Facebook advertising; who, why, how?

What you need to know.

So you must have heard of Facebook? Yeah sure… You and 1.4 billion others! Here, so you can use and abuse us, is some useful information about how to tap into this media to market your service or product.

WHO?

Before you leap into the world of Facebook Advertising and attempt to reach its users, you need to identify your Facebook target audience. You can do this in several ways.

• Look at your Facebook Pages Insights for demographics.
• Identify topics your Facebook page Likers are engaging with.
• Use your current customer data to form a persona of your Facebook target audience.
• Visit your current Facebook page Likers’ personal profiles. If their security settings allow you, look at their interests and what other pages they have liked.
• Visit your competitors’ Facebook page and see what topics their likers are engaging with. Try to include this in your targeting.

WHY?

At present, Facebook Ads are one of the most popular PPC advertising options amongst digital marketers. It is easy to see why, with access to more than 1.4 billion users, and visitors of more than 900 million every day1. The amount of traffic isn’t the only perk of Facebook Ads. The Facebook Ad Manager also allows digital marketers to highly target that traffic.

HOW?

Once you have identified your Facebook target audience you will need to plan out your advert. Follow our 6 tips to a successful Facebook advert campaign:

1. Stand out with your headline & imagery

It can be difficult to stand out from the noise on Facebook Newsfeeds so you need to be creative. Facebook allows you to use one image, several images, or video. On your advert, select imagery that is different to the norm, on trend, and relevant to your advert. For your headline, you only have a maximum of 25 characters to play with, so ensure your headline is attention grabbing, to the point, and complements the imagery you have chosen.

2. Write compelling text and add an extra link

If your goal is to convert Facebook users into traffic for your website, ensure you add your link again in the text area to gain extra clicks. If your URL is long, use a service like bit.ly. They will also tell you how many people have clicked a link.

3. Always use the ‘Learn More’ button

Statistics show that the ‘Learn More’ button works better than the other options, with 63.6% increase in conversions and 40% decrease in cost-per-click.2 If you feel this button isn’t relevant for your business or advert, there are several other call-to-action button options to choose from, for example; ‘Shop Now’, ‘Learn More’, ‘Sign Up’, ‘Book Now’ and ‘Download’.

4. Never use broad interest categories

You want to narrow down your audience to the most relevant people. Using broad interest categories may lead to high views and even clicks, but you won’t be targeting the right people. Facebook’s Ad Manager allows you to narrow the audience now by location, demographics, interests, behaviours and connections. You can even match users with your current customer lists if it contains email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or mobile advertiser IDs. You can also create custom lists on Facebook from the advert itself to use in future campaigns. You have two options to achieve this:

• Create a list of people who view your website or a specific web page
• Create a list of people who have taken a particular action in your app or game

Remember, the narrower your target group, the more likely you are to have a higher CTR (Click Through Rate).

5. Avoid the right-hand column

Only place your adverts in the Newsfeed, avoid the Display Ads in the right-hand column. Why? Research carried out by many social media experts and companies show that the CTR is a lot higher on Newsfeed Ads. For example, one company found that Newsfeed Ads were a massive 51 times more likely to generate clicks than identically targeted Display Ads on Facebook.3

6. Build a custom landing page for your Facebook Advertising

If the Facebook user has clicked on your advert, they are already primed to take action. Your advert has already promised to deliver a product or evoked an emotion that made the Facebook user make a purchasing decision. The last thing you want is to dissipate their decisiveness with a poorly designed page that confuses and leaves your promise undelivered. Your advert kept to one theme, so should your webpage so use a landing page. Landing pages are designed to help guide the visitor into a singular action and should contain:

• Limited form fields (if you are collecting lead data)
• Key visuals
• A singular call to action
• No navigation away from the page (unless it’s to a checkout or purchasing area).

If you identify your Facebook target audience and follow our steps, you should see a good CTR. Once your advert is live, continue to monitor it using their built in advert reporting tool. You can then decide where changes may be required to improve performance and have a successful Facebook Ad. You can learn more at Facebook Ads Reporting Manager.

Sources

1. Facebook – Visit the page on Facebook
2. Heyo – Visit the page on Heyo
3. Wolfgang Digital – Visit the page on Wolfgang Digital

Conclusion.

Faceboook and everything you need to know, the who, why and how. It is important to remember them and take into consideration when advertising on Facebook.

Facebook advertising can help business’s get more visibility for their Facebook content and boost traffic to their core website content – whether it’s cornerstone site content, simple ad copy, or blogs. Facebook ads can be set up to target greater site traffic, more impressions, and even click-through-rate (CTR).

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WTBI is a creative, digital services consultancy based in Corby, Northamptonshire. Providing well-thought-out, digital strategies to solve difficult business problems for our clients. With technology changing at a high pace, we need to keep our clients engaged in reshaping their business through digital innovation and new opportunities.

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