With Facebook, businesses can reach more than 2 billion people every month with a variety of formats. The platform lets businesses target audiences with self-serve tools and gives analytical reports.
To take full advantage of Facebook advertising for your local small business, it’s a matter of persevering and understanding how it works with these seven tips.
Figure out your goals before planning your Facebook ad budget
You may be wondering: How much should I spend on Facebook ads? This may be the appropriate question but it’s not the right one.
Defining your goals ahead of time helps you understand how many sales you will need to reach your revenue targets. What are you looking to achieve: an increase in Facebook fans, more product sales, or new email subscribers?
Only then can you generate the Facebook advertising spend needed to reach your goals and generate profits from Facebook ads.
To make one sale, say your conversion rate is 1%, you need at least 100 visitors. If it slows down to 0.5%, you’ll need 200 visitors. This logic applies to every product you want to test.
There are a lot of tools out there that can help you figure out exactly how much to spend on Facebook ad campaigns. You can quickly calculate your budget if you know what your goals are, just be sure to set them beforehand.
Use geo-targeting with your ads
For brick-and-mortar businesses, geo-targeting is a great way to reach specific audiences within a geographical area. Your audience is more likely to convert if the ad is more relevant to them.
Geo-targeting works that way because it allows you to target specific audiences in specific places.
You can target ads based on country, state, city, congressional district, radius, and zip code. Your Facebook ads can even target audiences based on what they’re doing in your area, and if they were just visiting an area, which may be relevant to what you’re selling.
Taking advantage of custom lists is an option if you know your ideal customer’s geographic location. If you want to sell your products and services to multiple zip codes based on your targeting criteria, you can target them accordingly.
Create Facebook ad funnels based on your email marketing funnels
If you’re using email marketing, you can create a sequence of Facebook ads based on your emails that can be automatically delivered on corresponding days. Do you refer to customer testimonials or promote webinars in your emails? You can repurpose them in a Facebook ad.
From there, you can expand brand awareness and sales funnels with ads, depending on the size of your Facebook following. If you have a sizable following of people you engage with regularly and share useful content with, you can create your campaigns based on webinars and testimonials. This funnel will optimize your Facebook advertising results.
Get more eyeballs on your page by engaging with your community
Facebook’s content ranking algorithm is more relevant to your content when the page’s engagement rate is higher. If the engagement rate is high, it will improve your post’s relevance.
By interacting with comments on your post, you can boost the conversion. Facebook will start showing your page content to their friends and family just for responding to your post.
Use analytics tools to see your ROI
Optimize your Facebook campaigns with Google Analytics and other analytics tools. Facebook Analytics is a powerful tool that improves user engagement by breaking down advanced goal paths and sales funnels. Google Data Studio reports and visualizes your social media campaigns.
These tools are designed to gather insights about your site visitors and where they came from and then apply it to Facebook ads, so you can track your return on investment for your ads.
Make your ads even more creative
You know who you’re targeting. You know the best Facebook ad types to use. You’ve even got a rough picture of your budget. But that’s not all there is to it.
Ad fatigue is mostly caused by not updating your creative assets. Even well-targeted ads that have clever messaging will fail if they use a generic template that was created in a matter of minutes.
Use photos that are high-quality, have the right colors and are cropped correctly. Videos and still images are only as good as the story you tell behind them. What really makes an impact is the story on screen and a great message.
Think broadly and be sure to create captivating ads that your audience will want to engage with.
Test everything in your ads
The last step is to test everything. There are plenty of wonderful best practices to get you started, but some will perform better for you than others. Videos may perform better in some circumstances, while carousel ads may perform better in others.
Then see which Facebook ads are most effective and scalable for the best results with the lowest cost. Test images vs videos, different messaging, different photos and test those on the same audience.
Don’t give up on your Facebook ads
Don’t give up on experimentation if your campaigns aren’t achieving the results you wanted. If they aren’t resulting in as much traffic as you thought, perhaps it’s time to reflect on what’s not working.
Test your Facebook advertising by scaling the successful campaigns and pivoting those that don’t perform. Get feedback about your campaigns from others. As you keep going with your Facebook ads, you’ll be more confident in using Facebook more effectively.
