If you manage a business page on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll be encouraged to advertise on these channels.
Whether boosting a post or placing an advert. It’s made easy for you to spend money, but what do you need to ensure success at running adverts?
Here are my 8 top tips of things you should consider before you start advertising with social media ads.
1) Budget
You need to think about how much you’d like to spend on advertising campaigns.
Meta campaigns are run as an auction and spending £50 a month is unlikely to reap you many leads or sales.
Depending on which type of advert you wish to run will vary your costs. A conversion advert is the most expensive campaign you can run. A conversion campaign is where you are asking people to buy or sign up for your thing.
At the other end of the spectrum will be ads for people to like/follow your page. These won’t cost as much, but you have to ask yourself why would I want them to follow my page if the overall objective is for them to sign up to a paid course or to buy from me. Of course this may be part of a larger marketing plan.
For my clients, I advise an ideal spend would be a minimum of £600 per month. £600 allows me to test two audiences with multiple adverts and retarget. A budget greater than £600 would allow testing of more audiences or a greater audience reach.
If you have a lower budget, advertising will not be out of reach – but it may take a little longer to achieve decent results depending on what objective you are looking to achieve.
2) Website
Where are you sending the clickers on your advert to? If it’s to your website, does it run fast or slow? Is it mobile-friendly? If you are an e-comm business is it easy for a buyer to buy your products or not?
Mapping the process that a prospective buyer needs to follow is an important step for you to take. If there are too many pages to click through, if it’s painfully slow or if you have them jump through hoops, prospects will click off and you won’t make the sale. Even if your ad is amazing and you are getting thousands of click-throughs.
3) Datasets in place
Have you set your Facebook pixel up yet? If not then now is the time to do this. Having a working pixel in place will allow FB to start tracking the people who are visiting and contacting you or buying via your website. You can then use this information to look for people similar to your existing customer.
Click here to read how to set up your Facebook pixel.
4) CAPI set up
Once you’ve set up your Facebook pixel you need to set up conversions API. Here is a guide on how to set it up.
5) Audiences
Setting up a Facebook audience is your way of telling Facebook who you’d like to target with your advert. This is where knowing who your ideal customer is comes in handy.
Facebook favours larger and broader audiences. That said you try to sell to everyone and you’ll end up selling to no one. Their new Audience tool is pretty magical but it doesn’t work for all businesses.
So think about whether your ideal customer or lead is male, female or both. What age are they and where do they live? You can then do further segmentation by thinking about what other companies they may be interested in, their highest level of education, their relationship status and whether or not they have children.
If I’m helping with your advertising then this is something I can help with.
6) Message and Graphics
Putting together the words for your advert and obtaining graphics, whether that be a still image, video or carousel need to be considered carefully. After all, these are the hooks that your ideal client will be seeing in their feed leading them to the decision on whether to click or not.
One of the things I do see a lot when advising people about their advertising is that when they set up a campaign they only use one graphic in their advert. My advice is to start with multiple, after all, what appeals to one of your ideal clients may not appeal to another and vice versa. It’s only through testing these you will see what appeals and what doesn’t.
7) Time
Facebook ads are not a quick fix to set up or to achieve results. Depending on what type of campaign you are looking to run, the set-up can take a couple of weeks from scratch.
Results from adverts are usually not instantaneous. If running a lead magnet campaign you will probably see results a lot quicker. If an e-comm campaign they tend to take a little more time to pick up the pace.
Call an expert
You are the expert in running your business and I am an expert in running advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. If you wish to advertise and would like me to check all of the above (and more), then please get in touch.
