In this post you will learn how to get started with Facebook Ads.
You want to get your business noticed
If you want your business to get noticed across social media, Facebook ads are one of the quickest methods, in my opinion and experience. It’s an effective route to market strategy (providing you get it right) and one I recommend that my clients adopt.
I know what it feels like when you’ve opened your doors for business, or produced your greatest work and there’s no-one to share it with!
I work with consultants, authors and the food and hospitality industry and everyone realises that the way to get noticed online is through paid advertising. One of the best platforms (love them or hate them) for small business is Facebook (and Instagram).
The key thing is, if you dive straight in without knowing some important principles and methods you could end up wasting money. My objective with this post, is to tell you everything you need to know and how to get started with Facebook (paid) Ads.
Why I Recommend Facebook Ads To New Businesses Trying To Get Noticed
- Organic Reach Is Dead – Reaching new audiences using social media platforms without paying is pretty much dead. There have been changes in their algorithms which means they will only show your posts to a small number of your followers. For most platforms it’s less than 5%. That means if you have 100 followers, only 5 will see your posts. Therefore, to be seen, you have to pay to play.
- The Facebook Database – Facebook has over 2.32 billion active monthly users (zephoria.com 2019). They collect a range of data on users, including demographics and interests, which advertisers can use, making it one one of the worlds most accessible consumer databases.
- Accurate Targeting & High Reach – the size and breadth of the Facebook Database makes it easy for advertisers to get specific with targeting and therefor an effective route to market. Not only that, you can reach just about any corner of the world, which is an attractive proposition for anyone who wishes to sell on a global scale.
- It’s Affordable – Facebook makes it relatively affordable for small business) the guy and the gal on the high street / the first time blogger etc) to advertise on its network. Back in the 1990’s when I first started my marketing career, advertising was limited to businesses who had a higher level marketing spend. Now, you can drive traffic to your website for less than 0.20 cents per click.
3 Steps To Getting Started
Setting up your ad account is the first you need to do. It’s pretty simple. You need 3 things.
A Business Page
You will only be able to run facebook ads if you have a business page. Set one up easily from your personal profile.
A Credit Card
You’ll need a credit card or Paypal account so Facebook can take payment from you. You can set a daily budget for your ad spend.
A Facebook Pixel
You need to add the Facebook Pixel to your website before marketing. This will allow you to re-market your ads and above lower cost results.
Once you have those in place (told you it was easy), you’re almost ready to create your first campaign.
What Should Your First Campaign Look Like?
Your first campaign really depends on where you are on your business journey and what your business objectives are.
In an effort to give you some kind of starting point, I’ll present some real life business strategies and ad campaigns you might choose to run.
Newsfeeds Are Busy Places And You’re Competing Against Other Ads
The Basic Principles Of Marketing
Before you go rushing ahead trying to sell to people because you want to hit a sales target, there are some important marketing rules of engagement that you need to be aware of.
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Rule 1 – Never Sell To A Cold Audience
The general rule of marketing and certainly in the digital world is that you would never try to sell to a cold audience. In other words someone who doesn’t know you.
There might be some exceptions, such as if the product / service is a necessity or very low value, but generally people like to buy from brands they know, love and trust.
Quite often, your Facebook ad will be the first time your audience has come into contact with you and your brand, and most of them won’t even care about you, let alone purchase from you.
Furthermore, if you try to sell on Facebook to a cold audience, your conversion will be low, and that means you will be spending way more than you planned.
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Rule 2 – Develop The Client Relationship then sell
People are more likely to purchase from you once they know your brand and the face behind it, therefore, it’s so important to nurture the relationship between you and the client. How long this takes depends on your product / service and audience needs. You can do this by re-marketing to them in Facebook.
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Rule 3 – Build Your Audience
You need to know your audience so that you can build it in Facebook and target your ads successfully ( this is one of the critical success factors of Facebook advertising).
If you know as much detail about who you are serving you can talk their language in your ad creative – the second variable of a successful ad campaign.
How much to invest?
Whichever campaign type you opt for, you will require to invest some money in order to get noticed. Of course you don’t have to invest in ads, but your journey to stardom could take a year or beyond.
Facebook ads, whilst still affordable, are increasing in price as advertising space become limited due to increased usage from all types of business.
To get your share of the newsfeed you need to be bidding competitively. A bid is how much investment you put behind your ads. Someone in the same niche as you, putting in more money will get more visibility.
Don’t that let put you off. It’s all relative. Start with what you can afford but if you want to be successful, the best strategy is to reinvest a portion of your earnings back into ads to feed the beast.
which ad campaigns you should start with
Now that you’re aware of these rules or marketing principles, let’s review some advertising scenarios for you.
I don’t know what business or service you’re providing (feel free to tell me in the comments below) but these two advertising campaigns (below), can be applied across different industries.
Ad Space Is Limited And This Has Raised Prices
1. Traffic Driving Campaigns
If your audience is small, the first ad strategy you may wish to adopt is to drive TRAFFIC to your website or facebook page. There are some advantages to doing this:
- You can optimise the add for cost per click (cpc) – my recommendation, so you can see exactly how much you’re spending when someone clicks your link. You can see this is in your ad manager, once it’s live.
- CPC are lower than other campaign costs such as lead generation and conversion campaigns with the average cpc being around 41 cents per click*.
- You can get relatively good engagement from a cold audience by simply sending them to a video or website.
- If you have your pixel loaded on your site, you can re-market to these visitors in the future and they will have been introduced to your business.
- If you send them to a post where they can sign up for a newsletter or freebie, you avoid the conversion cost which you incur if you set up the ad as a conversion (I’ll explain more on that later!).
2. Facebook Page Like Campaigns
Essentially this is a “promote your Facebook page” campaign.
If you’re new to digital marketing then I’m assuming you don’t have many likes on your Facebook page. You can create an ad to send people to your Facebook page and like it. The advantages of doing this when you’re a new kid on the block are:
- It’s the cheapest kind of campaign used to build your tribe, for somewhere in the region of 15 cents to 35 cents per click*, depending on time of year and time of day.
- You can begin to build a fan base and send them to your website or show them ads in their newsfeed, which has a lower overall cost than showing ads to a cold audience.
Conclusion
If you’re scratching your head, wondering how to get your brand, business or work noticed, then I recommend adopting these Facebook strategies. If you are looking for around 1000 followers, you can budget for around $400, give or take 10%, so long as you’ve nailed your targeting and creative.
P.S – If you need help on targeting your audience so your ads are published to the right newsfeeds check out my video on You Tube, where I walk you through the process.
Click to watch How To Refine Your Facebook Audience For Better Ad Targeting
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