The greatest virtue of Facebook as a showcase for companies can also be its greatest disadvantage: it is almost the whole world. This means that you have the opportunity to get your service or product to whom you are interested. But for this to happen effectively you will need to fine tune both the message and the target audience to which you want to send it. Thus making your campaign precise and result-oriented instead of being of the hit-or-miss, listless variety. This is the key to advertising on Facebook as we detail below.
The concepts that you need to have clear
Over the years Facebook has been improving its advertising platform. Today it has become a robust marketing tool that offers a very intuitive usage and possibilities to adapt to almost any requirement. But for the Facebook advertising campaign of your business to be successful, you need to know what you want to obtain from it - what is the objective you are working towards with the said campaign.
Do we want to make your business known? Are you looking to increase visitor traffic to your e-commerce website? Do you want to sell a product or service? The Facebook Ads platform itself raises these questions in one of the first steps to configure your advertising campaign. In fact, the social network divides the marketing actions we can carry out into three large blocks: recognition, implementation and conversion.
Within each of these categories, we find different actions, from the local diffusion of a business to getting users to download an application or increasing visits to e-commerce websites. In total, Facebook offers 11 different actions to choose from and this is the first big decision we must make, since depending on the chosen open, a whole range of possibilities opens up.
In addition, the specified objective must be aimed at a specific audience. Again, Facebook allows you to fully customize what audience you want to reach based on a good assortment of criteria: geographical location, sex, age, studies, hobbies, etc. As an additional help, the platform has a small indicator that show, depending on your choices, how many people you can reach with the campaign and if your criteria is too specific or too broad.
Ideally, when setting up the target audience, focus must be paid to three or four main characteristics. Just enough to fine tune who we want to reach, but without passing on and discarding potential buyers because they do not meet all the rigorous requirements we have set.
Raise the campaign based on your budget
Regardless of the objective you establish for your campaign, you must be clear about the budget you have. Obviously, the more money you put in, the more results you are going to have. And in this sense, Facebook provides an estimate of the potential results - clicks, people reached, etc. - that we will achieve with the planned investment. It is a very good indicator of what you are getting for your money so you don’t spend too little or too much.
In addition, there are two important concepts that you must know in order to estimate the cost of your campaign and for what concept you will be charged: Cost per impression - CPM - or Cost per Click - CPC-.
- In CPM, an amount is charged for every 1,000 impressions, so the campaigns that charge for impressions are designed to maximize the reach and diffusion of the message.
- In CPC, an amount is charged per click, so even if the ad has a high impact and the message reaches many people, you will only be charged for each person that clicks on your ad. These campaigns seek to promote conversions or traffic for e-commerce websites.
Tailor your message and make it impactful
If you already have your objective defined, your audience determined and you know the budget that you can afford to allocate to the campaign, all you need is the message: what will you attract visitors with? How do you expect to get sales?
Facebook Ads offers many possibilities when it comes to designing an ad and it would be very difficult to summarize them all, but note that you should dedicate time and effort to make the message perfect, both in substance and in form. For example, imagine that you have prepared a great advertising image but it does not fit in the formats defined by Facebook. No matter how good that image is, if the audience sees it incomplete, with cut edges or any other distortion, your ad will suffer greatly.
Therefore, the fundamental thing is to know the platform and features supported before designing your ad. Explore the different options offered by Facebook Ads and work based on them.
As a last advice, remember that once the campaign is launched it is important to follow it closely in order to analyze the results and see what works and what does not work. As we have seen, in a Facebook ad many factors interfere, so changing one of them can drastically modify the results - for better or for worse.
In conclusion, Facebook is a great social network on which virtually every internet user is present in some capacity. Therefore, digital marketing on this platform will garner solid results. But before launching your campaign on this website, you should invest time in understanding the concepts and working of Facebook Ads in detail to prevent any surprises down the road.