Facebook is one of the fastest growing markets for digital advertising. The company reported a net total of $26 billion in 2016, up 57% from its total advertising revenue in 2015. The UK market makes up roughly $1.8 billion of this spend.
It’s easy to follow the crowd and assume that this is the next best place to take your marketing activity, but before taking the leap in setting up Facebook adverts are you aware of the considerations that you should be making to ensure that this form of digital advertising is right for you?
Below are the 4 key questions you should be asking of yourself and your business before setting up a Facebook advertising campaign.
1) What is your objective from your Facebook advertising?
Before considering Facebook advertising, it is important to ask yourself what it is you are looking to achieve from your Facebook advertising. What is your ultimate end goal and what will you be looking for in your results to measure your ROI?
Are you wanting to generate new leads for your business? Are you wanting to drive more traffic to your website to raise brand awareness? Are you wanting to target existing customers or new customers?
Before you are able to set up any Facebook adverts, you must select an advertising objective from three categories – Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. The objective you select will determine your strategy.
For example, if your goal is to promote your content then a Consideration campaign would be the perfect fit – these can encourage users to engage with your posts or watch your videos. Alternatively, if your goal is to obtain more likes on your Facebook page, a brand or local awareness advertising objective would be a better fit for your campaign.
Understanding what you would like to achieve from your Facebook advertising is the first step towards creating a successful advert campaign.
2) Do you know who your audience is?
Without knowing who your audience is, setting up a successful Facebook advert campaign is going to be impossible. Before setting up the campaign, there are many things to consider – how old is your audience, where do they live, what interests do they have? The list is endless.
If you already have an idea of who your audience is, that is great. However, if you’re struggling or are unsure as to if your target audience can be found on Facebook the best place to start is to use Facebook’s Audience Insight tool. This allows you to learn about specific audiences before you dedicate a budget to targeting them.
If you already have a large number of likes on your Facebook page, this tool mines the available data of these individuals and tells you exactly who your target market is. Additionally, by inputting in information about your target audience – e.g their interests, expected education level – Facebook’s Audience Insight tool will also generate demographic information to give you more information about the individuals who make up your expected audience to see if they match up with the people you are wanting to target.
Targeting the right audience is important, because this ensures your advertising spend is not being wasted on audiences who are less likely to convert. The better targeted your adverts, the performance you will see as a result.
3) Do you have more than one audience to target?
If you have multiple products or services, it is important to consider if each of these services would be targeting the same audience.
For example, a legal firm may have multiple private and business legal services. Using an umbrella advert to try and capture this whole audience would essentially be a complete waste of budget. Instead, core audiences should be selected and advertising targeting accordingly.
Additionally, there may be different uses for a single product or service that would require targeting different audiences using different messages. Instead of delivering the same advert to everyone and hoping for the best result, it is important to create two unique adverts that would be delivered to two very different target markets.
Throughout the planning stages it is important to consider what messages you’re looking to push and if these would require different audiences. The better your adverts are targeted, the less chance of wastage of budget.
4) Do you have rich landing pages on your website?
If you’re planning on allocating marketing budget to Facebook ads then you need suitable landing pages on your website to accompany these. By sending prospective customers and clients to a basic website or product page that lacks clear direction, their click will be a waste of your budget. Optimising your landing pages with the content used within your adverts and making sure the people who do click through are shown relevant information is key to converting their business.
Aligning the content on your landing pages with the content on your adverts also increases your Ad Relevance score. This ranks your advert out of 10 as to how relevant it is to your target audience and the higher the score the lover you will pay per interaction with your advert.
Additionally, alignment of your advert and landing pages increases your conversion rate. Audience members who click the advert expect to get exactly what the post promised them. If they do, your brand gains credibility and potential customers are more likely to trust your business with their custom.
Here at Fantastic, we can help you answer the above questions and any more that you may have regarding social media advertising – simply contact us today!