How to Win With Facebook Ads and Social Media Content Posts
It’s no secret that a successful Facebook ad campaign can work wonders for any business, but not everyone knows what makes such a campaign successful. Much like Google and other search engines, Facebook’s algorithms are constantly changing, and what may have worked for a previous marketing campaign might not cut it now.
Since Facebook is far too big and too valuable to any marketing efforts to be ignored, any good entrepreneur or marketer should keep trying to get results with their Facebook content and ad campaigns. Fortunately, while the specific details may be changing all the time, the basics of a successful Facebook marketing campaign haven’t changed all that much. There are still things you can and should do no matter how the current algorithms work. Here are just a handful of tips that any good social media marketer should follow.
Know Your Audience
This is probably the single most important tip you can be given when it comes to Facebook content. While it is tempting to say that you want to target “everyone” with your insightful profile updates, that simply isn’t possible. No product or service will appeal to everyone, no matter how useful or popular it may be. That certainly goes for your business. You have a certain core clientele, and these people should make up the audience for your content. It’s up to you to figure out who those people are so you can write ads and content that appeals to them. You need to know where your potential audience lives (especially if your business has a brick-and-mortar location), how old they are, where their interests lie, and what kinds of devices they use to connect to Facebook.
Trying to figure out the demographics of your audience does sound daunting, but Facebook does have some tools that make it a little easier. If you want to reach the right kinds of people with your ad campaign, you can use the Facebook Ads Manager to set up ads that seem to work and drop the ones that do not. You can also use Facebook Audience Insights to gather demographic information for your next campaign.
Split Test Your Campaign
Knowing who to target with your campaign is certainly useful, but you won’t know how effective your marketing efforts will be until you put your campaign to the test. It could be that your ideas for your latest ads were way off despite all the data you’ve compiled about your audience. You don’t want to sink too much time, effort, and money into a campaign that might fail, so try split testing your campaign with a couple of different audiences to see which one gives you the best results.
To do this, set up a new ad campaign through Facebook’s ad manager, and choose what you want your objective to be. You can choose to raise awareness with your content, or you can be a little more aggressive and attempt to convert visitors to your Facebook page into new customers. From there, you will have the option to create a split test that targets different demographics. This should give you a better idea of who is viewing your content and who is more likely to respond to it. If it turns out that one of your split tests is a dud, you won’t have to fret about putting all of your effort into it. You’ve run other tests that should give you enough data to move forward with your campaign.
Fine-Tuning
Once you know who is most likely to respond to your content, your next step is to fine-tune your ads. Put yourself in the shoes of your core audience. Think about what they would like to see and how they would want to engage with your business. Modify the copy of your ads to appeal to a certain audience, and don’t be afraid of making two nearly identical ads with slightly different wording. There are times when you can have a huge impact with a certain audience by changing one or two words. The same goes for the images and videos that you use in your campaign. Images are powerful things, so don’t be afraid to mix things up to appeal more strongly to your target audience.
Keep Monitoring Your Content
One of the most important things to remember when it comes to Facebook marketing campaigns is that things will always be changing. You can never stop and rest on your laurels, even if you’ve somehow concocted the most impressive advertising campaign in history. Keep monitoring and updating your content. Take a look at what works, feature more content that gets a positive response, and cut out what doesn’t work. This constant monitoring and updating of your content will also help you hold onto your audience’s interest, something that is fleeting in the digital world. If you have a smaller business and can spend the time and effort to respond to individual questions and comments on your business’s Facebook page, you should do so. If you have a larger business and campaign, at least take the time to constantly update things, if only to let your audience know that you are still there and you care enough to keep them informed.
When it comes to advertising through social media, Facebook is still the reigning champion. Practically everyone on the planet has a Facebook profile, and they can be reached through a successful marketing campaign. And yet, you cannot let yourself believe that your own campaign is going to be easy. It takes effort to produce a marketing campaign that gets noticed, so keep posting updates, and pay attention to who is seeing them. This is practically a full-time job in itself, but as long as you are paying attention to what is happening on your business’s page, you will be able to reach at least a handful of people who will be interested in what you have to offer. Before long, that handful will grow into a bigger online audience and client base. As long as you pay attention and put forth the effort, it will pay off.
Heather Hart
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