Social media advertising is one the most influential ways for businesses to increase brand awareness and ensure they are reaching the right audiences today. Social media platforms like Facebook have become a significant channel for advertising with high reach and consumer-interest targeting capabilities. It continues to dominate in scale among social media channels. Today Facebook reaches more than 80% of users in the US and is widely used to drive top-of-the-funnel traffic and accelerate conversion.
To develop a successful Facebook ad strategy, you must optimize across several components:
A clearly articulated goal guides understanding and direction for your business objectives. It’s important to select the correct campaign goal type that aligns with your business. Facebook offers ad campaigns including sales, leads, engagement, and awareness. A campaign sales goal can be used to get new customers and increase sales on your website. If another campaign goal is to acquire more leads, you can run a lead ad that will help you build a marketing list that can then be leveraged in other supporting marketing tactics.
Where will you run your ad? Facebook offers placement options including Feeds, Stories and Search. Feed ads happen to be the most popular as they appear in mobile or desktop feed and help to capture engagement. However, using multiple placements can increase viewership and improve ad results. If you want to capture attention quickly, a video feed placement is recommended. Video and static images in Facebook Stories can also help showcase your business. As you’re trying a few different placements, testing them by audience or campaign will help you understand what’s resonating so you can optimize over time.
Targeting the right people at the right time, with the right messaging is the heart and soul of any effective ad strategy. Facebook provides robust targeting options to help you reach the right people that includes new customers, custom audiences, or lookalike audiences. Your audience is in different stages of the funnel, so knowing who you want to reach and when can help drive real results (see figure 1).
Testing is the best way to find out what is working in your ad strategy. Conducting A/B tests to compare different elements like messaging and imagery can help identify the most effective combinations. There are several recommended ways for businesses to test creative on Facebook.
Determining the right spend for Facebook helps to maximize returns across your campaign ad sets, audiences, and placements. You may be familiar with ad auctions, but a successful strategy ensures budget levels and bidding are optimized to get the best outcome. Facebook paces to provide your business with the available results by adjusting bids (ex:lowering or raising to support ad quality) or increasing budgets based on optimization events (ex: spending over your daily budget amount of $20 if an opportunity arises). To ensure you have the right budget and bid amount for your business goals, ask yourself: What is the total amount my business is willing to spend, how often will my ads be shown, and how are my competitors bidding?
