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Getting Started With Facebook Advertising

Facebook is an extremely effective business marketing platform for many industries, and companies targeting both B2C and B2B audiences.  However, it is no longer simple to use.  When it comes to Facebook advertising, it is very easy to make a lot of mistakes, and spend a lot more that you expected with little to show for it.

This is why I have compiled a handy resource detailing 6 need-to-know sections:

1. How to Choose your Facebook Goals and Strategy

Sadly, many businesses jump into Facebook Advertising without first setting goals, deciding initially exactly what they  want to do, and making sure it ties in with your overall business marketing strategy.

Once you decide your strategy, you can then set some goals.

Strategy

  • Awareness – Are you looking to create awareness? If you do not currently have a good base of followers and/ or subscribers, then driving awareness may need to be your first strategy.
  • Consideration – If people already know about your business, you might need to remind them to consider you.  This is where you should focus then.
  • Decision – Once your target audience is aware of you, and considering you, the next step is to run advertising that will help them decide to go with you.
  • Loyalty – It has been proven that it is easier to gain another sale, or increase your revenue from an existing customer than source a brand new one.  If you already have plenty of customers, this could be a good opportunity to up-sell to them, or re-engage them with your business.

Example Goals

  • Awareness – Grow targeted followers by 200 per month for the next 6 months.
  • Consideration – Promote website: get 200 registrations, and 50 full views.
  • Decision – Promote Offer or Services: get 20 leads per month.
  • Loyalty – Get 3 customers to re-engage with the business per month and purchase up-sell.

2. Understand your Target Market on Facebook

Running campaigns, and targeting EVERYBODY or the wrong audience can become expensive quickly.  Therefore it is imperative that you define your target market or target buyer personas and make sure every campaign you run, talks directly to that ideal audience.

Demographics and Interests

An easy way to target, is to use demographics and interests when setting up your Facebook advertising campaign:

Location – you can filter down as low as Suburb of a city, and up as high as a Country, yet you will need a minimum number of people in your location/s for the ad to actually run.

Age – you can target a specific age, or an age range.  Again there will need to be a certain number of people for your ad to run.

Gender – just Men, Women and Both available.  Sadly, no inclusive options currently available.

Language – if your audience speaks a particular language, you can target them here.

Connections – Facebook Pages, Apps and Events with multiple connections options can be targeted here.

Other – once the core demographics are set up, you can also filter and/ or exclude people based on things like Interests, Job Title and Relationship Status.

Custom and Lookalike Audiences

Utilising the custom and lookalike audience feature, for those who have defined their audience and have existing customers already, is a really effective way of targeting your campaign.  If you have an accurate, exisiting database, you might as well use it.

3. How to Set Up a Facebook Ad

Facebook’s advertising management interface is constantly changing, as they are always optimising and doing updates.  However the core way to set up an ad campaign has remained fundamentally the same.  Their ad structure is made up of 3 levels:

  1. Campaigns
  2. Ad Sets
  3. Ads

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Marketing Manager, Content Strategist and Writer driving Engagement and ROI. On weekends I'm a Property Investor, Traveler & Coffee Snob