article, thank you. From what I’ve read elsewhere, I’ve heard that clickthrough rates on Facebook ads generally tend to be very low. Any thoughts on this?

Dave Chaffey

Thanks for your comments Claire, Mike, Rene.

Claire – Your’re right – all case studies I’ve seen on CTR are relatively low compared to Adwords- the one’s I saw in the early days of the services were more typical of banner ads i.e. <0.5% and often <0.1%, but it is a cost per click model and as with all display advertising there will be an awareness raising effect if your creative is strong enough.

I've looked for published figures but can't find any others. This is a good example of creative testing in Facebook albeit not with an offer suitable for most businesses: http://www.profitaddiction.com/increase-facebook-ad-click-through-rates/
http://bedsmarketing.blogspot.com Kris Collins

We use Facebook advertising for targeted recruitment activities at the University of Bedfordshire. I’ve found that although the click through rate is reasonably low the targeting generally means that the quality of the visitors is better than teh traffic we get through Google PPC.

http://www.mmclearning.com Imran Farooq

Hi All, glad youâ€™re finding this post useful.
That is right, CTR rates are a low but it shouldnâ€™t be a concern as Facebook generates a big number of impressions due to all the social activity on the site. In fact, view this as an opportunity, thousands of impressions showing your logo/brand/image for Free!
http://www.mmclearning.com Imran Farooq

@Rene, thank you for sharing the example, very impressive how they built up their fans, low cost, through Ads.
Chris

Nice article Imran.
Its true that the targeting features of Facebook are very powerful and can prove to give marketers a strong and, I would argue, misguided sense of self-belief that their advertising and promotions will be successful through this channel.

As Dave notes in his post the CTR’s are low and as you commented, Facebook creates a huge number of page impressions due to all the social activity on the site. However I think this is where advertising through Facebook falls down. Social Networks and Facebook in particular are spaces which bring together different parts of our lives (professional colleagues, university buddies, sports and hobbies friends and family members) none of whom all share the same interests and in this way, not all of the people are interested in what *the FB author* is saying all of the time. In fact its the reverse and Facebook can be an uncontrolled window upon someone’s personal life which exposes your life to those whom you do not wish to share information with.

So Facebook is a network where the users are updating friends and family whilst undertaking a process of selective filtering – I look at this person and that information but not at the other because its irrelevant. Paul Adams of Google gives a great presentation which explains this here: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

The process of selective applied by the user is applied to the advertising which is served to them, hence the low CTR’s. Instead I think Facebooks strength is for brand and loyalty building and as such adverts which promote product/sale are misguided while adverts which promote brands succeed – Neilsons report titled ‘Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression’ gives good insight to this (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsenfacebook-ad-report/).

Dave Chaffey

Thanks for sharing these insights Chris!

I think you make 3 key points relevant to all considering Facebook advertising:

1. Emphasis on aim of promoting brand and its values rather than products and services ‘though those can be be featured as the Virgin Atlantic example shows (see the Nielsen report)

2. The most realistic goal is connecting people closer to brand through “Likes”

3. The social proof afforded by Facebook ads with context of other friends is effective in increasing engagement / response with them, again as the Nielsen post shows.

Thanks again for a great contribution Chris

Sara

Thanks for this article – lots to think about. In addition to providing a good reminder of information I was aware of in terms of FB advertising/marketing opportunities it also highlighted a number of key pieces of information I was not aware of and that are so key in determining a more successful campiagn. In particular the level of detail that can be utilised in order to target potential audiences. I love the targeting criterion feature that allows you to see the approx. number of users that your targeting will encompass. That feature will really help with campaign planning. The language ‘trap’ mentioned resonated particularly with me. I work in Wales and could utilise this and geotargeting to produce a far more targeted FB campaign. Would be interested to hear if anyone has had experience of this and what the results/effect was like comparatively.
Dave Chaffey

This article adds additional detail to Imran’s post looking at when to use Cost per Click (CPC) and when to use a Cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising model in Facebook:
http://www.allfacebook.com/cpm-vs-cpc-2010-09