These days, businesses everywhere are turning to Facebook as an important platform for reaching and engaging prospects and clients alike. As a user, you can spend hours cycling through your friends’ vacation picture or cat video posts.
For business owners, if used incorrectly, the time you spend posting posts could fall on deaf ears. Even worse, if you begin paying for more engagement, you may be wasting money.
In order for Facebook to truly become a tool for earning and engaging new prospects, you must be willing to pay to play. Because their entire business model revolves around paid advertising, Facebook has made it difficult to reach new customers without investing. But if used correctly, you can get a lot of great leads for a small investment. It all begins with targeting.
Know Your Audience
There are many reasons why Facebook has become a popular advertising platform. First, it is the most popular social media platform in the world. Facebook has over 1.4 billion users, and these customers tend to be highly engaged with the site.
But probably the most important reason why it’s popular is it’s targeting. You can very easily find exactly the people you want to find on Facebook. Not only can you find the demographics of a person on Facebook (who, what, where), but you can also target people by their psychographics (what they like, who they’re friends with, etc.).
The more you can know about your ideal customers, the better. You can use all of this information to find people just like them. The more you can narrow your audience down, the higher conversion rate you’ll get. Fewer people may see your ad, but you stand a higher chance of them engaging with it. This will save you money on advertising in the long run, because you won’t be paying for impressions that don’t turn into customers.
Start by looking at your current Facebook audience. Is there something that binds them as a group? Do they all live in the same area, have similar jobs, or even like similar music? Then target people based on those commonalities in your Facebook advertising.
Facebook even gives you the tools to build an audience based on people who visit your website and others who share the same characteristics.
For an even narrower focus, you can target just friends of people that already like your page.
Engaging Advertising
When you finally do create a Facebook ad, you have to make sure it is engaging. It is a bit of an art form creating great ads, but anyone can learn how.
Get some inspiration from your own timeline. Is there a particular style of post that is getting sharedfrequently? Quizzes and videos are popular maybe creating an ad around one of those elements can be helpful.
I’d suggest beginning by trying to think of a 5-10 question quiz based on what you might typically ask a perspective client. Are they ready to buy your product or service? Find out by answering these questions!
Be careful, though. Facebook does have some limitations on calls to action and featured images in the post. Be sure to work around the guidelines, which you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads
Test and Retest
Another great feature of Facebook advertising is that it allows you to try multiple versions of the ad targeted to the same audience. You can switch the copy or change the image and have them link to the same page. You can then find out which is more effective by how many clicks and conversions the ad receives.
Here’s the best part: A lot of this is done automatically. Facebook wants your ad to succeed, so if you have different ads in the same ad set, the one that converts the best will be shown to more people. You should review your ads regularly, but it doesn’t require a constant eye. Use the information to write better ads for next time!
Set a Budget
When beginning a Facebook advertising campaign, be sure to set a maximum budget. This will stop the campaign as soon as you reach it. While you’ll likely end up paying less than the budget you set, a maximum budget keeps you from paying too much. If you don’t set one and your ad is successful, Facebook will keep running up the bill until you manually stop the campaign, or you reach the end of the campaign.
Interested in advertising on Facebook? There’s a lot of competition out there, but with these basic tips, you’ll be able to grow your audience and turn them into potential clients on a reasonable budget.
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