Know Your Marketing Objective
When creating a new ad campaign on Facebook, you’ll be asked to clearly state your marketing objective. This is an extremely crucial step that you shouldn’t ever overlook. It really can make or break your Facebook ad campaign.
Facebook advertising is not just about likes and clicks anymore. Facebook can help run different marketing campaigns based on your brand’s goals and needs.
Is your target audience in the awareness stage of the digital marketing funnel or are they ready to convert? Perhaps you’re just building on your brand identity. Here’s how Facebook can help:
Awareness
This stage is all about producing content that will spark your audience’s interest. Maybe this is the first ad campaign that you run or perhaps you’re on a quest to increase brand awareness.
- Brand Awareness. Choosing this option lets Facebook know that you want to reach people that are more likely to be interested in your products or services.
- Reach. The reach option will offer maximum exposure by showing your ad to as many people as possible.
Consideration
This stage begins once you’ve grabbed your audience’s attention and must now position your products or services in a way that highlights their key benefits. People are aware of your brand, but now you need to convince them that you are indeed their best choice.
- Traffic. Choose this option if you want to consistently drive more traffic to your website.
- Engagement. Arguably what Facebook ads do best: Getting people to see and engage with your post or Facebook page.
- App Installs. Creates ads that aim to send more people to the App or Play store to download your app.
- Video ads and views. Aims to increase video views and promote your brand through video ads and video marketing.
- Lead Generation. Helps collect information on leads and prospects so that you can better monitor your marketing campaign to target the right people.
- Messages. Advertise your customer support services to generate leads, drive transactions and answer questions.
Conversion
Conversion lies at the end of the funnel and is where the magic happens. You’ve convinced your audience of your product’s value, but now you need to make sure that they actually convert.
- Conversions. Conversion ads aim to drive more traffic to specific purchase pages on your app or website.
- Catalogue Sales. Showcase your products with ads designed to specifically target interested audiences.
- Store Traffic. Choose this option to promote your store to people who are nearby.
We know it sounds like a lot, but if you want your ad campaign to succeed, you need to explore your targeting options and pick the one that best aligns with your current marketing strategy.
Utilise Placement Optimisation
This one’s tricky. It would make sense to think that a broader placement option would offer better results, but that’s not always the case.
Facebook recommends that you activate all placements when running campaigns. This effectively means that Facebook users will be seeing your ads on their News Feed, Instagram feed, stories, and yes even on Messenger.
While it’s true that providing Facebook with more ad placement options may help with your marketing efforts, things aren’t always that simple. If you’re focusing on engagement, for example, it may be more cost-effective to skip showing ads on Messenger altogether.
Customising and utilising the Placement Optimisation functions will give you more marketing freedom.
Consider Campaign Budget Optimisation
This one’s a bit controversial. Again, Facebook asks permission to manage your budget for you, promising to find the best opportunities for your objective across your ad sets and prioritise budgets accordingly.
All you have to do it set the minimum and maximum amounts that you’d like to spend on a specific campaign and you’re good to go. Well, we wish that was the case.
As marketers, we can’t help but look at such automated procedures with a bit of suspicion. With new policy changes that will take effect in less than four months, Facebook will essentially be stripping marketers off the little budget control that they currently have.
Being able to only adjust the minimum and maximum spend limits may work for most business, but the truth will be in the results.
Optimise for Mobile
Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but mobile phones are pretty big these days (pun intended). According to Statista, expected mobile traffic for 2019 will account for approximately 63.4% of all traffic. Keep this in mind when creating new Facebook ad campaigns.
User experience can vary greatly from device to device, which is why you should always make sure everything shows as it should across all platforms and devices.
- Make sure that the ad format is consistent.
- Your ad copy should be short and to the point, making it easier for mobile users to read and navigate through it on their small screens.
- Consider eye-catching visuals when designing banners to capture the user’s attention. Social media are heavy on the visual side of things.
- Include a clear call to action button to guide users to your store or landing page.
Your ads should look great on mobile, but remember to optimise your website and landing pages as well. Improve user experience to drive more traffic to your website and increase conversions.
Realise the Potential of Broad Targeting
Marketers have avoided broad targeting in the past. We’re taught to be very specific with our targeting to generate leads and increase conversions.
It may be a good idea to switch things up a bit every once in a while and actually let Facebook do its own thing. When you’re targeting a specific audience over and over again, you’re battling with other advertisers that are also targeting the same audiences.
What if you could generate leads from a multitude of audiences? Specific targeting can drive up costs pretty quickly and may not carry significant results if the competition is so fierce.
Alternating between broad and specific targeting when you run ad campaigns on Facebook can reduce costs and help you identify your brand’s own unique custom audience. Switch things up and keep your options open!
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