Today people are comparing Facebook ads to the Google AdWords platform. Several people around the globe strongly believe that Facebook ads have the potential to overtake the Google AdWords platform in terms of its reach in the next couple of years. If you are reading this in America, you must step up your Facebook ad game today! Research suggests that over 79% of the American internet users are on Facebook right now! The best part about this statistic is that it is continuously ruling in favour of Facebook.
Over 70% of the Facebook users actively use the platform daily! No other social media platform offers this type of reach and engagement on the internet today.
What do the Experts Say?
Globally-acclaimed expert marketer Gary Vaynerchuk says that this is the best time to invest in Facebook ads. He believes that investing a small amount of money in the Facebook ads can reap exponential amounts of return in near future. Gary also believes that the prices of Facebook ads are at a dirt-cheap price right now and that they will increase soon. He strongly recommends people to start using Facebook Ads right away.
Benefits of Facebook Targeting
Apart from the global reach and dirt-cheap prices, here are the 4 key factors that make Facebook ad targeting so efficient today.
- Highly Accurate Demographics: If you wish to avail the benefits of highly focused and specific market reach, Facebook is the perfect platform for you. The Facebook ad manager allows you to select specific criteria for your target audience. Some of these include age, gender, sex, relationship status, etc.
The ‘Free Forever’ feature of the Facebook platform has amassed a population that rivals that of the biggest country in the world. Today, there are more Facebook users than there are people in China. With such a powerful reach and sorting feature, Facebook has the potential to help you reach people you never knew existed!
- Extremely Strong Keyword Associations: Facebook can use its like/dislike feature very strongly to recommend your ad to the right audience. The keyword and preference association of the platform will help you reach all the right people at the right time. Both in the B2B as well as a B2C segment, Facebook can help you truly revolutionize your marketing efforts.
- Approximate Reach Feature: A special feature on the platform gives you the approximate amount of reach that your ads are currently targeting. You can use this knowledge to optimize your ad campaigns and increase the reach further. The best part about this feature is that you can use it even before placing any ads!
- Deep Data Analytics: The deep data analytics of the Facebook engine allows you to target the employees of a particular organization. This is the best way to catch a hold of the CXO-level person that you have sent a hundred emails already. The feature is exceptionally helpful in the B2B segment where the power of decision-making lies in the hands of several people from the target organization.
5 Tips for Facebook Marketing
Now that we know the power of Facebook marketing, let’s discuss a few quick tips to increase the efficiency of your efforts.
- Diversify: Novice marketers often commit the mistake of putting all their eggs in one basket. Facebook ads are highly dynamic in nature and the way how people respond to your ads may shift erratically over a week. So, it is a good idea to diversify your overall efforts and experiment with the marketing strategies. This way, your ads would adjust according to the market’s requirements and keep bringing you customers long after you first post the ad.
- Use Creativity: Creativity is what excites people on the social media platforms. If you are offering the same old boring feature list of your product/service on the ad, there is a high possibility that the ad fails miserably. Instead of posting textual content, experiment with graphical picture and video-based content. A moving animation, video or GIF has a greater possibility of attracting the audience’s attraction.
- Offer True Value: Marketers often let their targets and pressure from the sales department overrule their judgment. Under such pressure, they often tend to create extremely promotional posts and ads that add no true value to the customer’s mindset. On the other hand, the best marketers keep their audience’s interests at heart while designing the ad campaign. They focus on adding true value to the customer experience and then lure them into the sales cycle slowly.
- Use Automation Tools: If you are still posting ads manually, you are way behind the curve. Today tools like Jetpack, Revive and Blog2Social have automated the entire social media posting experience. These tools can help you schedule your posts and ads so that the information reaches the right customers at the right time. A combination of Facebook ads and posts is the best way to gauge the attention of the audience.
- Learn and Optimize: Marketing on Facebook has no fool-proof strategy. Instead, marketing is the most dynamic activity in the world. If you are not willing to accept your mistakes, learn and move on, you will stay stuck with a bad Facebook ad practice forever. Assigning micro goals for your Facebook ad experience will help you stay sharp and on point with the ad response. In case the ad does not generate enough commotion in the desired time frame, it is time to kill the ad and move on to a better one.
5 Tips to Optimize the Facebook Ads
We talked about optimization of Facebook ads in the last point of the previous section, right? Let’s learn how to put that thought into action on a live Facebook ad.
- Scheduling the Ads
Are you running your ads 24/7, 365 days a year? If you are doing this, you are playing the game wrong. The return on investment that you get with such practices will jeopardize your entire marketing campaign. Instead of running these ads for an extended period, run them only when your target audience is using Facebook. How do you find the right time? Simple! A small blend of market research and common sense comes to your rescue here.
Tools like AdEspresso will help you keep a track of the times when the ad received a maximum number of views. You can also apply basic logic here. Let’s say that you are selling cool baseball gear for kids on the internet. If you are running your ads on weekdays between 9 to 5, your ads will not produce the desirable returns since most kids are at school at this time. Instead, you can run the ads late in the evening when these kids are actively using Facebook. - Ad Rotation
Utilizing your old content is the best way to get the best return on investment in the world of digital marketing. Ad rotation is the best way to make sure that your audience notices your products/services effectively. Bugging your audience with the same ad, again and again, will only make them despise your product/service. Instead, you need to target the right audience with the multiple ads at a time.You can use the Facebook ad designs to create your own ad variations so that the audience does not get bored with the same ad repeated again and again. - A/B Testing
If you are not testing your ads before launching them, you are preparing to fail. A/B testing is the finest way to ensure that the ads that you place will bring desired results over time. The testing process will also eliminate the underperforming ads in the initial stages before you launch it at a massive scale.You can find tonnes of online tools that will let you do the A/B testing for multiple ads for free. Marketing automation tools like Hubspot and Marketo are the best tools for you to conduct the A/B testing over email campaigns. - Selecting Campaign Objective
Setting your campaign objective is extremely important in the realm of Facebook ads. If you are not selecting the right ad objective, your ad will not produce the desired results. For example, if you are starting off as a new global brand, a good amount of global reach is more important to you than local awareness. Similarly, for a person who is running ads for a restaurant at a particular location, the local awareness plays a far more important role.
- Auto-Optimization
Optimization seems like a good idea, right? So why do marketers often refrain from doing this? Simple. It takes too much time and effort. Well, Facebook launched a new feature that allows the marketers to rest easy now. The auto-optimization feature of the Facebook ads will allow you to set parameters for optimization with a few clicks. You don’t need to invest a lot of time into repeated optimization now.
This is the best time for you to start using Facebook ads to its full potential. Use these tips and tricks to transform your social media marketing efforts today!
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