Hints and tips from Team MadeSocial™ on getting more boost for your buck with Facebook advertising.
If you have a Facebook page for your brand, you’ve more than likely been feeling the pinch of Facebook making it more difficult for you to reach the people who ‘like’ your page. Maybe your reach has dropped, your engagement rate as petered out or watching your page likes go up is starting to feel a bit like watching paint dry? We feel your pain!
Facebook has been filtering the content which we see in our newsfeeds to show less promotional content from brands and businesses, and replaced it with more funny cat videos, selfies and Instagrammed shots of your pals’ dinner (in other words, non-promotional content.) This is annoying for businesses of any size promoting themselves through Facebook, and has meant that using Facebook as a marketing tool is becoming more of a ‘pay to play’ game with a much bigger reliance on Facebook advertising tools to get your content in front of your target audiences.
But, fear not – no matter how big or small your budget is, you can make the most of it and improve your results by upping your Facebook advertising game. Here are some guidelines from the team here at MadeSocial™ to help you get more for your money from Facebook advertising:
Start with a clear goal
When you set up adverts on Facebook, they give you a handy list of objectives to choose from (shown below), but are you picking the right one? You’ll get the best results from Facebook advertising if you’re clear on what you want to achieve from the start, so pick the one objective – yes, focus on only one! – which is the most important. So, if you’re going to promote a blog post on your site that you want people to read, but you’re also hoping that people might ‘like’ your page after reading it, and you also want people to engage with the post via ‘likes’, comments and shares, that’s three potential objectives. Pick the one which is most important and most appropriate for the content – so in this example, because the blog post is on your site and you want people to read it more than you want them to complete the other actions, you might pick ‘website clicks’ as your objective.
Use engaging images
“Even if your business doesn’t sell a product, try to pick images which reflect your brand and relate to what you’re advertising, rather than being too general.”
How much you pay for people to interact with your ad is all based around how good your click-through rate (CTR%) is, or in other words, how high the proportion of people who clicked on your ad versus how many people saw it is. So, grabbing people’s attention and encouraging them to click is all-important in getting better results from Facebook advertising. Use images which are likely to engage your target audience, and which tie in with what you’re promoting. Even if your business doesn’t sell a product, try to pick images which reflect your brand and relate to what you’re advertising, rather than being too general. The other thing to remember with your images is quality – avoid using grainy pictures taken on a relic mobile phone, or images which aren’t sized correctly for use on Facebook. Presentation is everything, people!
Use a clear call-to-action
The next most important thing which will help you improve your click-through rate is the text you use in your adverts. Great Facebook advert copy needs to lure people in and pique their interest, but also include a clear call-to action which encourages them to meet your objective and tells them why they should interact. This doesn’t mean that you should use sales-y messaging like “Buy This Now!” in your adverts (in fact we beg of you, please don’t!) but you should try and incorporate more subtle nudges in your advert copy. Not only will this be less spam-like for your audience, but Facebook tends to filter out content with aggressive sales messaging, so using gentle calls to action like “follow us to…”, “take a look at…” or “explore our range of…” will get you better results. People tend to scroll through their Facebook newsfeeds quickly, so you haven’t got long to grab ‘em – keep your message short and to the point, 1-2 short sentences is best.
“Great Facebook advert copy needs to lure people in and pique their interest, but also include a clear call-to action which encourages them to meet your objective and tells them why they should interact.”
Make sure your targeting is on-point
A great thing about using Facebook advertising over other forms of marketing is that the targeting capabilities are great, and you can really zero in on your target audience, no matter how niche they might be. So, make sure you use targeting options to their fullest potential and be specific – casting a reel-y (see what we did there?) wide net on Facebook is not necessarily going to get you more results. In fact, because how much you pay is determined by how popular your ad is with your audience, going for a large section of people who might only be sort of interested in your product isn’t the best way to go. If you’ve got a product that appeals to a lot of people and aren’t sure how to make it more specific, try breaking your target audience into chunks and running different adverts for each of them.
“Try breaking your target audience into chunks and running different adverts for each of them.”
Use the right bidding option
Once you’ve entered all of your copy and made your ads look nice and flashy, Facebook asks you to set your budgets and a bidding option. Depending on what type of objective you’ve set for your ad, you’ll be given different bidding options and the opportunity to set a maximum bid to tell Facebook what the maximum you want to pay for an individual action is. To get the most for your money from Facebook advertising, we’d recommend going with the option which is labelled “Optimised for…” and then your chosen objective, so if you picked Website Conversions, it will say “Optimised for Website Conversions.” If you pick this option, rather than having to enter a bid, Facebook will automatically bid competitively on your behalf in order to get your target audience to interact. By selecting this option, you’re reducing the possibility that you’ll miss out on targeting your audience because other advertisers are bidding higher and give yourself better chances of success. We know it might feel a bit scary not setting a parameter for how much you want to spend per click, but if you’ve set a daily budget, Facebook won’t ever go over it.
If you have any questions about social media, get in touch with our gurus.
