Know Your Audience
You can’t effectively market your business without knowing who your target audience is. In your Facebook Timeline dashboard, you can use your Insights data to help you identify your audience and from there, begin to break your advertising down by the demographics. Then use the Facebook Targeting Tools to help you deliver the ads according to those demographics. If you have a physical location, you will want to use the Geo Targeting option to target the people in your local area for in store promotions. Demographic Targeting by Job Title, Age or Gender as well as Likes and Interests Targeting can help you create target specific ads for a better ROI.
If you want to use the targeting feature by Job Title or Interest, you would enter it into the “Precise Interest field”. When you begin typing your keywords, Facebook auto-populates a list of related keywords with that audience’s population so you know how many people that particular ad will reach.
Engage customers
Now that you know how to target your audience with an Ad, the next task is to decide where to display it. You have several options for this and it’s best to mix it up putting some in your news feeds, as a custom tab or in a message. You can even place them on a new fan’s page as a thank you response when they Like your page. Their friends now see it in their feed as well so it has a far reaching effect.
Nobody likes to be brow-beat by a sales pitch day in and day out, so don’t use your Facebook Page solely for that purpose. Keep your fans and customers engaged by posting informative articles about your product or how your product helped solve a problem. Display photos, videos and polls that keep the fans engaged with you and other fans of the page. Social Fresh is a good example of this method with varied posts of polls, articles and images. All are brightly colored and customers are always engaging in conversations and debates with each other and the brand here.
Create An Ad
We have walked through all of the technical aspects of using the Facebook Targeting Tools to get the most ROI with your Ads so now we’ll put all of that together to actually create the Ad.
1. Design Your Ad
Navigate to the Facebook Ads Page and click “Create Ad”. Decide on which Timeline it will go, where you want it displayed, then choose the image and text to be displayed. Make sure you use bold colors that will stand out from the blue and white background of Facebook.
2. Target Your Audience
Using any of the desired targeting tools, enter the demographics you want to target with this ad. Facebook will generate an Estimated Reach of your ad based on the information you selected so you’ll be able to see the demographic reach at a glance.
Set A Budget
It’s now time to set your budget for the ad but first you need to decide if you are optimizing for “Likes” or “Clicks”. The option to optimize by Likes isn’t available to everyone just yet so you may not have this option right away. Your budget can be set as lifetime of the ad or by the day. You set how long you want the ad to run by selecting the dates in the “Campaign Schedule” and Facebook will auto-populate the CPC based on your targeting and budget allotment.
Review Your Ad
The last step is to review your ad for accuracy. You will see a summary of your target audience, your CPC and the total budget along with the duration of the ad. If you need to make any changes to the ad, now is the time to do so by clicking “Edit” otherwise click “Place Order”.
Manage And Refresh Your Ads
You’ll want to monitor your ads to determine the effectiveness of them. Within the Ad Manager, you’ll be able to see which ones have the highest click through rates, lowest cost per click, etc. The Advertising Performance Report and Demographic Response Report can be accessed in your Ad Manager by going to the Reports tab. Tracking and adjusting your ad content and target may be necessary as you first start out and these reports can help you determine what’s working and what’s not. It’s also recommended to refresh your ads weekly to prevent your click through rate from dropping. That can be anything from changing text or simply changing the image of the ad. Now it’s your turn to go create an ad for your business! Come back and share your experience of creating and using Facebook Ads with us! We’d love to hear how it has impacted your business and marketing strategy.
