How To Grow Your Business With Facebook Advertising

Facebook Paid Advertising Best Practices

If your business is struggling with tackling your Facebook advertising strategy, you aren’t alone these days. It’s no secret, for some time now, Facebook’s organic reach has been plummeting. Ongoing algorithm changes have pushed businesses to invest in paid campaigns or walk away.

But before writing off Facebook as a lost cause, pause for a moment. There’s a reason 97% of marketers still prefer the Facebook platform to run paid ads. After all, Facebook claims the largest, and one of the most engaged, user-base of any social network. That, combined with the fact that Facebook’s ad targeting is enormously in-depth, makes it clear as day why your business should still engage.

Naturally, that doesn’t mean that Facebook ads are surefire on their own. In this post, we’ll break down seven Facebook ads best practices and what you need to know to get started.

  1. Define Your Target Audience

    Facebook ads’ most significant benefit is the ad targeting function that allows you to pinpoint specific buyers who are most likely to purchase.

    And target only those people.

    Unlike historic PPC, you can get granular with today’s Facebook advertising, only serving ads to relevant audiences. Below is a quick run-through of how to target Facebook ads to drill down and identify an audience ready to click through and convert.

    Find an audience.

    Audience quality is more significant than size because, with Facebook advertising, your goal is to engage and/or convert. Casting a wide net, including those not in your target audience, will sabotage your relevance scores and return bad data.

    Facebook’s targeting capabilities are incredibly robust and include demographics, interests, location, and even behavior. That means you can specifically target who you want to see your ads.

    For example, you no longer have to settle for “males between ages 35 and 50” Now you can target “males between ages 35 and 50 who own a home, enjoy landscaping, and live in the northeast.” Getting this granular allows you to exclude users who are not your target market, only showing your ads to those who will find it most relevant and are most likely to convert.

  2. Develop Custom Audiences with Facebook

    Getting ROI from your Facebook spend is all about attracting only relevant, qualified audiences to see your ads. So how do you laser-focus your ad budget so you find the right audiences on Facebook, whatever your industry and business?

    Facebook Custom Audiences are defined groups of people who already have a relationship with your business and offer some of the best targeting available. There are several types of Facebook Custom Audiences, including:

    • Customer List Custom Audiences
    • Website Custom Audiences
    • App Activity Custom Audiences
    • Offline Activity
    • Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences

    Custom Audiences help brands increase the relevance of their ad messages by targeting audiences that are most likely to respond. The more relevant the advertising is, the greater the return on investment.

  3. Choose Relevant Ads

    Relevance is vital for success with Facebook advertising. If you’re displaying ads your target audience doesn’t consider relevant, you’re wasting your time and money and will likely not reap any benefits from your advertising.

    In 2015, the Facebook advertising platform launched a feature that rates your ads and provides a relevance score, similar to Google Ads’ Ad Rank. The more relevant your ad copy, image, and destination landing page are to your audience, the higher your score — and the better Facebook will treat your ads.

    According to Facebook, the three types of goals related to your paid advertising strategy are:

    • Awareness: Increasing your reach and familiarizing potential customers with your business via Facebook ads
    • Consideration: Encouraging prospects’ engagement with your marketing messages
    • Conversions: Convincing the potential buyers to become full-fledged customers

    The goals you set will ultimately determine your direction with ads, including the creatives and types of ads you choose. Although some brands may have turned away from Facebook, there’s no refuting the success of the new ad features they’ve rolled out recently.

    For example, collection ads are well-received right now. These eye-catching messages allow brands to show off multiple products at once. Remarketing ads are also a demonstrated way to bring former customers back into the fold by serving as a “light-bulb” moment in their Facebook feeds.

    With so many considerations, it’s essential to get familiar with Facebook’s ad specs and new features.

  4. Evaluate Your Ad Creatives

    What engages customers on Facebook is remarkably specific. Based on best practices, here are some key creative tips for your Facebook advertising strategy.

    The Most Engaging Social Ad Content

    Don’t overlook entertainment value.

    Being boring is the death of any ad campaign, including Facebook. The more entertaining your ads are, the less they will feel like ads. Strive to avoid static, stuffy campaigns with humor or imagery that catches people’s eyes.

    Use video when possible.

    You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, but it’s worth repeating:

    Video content is crushing it.

    Videos can show off your ads in action, perfect for raising awareness and grabbing users’ attention. Also, don’t forget Facebook has explicitly encouraged brands to get on board with video in the wake of their algorithm shift.

    Think of a video ad as a mini commercial for your brand that stops scrollers in their tracks. It’s fair game for almost any business.

    Actions Consumers Are Most Likely to Take When Interested in a Social Ad

    Establish a clear, compelling call-to-action.

    Any engagement is a plus with your Facebook ads, but, ultimately, you’re looking for clicks. To guarantee these clicks, you need a strong call-to-action.

    Following the principles outlined above, you can better position your ads for clicks and conversions.

  5. Don’t Forget the Pixel

    Whether we’re catching up on your favorite sports team or adding items to a shopping cart, pixel technology keeps track of it for “future reference” (i.e., “future advertising”).

    Pixel technology enables businesses to identify facebook users who have visited their sites and precisely re-target them with custom messaging based on the specific pages they visited and the actions they took.

    Pixel is a few lines of code that you copy and embed into the header section of your website to link visitors’ onsite behavior to Facebook user profiles. The code allows Facebook to receive information about the actions taken on your site to make your ads more relevant to your target audience. Facebook pixel can help you understand visitors’ behavior and which advertising strategy works best to reach your business goals.

  6. Test and Track Your Campaigns

    Before you jump entirely into your Facebook ad strategy, you first need to determine how to navigate the platform. With so many variables to monitor and metrics to track, marketers can get a bit overwhelmed.

    If you’re a novice, we encourage you to run smaller test campaigns to get your feet wet and make adjustments before blowing out your budgets.

    Facebook can display your ads based on what they perceive as “optimum” engagement, or your ads can run on a predetermined schedule. There is no “right” answer but understand that you can drain your dollars quickly if you don’t set parameters.

    Finally, Facebook gets incredibly granular in terms of what you can track with its reporting features. If you want to establish whether you’re getting a positive ROI or relevant click, look no further than your reports. Tracking specific events, reach, and amount spent, you have a wealth of data at your fingertips to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

  7. Combine Paid Campaigns with Organic Activity

    In most cases, it’s in companies’ best interest to adopt a hybrid social media strategy. In other words, organically targeting customers through content and community-building simultaneously supplementing your Facebook advertising strategy with paid campaigns.

    You get the best of both worlds.

    Although organic reach is undeniably curbed, that’s no reason to abandon Facebook or ignore the potential of employee advocacy or customer service to connect with customers. Although paid ads encourage conversions, organic activity can help you build awareness and relationships with your brand.

    How does your Facebook advertising strategy look?

    Hopefully, this post served as some much-needed direction if you’ve been struggling with the Facebook platform. And, there are plenty of folks struggling with it right now. But although many companies’ relationships with Facebook are complicated, Facebook’s value as an advertising channel is undeniable.

    Being Facebook savvy isn’t something that comes naturally to many marketers. At Jungle Communications, we can help manage your social media strategy, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whichever social media channel that’s a good fit for your organization. Contact us today, and let us help you jumpstart your Facebook advertising strategy.

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