Facebook Advertising Shouldn't be Underestimated: How to Get Started

Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide with over 2.7 billion monthly users in the second quarter of 2020. A fifth of the the worlds population spend an average of 35 minutes on Facebook every day!

As a result of these staggering statistics, ostensibly it is highly likely your target audience is on Facebook. However, what makes Facebook one of the best places to advertise is that its huge reach is compounded by affordable advertising opportunities and the option to target your ads very specifically. Not only that but they allow for scaling of these hyper-targeted ad campaigns to put more money into the ones that are most successful.

To scale your ads successfully you need to be aware of the best process and strategise because if you scale too early you risk losing money.

1. Create Your Audience

Facebook Target Audience:
Great for those who don't know who their target audience is, Facebook target audience's allow you to create one from scratch.

Upon logging on the Facebook Ads Manager you can choose profiles to target based on their likes, major life events like marriages, demographics and online behaviours due to a large amount of information Facebook has about their users. All that is left to do is set how much you are willing to pay!

Facebook target audiences are a great way of getting your brand in front of people who have never seen it before and therefore increasing brand exposure.

Custom Audience:

Although they require pre-existing information like, mailing lists, a list of people who have visited your website (or a specific part of it), your Facebook followers or your existing customers, Custom Audiences are a great way to make sure your ads are shown to the right people. For example, there is no point advertising a points bonus on a loyalty scheme to a new customer, it would be much more successful if shown to existing, loyal customers with points built up.

Psst: Don’t fall in the trap of inviting all your friends and family to like your page. Yes, it will boost your follower count, but unless they fall in the category of your ideal client adding them will in fact work against you rather than in your favour.

2. Analyse Your Ads

To narrow down who your ads are targeted at will save you money so you need to determine what kind of formats, messaging and offers work best for which audiences. You can segment your ads into different types for different groups of people, whether that be different ads for men and women or different ads for people in different geographical locations.

Once you have determined which ads are performing the best, there is no rush to scale them as you can wait until you have got the most out of the conversions from these ads.

3. Time to Scale

Use Facebook Lookalike audiences to take advantage of the wealth of information Facebook had about its audiences that you don't have access to. The programme finds audiences that are very similar to people who have previously clicked on your ads but are currently outside of your reach on Facebook.

4. Invest more money

Once you are absolutely sure which are your most successful ads, increase your budget for them. But be careful! Scaling up too soon destabilises the algorithm and will in turn decrease your ROI. Increase your budget slowly whilst keeping a keen eye on your ROI.

Want to know more about Facebook advertising or retargeting? Book a FREE discovery call here to get started.