Effective Facebook Advertising

Featuring Lesya Liu

I am excited to welcome another entrepreneur to the blog today, Lesya Liu of The Social Media Current, to share her insight and expertise on how to do Facebook adverting the right way.

So without further ado, take it away Lesya!

For the past year or so, various media outlets blazed with titles in a manner of “Facebook is dead,” “Get off Facebook now,” etc. Yet, like a famous Mark Twain quote says, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” While it’s true that Facebook’s organic reach for posts from Business Pages is way below anything marketers would ever expect, this is definitely not an end of Facebook. It’s a new beginning of Facebook advertising.

Now is the time to evaluate your Facebook presence, strategy and whether the network is the right fit for your company’s needs. If you create killer content and promote it correctly, you won’t be spending much but will see a huge ROI for your efforts.

So how do you advertise on Facebook effectively?

First, you become really clear on the rules of the game.

The first thing to make sure you’re doing is you are creating engaging promotions. This has two components to it: value offer and the right execution. It’s up to you to decide what value you bring to the table. When you decide to promote your offering, make sure you’re as concise and clear as possible. Note that Facebook allows 90 characters for the copy, and the image that goes with it cannot have more than 20 percent text in it.

How to Set up Ads

There are two options for creating ads: the Facebook Ads Creator and the Power Editor. Although Ads Creator is limited in its capabilities, it’s much more user-friendly. Get comfortable with Ads Creator before jumping to Power Editor.

An ad consists of three levels – campaign, ad set and ad. Objectives are set at the campaign level. Audience, budget and schedule are set at the ad set level. Individual tweaks like text and images are drafted at the ad level.

First, you will need to:

• Decide on ad type
• Choose objective
• Define target audience
• Pick ad placement
• Define budget
• Types of Facebook Campaign Objective

The best, most simple, yet most important and difficult question to answer is “what are you trying to accomplish with a Facebook ad?” Do you care about people engaging with your posts, liking your page or going straight to your website? We want it all, but you have to focus on one objective at a time.

Objectives to choose from are:

• Page Post Engagement
• Page Likes
• Clicks to Websites
• Website Conversions
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• Event Responses
• Offer Claims
• Video Views

Then, you specify a budget for ad sets. Insert the amount and specify whether it is a daily ($10 a day) or a lifetime budget ($100 for the whole campaign). You will also need to pick a start and an end date or decide to run it on a continuous basis until stopped manually by you. If an ad is not performing well, you can switch it off and stop spending money or if it’s doing amazing you can add more budget too.

Choosing the Placement for Your Ad

Newsfeed, mobile Newsfeed and the Right-hand column, each location has its strengths and weaknesses. The most visible advertising placement is the Newsfeed. Mobile Newsfeed is exactly the same, except targets mobile users. If your website is not mobile-friendly, better un-check this option. Right-hand column placement secures a location right underneath Trending Topics.

Once you feel more comfortable with the Facebook Ad creation process, venture into Power Editor. Power Editor aids with the creation of bulk ads. It also has lots of cool benefits, including enhanced ad placement possibilities (you can specify the device and operating system your target audience is using), running ads during specific times of the day and ad optimizing to be shown only once to each user.

The most frequently-used reason to move on to Power Editor is “Unpublished posts.” They appear similar to a regular post and include a call-to-action button. Use unpublished posts for A/B testing your ads. Besides, unpublished posts allow more text before cutting off into the “See More” link.

“In order for any advertisement to be effective, it has to be seen by the right people at the right time.”

Play around with ad content and placement. Also, experiment with it first with little dollar amounts to get a feel for what results you get, see what statistics tell you, and what insight you can gain from test ads. Expect first Facebook ads to be a little pricey, but as you get better at targeting and understanding what engages people, the cost of running ads will get lower.

In order for any advertisement to be effective, it has to be seen by the right people at the right time. Facebook offers one of the most sophisticated targeting tools based on their demographics, interests and even purchasing stages.

Targeting Your Ad

Once you feel comfortable to venture into Power Editor, you can upload your own audiences and target people based on their email addresses, phone numbers, user IDs and visits to your website (this is why you need Facebook Pixel). You also have the ability to allow Facebook to create “Lookalike Audiences” based on the shared traits of your audience.

You can go into Insights on your business page and check out “People.” But for a real wealth of information, head over to “Audience Insights” under “Ads Manager” and you will get a wealth of information about your customer personas.

You have to be very precise about what your target audience looks like. Perform a Facebook Graph Search to see what other pages your audience is connected to. This will give you a valuable insight not only about your competitions or new market opportunities but also will give you an insight as to what your audience is interested in and what they value.

Free Resource!

Free Facebook Ad Campaign Tracker to help you organize your Facebook Campaign.