One of the best ways that you can advertise is through social media. When it comes to choosing a social media network to spend your advertising dollars at; Facebook is definitely the most recommended one. There are a number of features that Facebook advertising offers that you won't find anywhere else. In this article, we are going to go over exactly what Facebook advertising is and how you can use it to get great results.
What Is Facebook Advertising?
Facebook advertising is a method of paying to reach a specific audience with your message via Facebook. There are actually several types of Facebook ads to choose from, and there are lots of options within those methods. Let's go over the five ways that you can advertise on Facebook, so that you can see what your options actually are.
Facebook Advertising Options
The first thing you have to realize when it comes to advertising on Facebook is that you have the option to either advertise to your own audience, or you can advertise to people outside of your connections network. There are several places that you can advertise using Facebook, and four of them are actually on the site. Let's go over each one in detail.
The first type of Facebook ad that you can place is on someone's mobile news feed. So, whenever they check their Facebook with their mobile device, depending on whether or not they meet your advertising criteria, they will be able to see the ad that you've placed. This is obviously quite a popular option, because most people use their mobile devices to check their Facebook page throughout the day.
You also have the option of advertising on the desktop news feed. This is also effective, depending on the kind of audience that you want. People may check their Facebook news feed on their computers at work, and people that work from home or do telecommuting will usually be on their desktop computer rather than their mobile device when it comes to checking Facebook updates.
You can also advertise on the right hand column of a Facebook page. This type of ad is great if you are not necessarily targeting a specific audience. If you have a very specific audience in mind for your ad, then you might want to use a news feed to display it because your target audience will see it and likely respond. But if you have an ad where highly accurate targeting is not really necessary, then the right hand column of a Facebook page might be the perfect placement.
In addition, Facebook offers advertising on the Audience Network, which is an expanded advertising audience that works across mobile devices. Audience Network ads are placed on regular websites, inside games or apps and other locations besides Facebook. The Audience Network Is a great way for you to maximize your advertising dollars.
Finally, you can also advertise on Instagram. Instagram is now owned by Facebook, so with this partnership, advertising that is purchased on Facebook can be shown on Instagram and vice versa. Depending upon your product or service, you may find that Instagram offers you a better return for your advertising dollars.
How to Tell Facebook Ad from a Regular Post
While Facebook purposely makes their ads blend in with the rest of the newsfeed so that they do not disrupt the user experience, there are some ways to tell if something you are viewing is an advertisement – but you have to know what you were looking for. There are a few features that are unique to ads, but they are only obvious after you have some experience checking your feed for them.
One of the first ways that you can tell if a Facebook post is an ad or just a regular post is by looking underneath the name of the company or page. If you see a tag that says sponsored then you know that it is an ad. In addition, these ads will usually have a like page button in the upper right hand corner and some kind of call-to-action in the bottom right-hand corner such as a sign up button. There are several different types of call-to-action that you may see in the bottom right-hand corner including learn more, sign up, contact us, shop, download, book now, watch more or apply now.
Why Advertise With Facebook?
If you've never advertised on Facebook before, don't worry you're not alone. Many people don't even realize that you can advertise on Facebook and are surprised when they learn that some of the posts they have been seeing have been sponsored. Other people opted for PPC advertising (pay-per-click), an email marketing campaign or one of the more traditional ways to advertise online. But the truth is, not only is Facebook less expensive than traditional marketing, it can be even more effective.
What you have to understand is that Facebook ads are extremely inexpensive. For example, suppose that you want to reach a hundred people a day. Would $3 to $5 a day be worth it? This is about what Facebook costs when it comes to advertising. When you look at pay-per-click campaigns, you can end up spending a huge amount of money for every click that you get. In fact, on some keywords you could be spending upwards of $50 hours for each and every click.
But more importantly, Facebook is laser-targeted to your audience. When you run a PPC ad, you actually have very little information to run a targeted campaign. You may be able to target to a specific geographic area but you aren't going to be able to get much beyond that. But Facebook collects a huge amount of personal information from every person with a Facebook page. People supply the information voluntarily! So when you target ads with Facebook you were truly targeting your audience.
Finally, your audience is definitely on Facebook. Facebook now has over two billion users. That's more than a quarter of the world's population. In fact, if someone isn't on Facebook, then they may not even be qualified for your ad. For example, they may not be located in a geographic area where they can use your product or service, they may not be on the internet at all or they might not be able to afford what you're offering.
Let's How Facebook Ads Are Managed
There are two methods of managing your Facebook ads. The first is the ads manager. This is the standard tool that Facebook provides for you to be able to manage your ad campaigns. If you are a beginner with Facebook advertising, or you don't have a ton of customization that needs to be done, then you may be able to use the ads manager alone for all of your Facebook advertising.
However, for more advanced users there is the Facebook ads power editor. The power editor is set up differently than the ad manager and it gives you several more options so that you can customize your advertising. If you are running Instagram ads rather than Facebook ads, then you are going to have to use the power editor because the ad manager does not have the option for Instagram yet. That may change in the future though.
What Facebook Advertising Can Do For You
Facebook is one of the most effective ways to advertise because of the targeting that is involved. For example, suppose that you had an online store that sold pet food and pet supplies. Since only about 1/3 of the households in the U.S. actually owns a pet, if you were to create an advertising campaign that wasn't targeted you could be wasting two out of three ads that you display.
This may not be a huge deal on a pay-per-click campaign, but it is absolutely murder when it comes to CPM ads. But how could you possibly target people that own a pet online? The only way that you can do that is by showing the ad only on sites where pet owners are likely to be visiting.
But Facebook is able to target people like that. They may not be able to target people with pets, although that is an unrealistic option for the social media giant in the future, but they can target people based on a dizzying array of personal information. Do you have a Facebook account? Remember how much personal information you have filled in? Now imagine being able to target by several of those factors.
Facebook advertising has a number of options or tasks that can be accomplished from within your ad manager. For example you can:
- Set up a brand new ad campaign
- Create various targeted audiences
- Manager bid amounts
- Create various types of ads
- Optimize your ad campaigns even while they are running
- Run test ad campaigns
Running Your First Campaign
Now we are going to discuss how you run your first campaign through the Facebook ad manager. The first thing that you will do is choose your objective. You have to do this whenever you create a new ad campaign. There are three different categories of objectives.
- Awareness: includes brand awareness and reach
- Consideration: includes the objectives traffic, app installs, engagement, video views, messages and lead generation
- Conversion: the conversion category includes conversions, product catalog sales and store visits
If you have never run a Facebook ad before, you are going to have to set up an ad account before you do anything else. Step two is going to be creating your ad set. But this is also where you create a custom audience so that you can define exactly what you are looking for and how narrow you want to target your ads. You’ll also set up a budget for this ad campaign, including a simple daily budget amount or the amount that you want to spend on the campaign in total. There are a number of other options that you will be choosing from, including where you want to place your ad.
Your third step is going to be to actually create the ad. You will have several options to choose from when it comes to formatting, such a single image, single video, slideshow, collection and carousel. You also need to set up a business Facebook page if you don't already have one. In addition you will add headlines, descriptions, URLs and other advertisement elements. You will be able to see a preview of your add in real time for all of the various places where your add could appear. The news feed on a desktop or mobile device, within an Instagram feed, on an Audience Network website, on an Audience Network video and in messenger are just a few of these.
Making Your Ad Work on Facebook
One of the things that pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords has going for it is that people go on the internet to get something and a lot of times that something is an item that they would be willing to spend money for. With Google AdWords, you get to choose exactly what keywords someone will be typing in to find your ad and then you will compete with other advertisers to show it to them first. This is a terrific system and the techniques that are used for pay-per-click advertising can make you a great deal of money. But you can't take those same techniques and go to Facebook. People go to Facebook to be social. They aren't there to shop like people are when they type in a buying keyword on Google. However, if you set up a Facebook sales funnel then you should be able to convert pretty easily.
Three Steps to Advertising Success on Facebook
The first thing that you have to do is to let people know that your advertisement is there. Remember, the goals of Facebook ads are to be unobtrusive and camouflage themselves easily within the news feed or other placement area. That means that you are going to have to do something out-of-the-box to get people engaged. You can use comedy, great pictures or many other techniques to do this.
The second thing that you need to do is make sure that you are aware of who your audience is. Remember, the goal of setting up your Facebook ad campaign may not even be conversions. What if you don't know what you're talking to audience is going to be? You can use Facebook advertising to see who is interested in your products or services and from there you can create a custom audience that is going to respond much better. If you do know who your audience is, then make sure that you are aware of what will appeal to them and that you are creating your advertisements, landing pages and other elements of your campaign with them in mind.
The third thing that you're going to have to do is figure out a way to get conversions. If your product or service only cost a few dollars then you probably don't have to do much creative thinking to get people to convert. However, if you are selling larger items, then you may have to use a tripwire technique or something similar to get people to start the buying process.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that Facebook advertising is extremely effective and exceedingly in expensive. You can have a great deal of success for your business by using Facebook advertising if you know how to do a properly. it doesn't matter what type of product or service you are selling, Facebook has the audience that you need and the customization to allow you to create any type of ad you desire and make it effective.
Learning how to use Facebook advertising successfully isn’t an overnight process. You won’t be able to learn these techniques in a single day, and there is a great deal more to learn about Facebook advertising than what is listed in this article. However, hopefully now you have a much better idea of what to expect and will be able to get started with Facebook advertising. Even if you are now simply aware of the value of Facebook advertising, that fact alone may be able to help you grow your business if you decide to set up a Facebook ad campaign sometime down the road.
