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Facebook and Google Ads – The Keys to Small Business Paid Search

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By John Jantsch

If you want to run a business today, you need to be advertising on Facebook and Google. These two tech giants dominate the online advertising market, and their reach is so incredibly broad (both have billions of users each month) that to leave them out of your strategy is to not have an online strategy at all.

However, if you take a look into how to approach advertising on these sites, you’ll find some conflicting opinions online. And of course the advertising approach for a large company is going to be very different from the one undertaken by a small business with a limited marketing budget.

Here, we’ll look at how to make Facebook and Google work best for you, the small business owner.

Determine Your Budget

Before you go off down the marketing rabbit hole, the first thing you need to do is set a realistic budget for yourself. It’s entirely possible to run an effective marketing campaign online with an outrageous spend, but you’ll need to understand what you’re willing and able to spend before you can develop an approach to using these tools effectively.

When you’re thinking about budget, it’s critical that you consider the budget for the year, not just month to month. Your online marketing campaign will not be successful if it comes in fits and starts—as one of our guest bloggers noted here, being a consistent presence online and in front of customers is a key component of building trust and driving conversions. That means that when you think about marketing budget, you need to think about your long game.

Have a Gameplan

After you’ve determined what you’re willing and able to spend, you’ll also want to set really clear objectives for your marketing campaign. Sure, you’re hoping to win more business, but how do you measure success? Number of conversions? Number of sales? Percentage of revenue growth?

Understanding what your expectations are for your marketing efforts will allow you to better understand the results of your campaign and refine your approach further in the future.

Understand Your Prospective Customers

Each small business is solving a unique problem, and therefore has their own unique cohort of prospective customers that could benefit from their good or service.

One of the key benefits to using Google and Facebook advertising is that they allow you to get really specific about the people who will see your advertising.

How to Find Your Audience on Facebook

I go into greater detail on this podcast about setting up your Facebook Business Manager account, but once you have that up and running there are a number of tools you’ll want to take advantage of to identify your most promising prospects.

  • Facebook Pixel is a line of code that you can install on your own company’s website. This code will allow you to track those who visit your site and send them targeted ads on Facebook based on their behavior. If someone’s already expressed interest in your business by visiting your website but hasn’t yet become a customer, you’ll want them to encounter you again on Facebook. The more consistently someone sees your brand across various channels, the more likely they’ll be to go and check you out in greater depth.
  • Creating lookalike audiences is another key component to optimizing your Facebook advertising. Facebook allows you to upload a list of your current customers, and then they generate a list of users who have similar attributes to those with whom you already do business.

How to Find Your Audience on Google

Google also provides business owners with a number of avenues to target specific users with their advertising.

  • Google Ads (formerly AdWords) allows you to target your ads by location and search words. There is some legwork you need to do up front to research the most effective keywords for your business. Putting in the time at the start to do the research phase correctly can result in really stellar results for your business and will get you the most bang for your advertising buck.
  • Google Local Services Ads are an important tool for tradesmen, technicians, or those who offer services to homeowners. Local Services Ads curates a list of providers of a particular service in a particular area (i.e. “electricians in San Francisco”). This puts your business front and center with those homeowners who are in immediate need of the service you provide. Your contact information is available, and so it’s a direct way to not only generate a lead but gain a new customer right on the spot.

Understand How to Best Use Each Platform

Facebook and Google both allow you to target your most promising prospects and to get detailed analytics about the success of your campaign, but there are some differences between advertising on the two sites, and so your approach to each should be unique.

Facebook’s ethos is all about creating community, so when someone searches for a business there, the first thing they see is how their friends are interacting with the brand. Once they head to the business’s page, they’re encouraged to invite their friends to “like” the page. The advertising is visually-driven, allowing you to paint a picture (literally) of what your business can do. The endorsements of friends and other Facebook users and the image-rich pages all allow you to present your business as one that’s trustworthy—you’ve earned the kudos of real people and you’re not afraid to share pictures and videos that show who your company really is.

Google’s paid search takes a different approach that’s more about immediacy. With a paid search ad, your company appears in line with results to a particular query. That means that if you’re a florist in San Diego, and someone is in desperate need of flowers in that geographical area, you can ensure you’re the first name they see when they type “florist near me” into their Google search. This allows you to become the immediate solution to their pressing issue. Google’s platform also incorporates ratings and reviews into some of its advertising (specifically as a part of Local Services Ads) and those with the highest ratings are often bumped up to the top of the results list. This means that reviews and trustworthiness are still a key component of the game on Google.

Two Advertising Tactics are Better Than One

While each platform has their own unique strengths, there is even more value in using the two together. Facebook cites a case study from the digital marketing technology firm Kenshoo, to illustrate this point. Kenshoo looked at Experian’s paid search approach and found that using Facebook and Google ads together helped to improve the overall effectiveness of their campaign.

Because users often turn to Facebook first and go there for personal recommendations from friends and other users, having advertising present on Facebook is a valuable first step to gaining a prospect’s attention. As I’ve noted before, 90 percent of consumers say they trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, and 70 percent say they trust a personal recommendation from any fellow consumer (even a stranger online).

In their case study, Kenshoo noted that when Experian advertised on both Facebook and Google, they saw a 19 percent increase in total conversions, while spending 10 percent less overall per acquisition. Using both platforms together allows you to get in front of prospects across multiple channels, build trust, and make the conversion.

Pay Attention to the Analytics and Pivot Accordingly

Both Google and Facebook ads provide you with a lot of information about how your ads are performing.

Do you have an ad that’s reaching the right people but isn’t resulting in leads or conversions? If you’ve put together an expensive television ad or print campaign that isn’t generating results, you’ve already spent the money and can’t take it all back.

Fortunately, with online advertising you’re able to quickly scrap ideas that aren’t successful and test out new approaches. And if you make tweaks to your advertising one step at a time, applying the principle of A/B testing, you’re able to see what change you’ve made that’s generating the most positive results from your audience. From there, you can hone in on that approach and expand it to other marketing and advertising efforts.

Facebook and Google ads are really great for small businesses because they’re a low risk and potentially high reward way to reach new customers. Both platforms make it easy to find those who are most likely to want to interact with your brand, which makes lead generation and conversion an easier task. And if you’re willing to go the extra mile and sort through the analytics that come back from your campaigns, you can use that information to further refine your approach in the future, thereby creating more and more effective advertising campaigns each time.

By John Jantsch

Sourced from Duct Tape Marketing

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How to Use PPC Marketing to Find More Clients

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By Callum Mundine

The age of the Internet has given rise to the kind of workers the world never thought would gain so much traction: freelancers. These are people who use their varied skills to earn enough income without being bound by a contract tying them to only one company. They can collaborate with clients without the long-term commitment. It’s the ultimate freedom — or is it?

Like any job, freelancing has its fair share of challenges. Freelancers are not exempt from dealing with clients, conflicts in schedule, competition, and all those things nine-to-five employees face. If you’re a freelancer, you know this to be true.

Among the many hardships that freelancers face is one that can make or break their career: attracting and keeping clients. Both online and offline freelancers are faced with tough competition. To address this problem, you must stay one step ahead of your competitors. But how?

If you have access to the Internet, which I am sure you do, try using paid online advertising to get the ball rolling. The age of cold-calling is over, and thankfully, we have a new option: pay-per-click advertisements. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is one of the most common marketing schemes for small businesses. It works like a billboard ad in the sense that you pay for your space, but it gives you a much wider audience. This is especially beneficial to freelance online writers since we generally can’t employ the same marketing strategies as big businesses and brands.

What are the benefits of PPC marketing?

Unlike print advertising, PPC can instantly get your freelance writing services onto the radar of a large number of potential leads. It will give you the power to target your ads to a specific audience.

Because it is customizable, you can set it up to show your ad to specific areas and at certain times of the day. Best of all, you will only pay for the service each time a viewer clicks on your ad. This way, you’re only paying for those who are more likely to convert to actual clients. You even have the freedom to adjust your budget or redefine your target audience at any time, and the ad will reflect the changes almost instantly. It’s a great way to put yourself out there with maximum return on your investment.

Where do I set up my PPC marketing plan?

There are different types of PPC available on the Internet. You can go for search engine PPC advertising or social media PPC advertising — it depends on your industry and niche. For example, freelance writers may want to opt for search engine PPC marketing, as clients are more likely to turn to Google or Bing to look up writing services.

Search engine advertising provides targeted traffic and is keyword-driven. Leads are generated by people typing certain search words. Meanwhile, social media marketing is more interest-driven and appeals to people who share the same interests.

Whichever the case and whatever PPC you think will suit you best, here are the best PPC marketing channels that every freelancer can take advantage of to find more clients.

Google AdWords

Nowadays, more than 80% of online searches are done through Google. It has dominated the search engine market and is undeniably the most popular search engine.

Google AdWords is the PPC marketing system that Google offers businesses. Ads occupy the first four spots on the search results page and are shown again after ten organic search results. If a user clicks on your ad, they are redirected to your site or page, and Google AdWords charges you the corresponding fee. Advertisers bid for the top spots on the results page. The higher you are on the list, the better exposure you have.

As a freelance writer, you may not have a budget as large as big brands to bid for the top position, but setting up a PPC campaign can help you get the word out there without poking a hole in your wallet. You have the opportunity to attract more clients and only pay for those who are interested enough to click on your ad.

Source: Pixabay

Facebook Ads

Most people who have access to the Internet have a Facebook account. We talk to friends and family, we share photos, we share memes, we organize events, we sell products — almost everything and everyone can be found on Facebook. So can your next client. It’s only a matter of getting the word out about your freelance writing services.

Facebook Ads are cheaper than almost all other online advertising options, and their reach is almost limitless. You can target your ad by behavior, interest, demographics, connections, you name it. You can even tailor it according to age range and location. This is a great way to show up in a potential client’s newsfeed and get noticed.

Be sure to identify who your target audience is and be as specific as you can. What do you specialize in as a freelance writer? Copywriting? SEO? Any specific niche you are best at? You have to know your target audience’s age group, interests, and location in order to reach them with your ads.

Next, do your research. Find out what days and the specific time your target audience is likely to be online. Create your ad based on their online activity. What are their problems and needs? What questions do they ask in relation to the service that you provide? What images do they like to see? Or maybe they would be more attracted to videos? Do they like memes? Would they respond to Facebook quizzes? People go on Facebook to be distracted, so be sure to provide them with the best distraction.

It is important to tailor your ads carefully to make it more effective. While this is true for all marketing campaigns, it applies especially to Facebook ads.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is the professional older brother of Facebook. You will find even the most high-ranking executives on LinkedIn. Ads posted there will allow you to reach the key professionals in your industry. You can target your ad according to company names, company industry, company size, job functions, job titles, membership levels, and the like. If you are targeting professionals of a specific age or gender, you also have the option to target your ad to that demographic. On LinkedIn, you will see industry front-runners in the niche where you want to establish yourself as a writer.

LinkedIn’s PPC runs much higher compared to Facebook, at $5 per click. To get your money’s worth, be as specific as you can so your ad will generate higher quality leads. It is a good idea to segment your ads according to how you’ll be posting. You can also use sponsored updates, which appear in users’ newsfeeds, giving you premium placement.

Twitter Ads

Twitter offers the following advertising schemes:

  • promoted tweets
  • promoted accounts
  • promoted trends

The cost will largely depend on the type of ad you choose.

To promote a tweet, you will have to pay every time a user clicks the Favorite button, retweets your post, or replies to it. You will not have to pay per impression, which is the number of feeds your posts will show up on. A promoted tweet costs around $1.35 per engagement.

Promoting an account is essentially identifying a target audience to which Twitter will promote your account. This will work when you want to gain more followers that may be interested in your business. You pay per confirmed follower a fee of $2.50–$4.00.

Promoted trends, used typically by bigger companies, appear in the Trends section of Twitter and cost up to $200,000 per day.

While this may not be the most cost-effective PPC option for freelance writers, Twitter allows you to interact up close and personal with potential clients. This is still worth looking into if you’re willing to spend a little more on engagement.

How do I write my ad copy?

That being said, all ad copy is not created equal. The PPC campaign may grab a potential client’s attention, but your copy still holds the power of keeping them interested until they convert. Here are a few quick and easy tips to write better copy for your ads:

  • Hint at your services’ benefits. What will your client get if they hire you as a freelance writer? How will you help their business? Are you an SEO expert? Do you have other skills? Capitalize on that and highlight it in your ad. Remember to answer this question that most clients will ask: “What’s in it for me?”
  • Hint at your competitors’ weaknesses and gaps. This doesn’t have to be blunt and outright, but you must mention why they should choose you instead of other freelance writers.
  • Get to know your audience. Target a specific group or industry and focus your message on them by using “you” instead of “we.” It is also important to understand your medium — that is, which PPC platform are you putting your ad in?
  • Don’t forget a call-to-action. After you’ve laid out all your strengths and your competition’s weaknesses, make it count. Don’t leave your audience hanging and confused as to what you want them to do. Include a clear call-to-action that catches the eye.
  • Lastly, proofread. Proofreading will save you a lot of trouble, and it always pays to double-check your work before you release it on the Internet where it is much harder to take back.

Final thoughts

Any marketing plan will only initially get the client’s attention, then it’s up to you to keep the client. Remember to be true to what you promised in your ad and keep your integrity as a freelancer. After all, a good reputation goes a long way.

Have you tried ProWritingAid’s editing tool yet? It will help you edit faster, strengthen your writing, and get your ideas across.

Try it for free now!

Originally published at prowritingaid.com.

 

By Callum Mundine

Callum Mundine is part of the marketing team at One Egg. He is an Amazon marketplace & white hat link building specialist, and has launched multiple successful brands on Amazon.com. Callum like his eggs boiled.

Sourced from The Writing Cooperative

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Five social media platforms that your competitors are using in 2018

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By Holly Thatcher

In 2018, every business knows that having a strong social media presence is no longer optional. It’s the most powerful tool available to develop relationships with consumers and to build brands.

But the world of social media never stands still. It’s not just a competition for likes and followers anymore – today, the most forward thinking businesses are concerned with getting consumers to engage with their message in a meaningful way.

While Facebook might be what springs to mind when you think of social media, newly emerging platforms should not be overlooked, particularly if you are trying to tap into the international market.

These are some of the social media platforms that growing businesses are embracing in 2018.

Facebook ads

(Image: Getty)

Facebook is changing. At the start of 2018, its relationship with businesses changed to “it’s complicated” after CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced that posts from friends and family would be prioritised in users’ newsfeeds over posts from publishers and brands.

The idea behind this is to make Facebook a more positive experience, by encouraging users to have more conversations and connections with peers. But it’s bad news for brands, who already faced an uphill struggle achieving organic reach.

Facebook ads work on a self-service format
Facebook ads work on a self-service format (Image: Facebook)

With this in mind, B2C businesses should investigate Facebook paid ads. They’ve widened massively in scope – Facebook Messenger and Carousel ads have recently been launched, for example – and offer the advantages of being self-service, highly targeted, budget flexible, and measurable.

LinkedIn

In 2018 businesses can't afford to get left behind when it comes to social media
In 2018 businesses can’t afford to get left behind when it comes to social media (Image: Ju Stocker/Getty)

For the B2B market, LinkedIn is where you are likely to reach your most engaged audience. It offers various marketing opportunities, including:

Sponsored Content – this can be targeted to reach an audience of professionals beyond just your LinkedIn Company Page followers.

Direct Sponsored Content – this feature allows you to share content directly in the feed, giving you the ability to personalise and test content without having to originate posts on your LinkedIn Company Page. Make your content more relevant by sending personalised messages to specific audiences. Then test and retest a variety of content in real-time to optimise performance.

InMail – send personalised messages to the people who matter most to your business, with the ability to collect more leads with the lead-gen form.

Dynamic ads – these are customised messages to drive content downloads/page visits and collect quality leads.

Video and Carousel ads are also set to launch shortly, offering yet more opportunity to connect with the clients that matter.

WeChat

WeChat users spend an hour a day on average using the app (Image: Getty)

There’s a good chance you’ve not heard of WeChat, but it’s a game-changer in China.

With around 938m monthly average users who use it to socialise, buy, game and more, WeChat is a super-app.

On average, users spend more than an hour a day using it, and 40 per cent of Chinese consumers no longer carry cash because they can buy things using WeChat Pay.

The app allows you to localise your offering to Chinese consumers – but you will need partners to help you, and a decent budget.

Setting up a WeChat store and starting marketing will cost in the region of £50,000 – but there is potentially a serious return to be had on that investment.

Instagram Stories

via GIPHY

Of the 300 million accounts using Instagram Stories, one-third of the most viewed stories come from businesses, and one in five stories gets a direct message from its viewers.

The possibilities are endless with Instagram stories: Boomerang, live videos, event promotion, user-generated content to increase engagement…..dive in and get creative!

With the ability to target your ads by reach, video views, traffic, conversions, app installs and brand awareness, you can drive business results at the same time.

Vkontakte

Vkontakte has 90 million active monthly users
Vkontakte has 90 million active monthly users

When it comes to social media, don’t assume the ‘most popular’ platforms are the most popular.

Whilst Facebook has a presence in Russia (between 13 and 20 million monthly active users, depending on which report you trust), Vkontakte demonstrates that a well-structured social platform that serves the local population can take the lead as the most popular social media site.

On the surface, Vkontakte looks a lot like Facebook and Instagram rolled into one – but there are a few differences that really set it apart

Its embedded MP3 player and playlist tool, for example, is certainly worth investigating for anyone involved in the music industry. With access to 90 million active monthly users on the platform, it’s a potential seam waiting to be mined.

Bristol Social Media Week 2018

Most small businesses acknowledge that social media can be a wonderful way to promote their product or brand, but many are confused by whether they can still rely on organic reach (free posts) or if they should be investing their resources in paid for advertising (pay-to-play). When used properly, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can become effective and profitable sales tools.

Social Media Week, the leading global conference hosted in over 25 cities worldwide, is coming back to Bristol in February 2018 to upskill and inform the local business community on key issues in media, marketing and technology. Business West is proud to be the official partners of this year’s event and will be taking over Wednesday 28th February with talks from the likes of 2014 Apprentice winner and CEO of Climb Online Mark Wright, Instagram, Aardman, JustEat and many more

By Holly Thatcher

Sourced from Bristol Post

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Does Facebook Ads really generates ROI? People are tired of ads…

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Facebook Ads have revolutionized the world of advertising by making the process easier. We’re already familiarized with its interface and everyone with a facebook profile and fan page can have access to it. Facebook brought paid advertising opportunities to big and small companies regardless of their budget. But, what about conversions and ROI? Is Facebook Ads really delivering that kind of revenue it promises?

I would say it depends. Due to all the information we give freely to Facebook when we open our personal profiles, this social network has a big database of our interests, demographics, migratory movements, hobbies, idols, education, among others. Ad targeting is easier and more effective, and it’s more accurate to know how many people match our targeting criteria for a specific campaign.

A social platform

In terms of reach, Facebook is a big tool to increase awareness whatever the objectives of your campaign are: promoting an event, launching a product, getting people to know your brand, promoting your content. But when it comes to conversions… well, that’s a different story.

We can’t forget that Facebook is a social network. Social, not specifically a sales channel. It’s a platform to create connections with people (customers and potential customers), to entertain, to inform, to educate, and nowadays due to the growth of influencers, to influence.

According to a recent research by Splashlight, fewer than a third of US consumers are influenced by Social Media when making a purchase decision. And with the increasing number of people investing on Facebook Ads, I’m sure you have noticed how the social platform has become a shop window by bombarding people with ads promoting services/products they even didn’t know they need it or want it.

People are getting tired of so many ads

People on social media are not on search mode. In fact, people are being bothered by constant ads. A survey carried by Lithium Technologies in 2016 shows that 56% of native digitals are using less frequent or even have stopped using social media platforms due to ads on their news feeds.

Targeting on Facebook is getting better. Recently Facebook is testing ads when people make an in-store visit. We are chasing customers and potential clients in a very aggressive way and this is causing a massive rejection to ads. So, what should ads really do to avoid this kind of response from people they want to target?

Instead of a sales discourse, ads should call attention and take people to the website, a better place to generate sales. If you are looking for instant conversions (in terms of sales) with a small budget, you are wasting time, effort and money. Try to focus on other aspects such as sparking curiosity, inspiring or entertaining. The objective can be the same, but another approach can be more effective.

If you are just starting with Facebook Ads, take this into account:

6 aspects to improve Facebook Ads

–Set specific, measurable goals to track the ROI of your campaigns: page likes, engagement, opt-ins…

–Narrow your target: if your audience is too broad, the conversion is more difficult. More reach doesn’t mean better reach.

–Choose the right ad format: a video, image, carrousel… depending on what you’re trying to achieve, choose the one that will adapt better to your message and audience.

–Try different ad sets and test them!

-Create eye-catching optimized images and a clear copy

-Don’t forget the CTA (call-to-action) for the goal you set for your ad, not for your intention to sell.

Remember that people go to Facebook to connect with their contacts and to relax watching amusing content. So try to create ads that engage with people’s expectations. Give it a try and let us know!

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Sourced from MJC Studio

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The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Facebook Ads

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By Kevan Lee.

Paid advertising on Facebook seems to be one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Though it’s not without its questions.

Understanding how to leverage Facebook Ads is becoming a staple part of almost every social media strategyAnd if you want to get your posts seen on Facebook, it’s becoming more and more likely that you’ll have to pay for reach with Facebook Ads.

Paid advertising on Facebook seems to be one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Though it’s not without its questions. How well does it work? What kind of engagement do you get? And what can you expect for your hard-earned money?

In this post, we’ll share with you everything you need to know about Facebook Ads to get your campaigns up and running as well as all we’ve learned from our own experiences.

Let’s jump right in…

How to set up a Facebook Ads campaign

Step 1: Set some goals for your Facebook Ads

Before you jump in and create any adverts, it’s important to first think about why you’re advertising and what you’re aiming to achieve. By setting yourself a few goals ahead of going live with ads, you also have something to measure your success against.

For example, if you’re looking to increase downloads of your mobile app through Facebook Ads, you could set a goal of 100 downloads in the first month. This will also help you when it comes to choosing the correct objective for your Facebook Ads campaign in Step 3 below. Some more example goals could be:

  • Increase traffic to my website from Facebook
  • Increase attendance at my event
  • Generate new leads
  • Increase the reach of our content on Facebook
  • Boost engagement for our Facebook Page

Step 2: Head over to Facebook Ads Manager

All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads Manager tool, which you can access via a direct link at facebook.com/ads, or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu on your Facebook account, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook page.

Once you’re into the Ads manager, you can navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.

Step 3: Choose your objective

When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 15 options here for what you might want to achieve:

With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:

Awareness

Objectives that generate interest in your product or service:

  • Boost your posts
  • Promote your page
  • Reach people near your business
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase your reach

Top tip: For small budgets, you’re likely to get the most bang for your buck with the awareness ad types. Moz found that $1 per day can grow your audience by 4,000 people (this didn’t quite match our experience, though it’s well worth trying).

Consideration

Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it:

  • Send people to a destination on or off Facebook
  • Get installs of your app
  • Raise attendance at your event
  • Get video views
  • Collect leads for your business

Conversion

Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service:

  • Increase conversions on your website
  • Increase engagement in your app
  • Get people to claim your offer
  • Promote a product or catalogue
  • Get people to visit your shops

Once you’ve selected your marketing objective, you’ll then be asked to name your campaign:

Step 4: Define your audience and budget

This step is extremely crucial for the success of your Facebook Ads campaigns. The audience for your ad can be customized based on all the following demographics:

  • Location – starting with a country, state, city, zip code or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Languages
  • Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like and closely related topics
  • Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, as well as device usage
  • Connections – Choose to show the ad to all people, just those connected to Buffer or those not connected to Buffer

In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps or events. You can also further customize your targeting using custom audiences to retarget people who have already interacted with your business.

Example: Choosing an audience for a Buffer ad

Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way in order to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the following audience demographics:

  • Location – United States
  • Interests – Social media
  • Excluded – People who already like Buffer
  • Age – 18-65+
  • Language – English (U.S.)

This gave us an estimated reach of up to 3,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are how many we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.

Setting your budget

Once you’ve selected your target audience, you next need to choose how much you’d like to spend on your ad. When you set a budget, it’s important to remember that this figure represents the maximum amount of money you want to spend. You can also set your budget to Daily or Lifetime:

  • Daily – A daily budget is the average that you’ll spend every day.
  • Lifetime – A lifetime budget is the maximum that you’ll spend during the lifetime of your advert set.

Step 5: Create your advert

This is where it gets really fun! It’s now time to choose the images (or video), headline, body text and where your ad will be displayed on Facebook. For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image(s) or video.

There are two ways to create adverts: Using an existing post or creating a new advert. Here’s a quick look at both options.

Using an existing post

For certain types of adverts, such as boosting posts, you can create your ad using an existing post that’s already been shared on your Facebook Page. To do this, select the ‘Use Existing Post’ option from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From here, you can choose which Page you’d like to select a post from and pick an individual post from that Page to use as your advert:

Creating a new advert

If you’d like to create your advert from a blank canvas, the first task is to select the format you’d like to use for your advert. Facebook Adverts look slightly different depending on the results you want. Facebook currently offers five various formats for adverts:

  • Carousel – Create an advert with two or more scrollable images or videos
  • Single image – Create up to six variations of your advert using one image
  • Single video — Create an advert with one video
  • Slideshow – Create a looping video advert with up to 10 images
  • Canvas – Tell a more immersive story by combining images and videos

Note: The formats available to you will vary based on the objective you set for your advert during Step 3 a little earlier in this post.

Once the format is selected, you need to add the content to your advert (the images or video and the copy). This part is incredibly important to making your advert stand out in within Facebook’s or Instagram’s feeds. If your ad is going to be a success, you want your image and copy to be enticing enough to make people want to click.

The recommended image or video specs are normally placed next to the area on the screen where you upload your content, but as a rule of thumb:

Image specs:

  • Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
  • Image ratio: 1.91:1
  • To maximize advert delivery, use an image that contains little or no overlaid text.

Video specs:

  • Format: .MOV or .MP4 files
  • Resolution: at least 720p
  • File size: 2.3 GB max.
  • Recommended aspect ratio: widescreen (16:9)
  • Facebook: 60 minutes max.
  • Instagram: 60 seconds max.

Step 6: Choose your ad placements

Advert placement defines where your advert is shown and with Facebook Ads, you’re able to choose which locations your advert will appear in. Adverts may appear in Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and right column. You may also create ads to appear on Instagram.

Facebook recommend using the default placements for the objective you chose, which enables Facebook to optimize placements for you in order to get the best possible results at the cheapest overall average cost.

However, if you want to select your own placements, Facebook recommend the following choices, broken out by campaign objective:

  • Increase brand awareness campaigns (including Reach & Frequency buying) – Facebook and Instagram
  • Boost your posts (including Reach & Frequency buying) – Facebook and Instagram
  • Get video views (including Reach & Frequency buying) — Facebook and Instagram
  • Get installs of your app – Facebook and Instagram
  • Increase engagement in your app – Facebook
  • Promote a product catalog – Facebook
  • Increase conversions on your website – Facebook
  • Send people to your website – Facebook

For more on ad placements, check out this guide from Facebook.

Step 7: Place your order

Now, your advert is ready to go. To submit your ad click the ‘Place Order’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live (you’ll receive a confirmation email from Facebook once the ad is live).

What $5 per day will buy you on Facebook

To give a little context into what’s achievable with Facebook Ads, we ran an experiment to see what a budget of $5 per day would get us. I’d love to jump right to our findings here, then get into the specifics below. We tried three different types of Facebook Ads, each designed with a different objective in mind.

Here are our results:

  • Page likes – $0.57 per like
  • Clicks to the Buffer for Business landing page – $4.01 per click
  • Boosted post – $6.35 per additional 1,000 people reached

When we view this in terms of how much $5 per day will buy you, these are the numbers:

  • Page Likes – nine likes per day
  • Clicks to the Buffer homepage — one per day
  • Boosted post – 787 new people reached

How does this jive with your experience on Facebook Ads?

I’ll be happy to share the specifics of what we tried and how we tried it (and how you can test this for yourself, too.)

One final thought before moving ahead, it might be useful to see how our experience compares to Facebook Ads benchmarks overall. Matthew Kammerer shared an overview of social media advertising in a guest post at the Buffer blog, including the following chart of helpful Facebook benchmarks.

Since we find ourselves in the technology space at Buffer, we can compare to the industry benchmarks in this chart.

Average clickthrough rate: 0.2%

Ours: 0.95%

Average cost per click: $0.20

Ours: $0.97

Average cost per 1,000 impressions: $0.38

Ours: $6.35

A lot of our experience here didn’t quite match up to the benchmarks, likely for a number of factors like this being my first dive into Facebook Ads (lots to learn!) and my not spending the time to truly optimize the campaigns.

By Kevan Lee

Kevan Lee is a Content Crafter at social-media firm Buffer. You can find him online, tweeting about his writing process, or at home, second-guessing football coaches.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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