How To Grow Your Business With Facebook Ads

Facebook & Instagram Ads Strategy 101

Marketing your business has become more difficult every year. In the past, you could advertise on TV, newspapers, or radio; and you could be certain that you were reaching most of your customers and potential customers. Not anymore. The number of people canceling their cable continues to rise every day. They are switching to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime among others. Many are turning to streaming music via services similar to Spotify and Pandora. And let’s not even get started talking about where people are getting their news.

The point is, potential customers are scattered all over the place. How are we supposed to reach them?

Fortunately, there is one place where you’ll find most people now-a-days – social media. Guess which social media network has the most users? You guessed it – Facebook does.

Why Facebook Ads?

• Audience size: Facebook has over 1.55 billion daily active users.
• Attention: The average US user spends about 50 minutes on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger every day.
• Organic reach decline: Organic reach on Facebook is close to zero for businesses. If you want to reach anyone (including your fans) you have to pay.
• Targeting: The targeting options within Facebook Ads are so detailed, it’s easy to reach new readers that have never heard of your blog.

Facebook Ads Dashboard

Go to facebook.com/ads/manager or click the dropdown arrow in the upper-right corner of Facebook and choose “Manage Ads” from the drop-down.

3 Levels of Facebook Advertising

• Boost Post: Beginner Level
  • Least effective promotion.
  • Cannot target a specific audience.
  • Cannot create multiple ad variants to test different copy, images or calls to action (CTA).

• Facebook Ads Manager: Intermediate Level
  • Ads Manager allows you to set up, track and optimize all of your campaigns in one easy interface.
  • Can target a specific audience.
  • Can create tracking pixels for your website to target people who have visited your website.
  • Can run multiple campaigns to test and optimize your ads.

• Power Editor: Advanced Level
  • For advanced marketers and advertisers.
  • Can build and manage multiple campaigns in bulk.
  • Can create ads across a number of accounts.

Facebook Ad Guidelines

• Text Limit: 90 characters maximum. Any additional characters could be cut off.
• Link Title Text Limit: 25 character maximum.
• Text on Image Limit: Facebook will only approve ads with less than 20% text overlaying the image. facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay
• Image Size: The size of your image depends on your campaign goal.

Best Performing Campaign Objectives

When you create a Facebook ad campaign you must pick a campaign objective. Facebook offer 10 types of objectives to choose from. I suggest you play around with all the different objectives that make sense for your business. If you are a complete newbie at Facebook Ads I recommend you start with the top 3 best performing Facebook ad objectives.

# 1 Engagement Objective (a.k.a Promote Your Page For Likes)

1. Click to create a new ad and choose “Engagement”.
2. Choose one of your Facebook Pages or enter its URL.
3. Give this campaign a name.
4. Set Audience & Budget.
5. Upload Image(s) or Video.
6. Easily create up to 6 variations of your ad and test how different images perform.
7. 1,200 x 600 pixels (width and height).
8. Image ratio: 8:3.
9. You can upload a series of three to seven photos that Facebook will stitch together as a slideshow video.
10. From the right-hand panel of the Ad Editor, you can preview your ad and select which locations you want it to appear. By default, Facebook will show the ad on the desktop News Feed, mobile News Feed, and the desktop right column. Click to remove any of these options.

# 2 Traffic Objective (a.k.a Send People To Your Website)

1. Click to create a new ad and choose “Traffic”
2. Enter the URL of the page you’d like to promote.
3. (Optional) Choose a conversion pixel to further track the performance of the ad (more on pixels later)
4. Give this campaign a name.
5. Set Audience & Budget.
6. Choose if you’d like to show a single image or video in the ad or show multiple images in the ad (up to five).
7. Additionally, you can choose a couple more options:
   • Showing your ad on Facebook’s Audience Network, other mobile apps and networks owned by Facebook.
   • Showing your ad on Instagram

Tip: When selecting Send People to Your Website objective make sure the landing page matches the message of the Facebook Ad. Are there clear Call To Actions? Do the ad and the page feel related?

#3 Get Video Views Objective

1. Click to create a new ad and choose “Get video views.”
2. Choose one of your Facebook Pages or enter its URL.
3. Give this campaign a name.
4. Set Audience & Budget.
5. Upload video to share.
   • .mov or .mp4 file format
   • At least 720p resolution
   • Widescreen (16:9 aspect ratio) is recommended
   • 60 minutes and/or 2.3 GB max for Facebook
   • 60 seconds and/or 2.3 GB max for Instagram
6. After the video has been selected, you can edit the way the ad appears by customizing the text and buttons. By default, Facebook does not show a button, allowing the ad to focus on purely gaining more video views. You can edit the text that appears above the video.
7. If you’d like to include a button with the ad, there are seven choices from the “Call to Action” dropdown:
   • No button (default)
   • Book Now
   • Download
   • Learn More
   • Shop Now
   • Sign Up
   • Watch More
   • For each of these button options, you can customize four additional text fields: the website URL, the display URL, the headline, and the link description.

Facebook Tracking Pixel

Facebook will generate a unique pixel to add to the header code of your website. This pixel allows Facebook to track who visited your website and what pages they visited. Use this pixel to create Facebook Ad Audiences of people whom have already visited your site. You can also find similar Facebook users to the visitors of your blog with the Audience Look Alike feature.

How To Choose A Facebook Audience

How to Target Facebook Ads

The #1 mistake most bloggers make with Facebook ads is not targeting them correctly. You can target users by:

• Location: Location allows you to targets users in the country, state, city, or zip code that you service.
• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Interests (Entertainment, Business, Shopping, Food & Drink, etc.)
• Demographics (Education, Relationship, Work, Politics, etc.)
• Behavior (Financial, Residential, Charitable, etc.)

Each option can be useful, depending on your customers. Age and gender targeting should be based on your existing customers. Check your blog, Google, Facebook or Instagram Analytics to find out your customers’ demographics. If women 25-44 are the bulk of your customers, start out only targeting them. If they prove to be profitable, you can then expand your targeting.

Interest targeting

When creating an ad, you have two options: broad categories or precise interests.

Broad Category Targeting

Broad categories include topics like Shopping, Fashion, and Engaged. Broad interests may seem like an efficient way to reach a large audience. However, these users often cost more and spend less. Avoid using Broad Category targeting.

Precise Interest Targeting

Precise Interest Targeting allows you to target users based on information in their profile including “listed likes and interests, the Pages they like, apps they use, and other profile (timeline) content they’ve provided” (Facebook). You’ll find the best ROI using Precise Interest targeting.

Research which magazines and blogs your customers read, who they follow on Twitter, and which related products they buy. If you use laser-focused interests like these, you’ll reach the people who are most interested in your products or services and the most willing to spend money on it.

Instagram Ads

If you’re planning on running concurrent Facebook and Instagram ads, click the button, “Only include photos that will work with Instagram ads.”

Instagram Ad Guidelines:

• RECOMMENDED IMAGE SIZE The recommended image size is 1080×1080 pixels. At minimum, square images should measure 600×600 pixels, while landscape images should measure 600×315 pixels.
• CAPTION LIMIT Instagram recommends your caption be 125 characters or fewer. However, it may be up to 2,200 characters.

Setting A Budget

“Different conversion objectives have different values. For example, if your objective is to get your readers’ emails, you might be willing to pay more for that particular conversion as you will have a direct pipeline to connect with those readers. While it’s difficult to determine lifetime value, a good rule of thumb is to pay around $1 for light acquisitions (i.e. getting a Facebook like) and $3 for heavy acquisitions (email subscription, event sign-up, product purchase). Using this rule of thumb, if you only have $50 to spend for your first month of advertising, you’re not going to want to do an email objective campaign because you’re going to get less for your money. You might set your goal, to get 50 page likes at $1/conversion as a benchmark. If your ads don’t end up hitting the $1 for light acquisitions and $3 for heavy acquisition benchmark – don’t sweat it. Continue to AB test and optimize your ads, and with each campaign you’ll be able to lower your cost per acquisition.” – SOVRN – The Complete Guide to Facebook & Instagram Ads

5 Popular Strategies And Facebook Ads Tips

1. Consider the placement of your URL

• Include your URL above the image/video in the text section
• Use taglines and hooks to draw your potential customers in (i.e., “Make This a Year to Remember”)

2. Spend at least $5 per ad

Create Buyer Personas and a specific call to action for each of them. Don’t allocate too small of a budget (best is at least $5 per ad, typically).

3. The Most Important Part of Your Ad is Your Image

Don’t use low-quality images, generic stock photography, or any images that you don’t have the rights to use. Images of people work best – preferably their faces.

4. Segment More Than You Think You Should

Make sure the creative imagery and copy is tightly targeted to your audience. Instead of targeting an audience of 2,000,000 people, find a way to break them into smaller, more specific groups, and show them customized copy and graphics that will appeal to them.

Source FACEBOOK

5. Don’t Ignore Mobile Advertising

Regardless of the age or demographics of the audience you’re targeting, don’t assume that they’re scanning through a laptop Facebook feed. The vast majority of Facebook users are on mobile apps, and many of your ad sets may never get a click from desktop users.
That’s it! Now get started on your Facebook Ad campaign and grow your brand!

Facebook Ad Inspiration

SOURCES:
– https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-ads-guide
– http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2014/25908/the-most-effective-paid-digital-media-channel-in-2q14?adref=nlt090614
– https://moz.com/ugc/my-story-how-facebook-advertising-performed-vs-google-adwords
– http://kimgarst.com/ultimate-facebook-ads-jumpstart-guide/submission/
– http://info.sovrn.com/hubfs/Paid_social_ebook.pdf
– https://moz.com/blog/10-things-ive-learned-while-learning-facebook-ads
– https://blog.kissmetrics.com/deep-dive-facebook-advertising/
– https://adespresso.com/academy/blog/dos-donts-facebook-advertising/