Digital marketing can be quite confusing for someone who cannot dedicate their time to following all the different layers of it. And this is the reality of many Australian business owners looking to promote their products and services online, but who struggle to find out the best approach that will help them reach their goals.
For example, you may be using Facebook to promote your offers, and that is a great marketing strategy. Because organic reach is difficult to increase and even maintain, Facebook Ads provide a better way to make sure your name and offers to reach a larger number of Facebook users.
However, how are you using Facebook Ads? Are you creating campaigns, or simply boosting the posts on Facebook?
Because yes, there is a difference.
What Are Boosted Posts?
If you have a Facebook page, underneath the creative of your organic posts, you can find a blue button with the text “boost post”. This essentially means you can create an “ad” out of an organic post and promote it to people’s news feeds.
Boosting a pot allows you to increase the reach and visibility of your content, and even reach certain specific goals, such as bookings, clicks to a landing page, event sign-ups, and more.
What Are Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads is the social media platform’s own advertising system. It provides businesses with a large array of tools to create ad campaigns similar to other PPC or advertising systems, such as Google Ads.
Unlike boosted posts, Facebook ads do not have to be first published on your Facebook page timeline. Instead, they are created exclusively through the Facebook Ads Manager. However, this is not the only major difference between boosting a post and creating a Facebook ad campaign.
Boosting Posts Versus Ad Campaigns: Which One’s Better?
Facebook’s ad system provides many more targeting and campaigning options than you can achieve through boosting a post.
If you choose an organic post and want to increase its delivery in news feeds, you can set up the following criteria for ad delivery:
● Target audience – You can choose some user characteristics you want to target, such as age, location, behaviour, and interest;
● Total budget – You can establish how much you want to spend on the boosted post;
● Time Frame – You can establish how long the post should remain boosted.
By comparison, Facebook ads offer a lot more advanced. Here are some major differences between Facebook ads and boosted posts:
● Ad placements – Advertisers can choose where you want your ads to appear, or not appear, such as Messenger stories, news feed sides, instant articles, and more;
● More ad objectives – Campaigns created in the Ads Manager allow for more specific objectives such as brand awareness, store traffic, conversion, or lead generation. With posts, you can choose smaller objectives such as website clicks, engagement, etc.;
● Advanced targeting – While Facebook ads also allow you to choose the target audience in the way boosted posts do, you have never more targeting options. For instance, with Facebook ads you can create custom audiences from your list of contacts, and retarget them with new offers, then create lookalike audiences to target users similar to your existing buyers;
● Advanced tracking – You can install the Facebook Pixel on your website and track the journey of the customer from the moment they click the ad, to the moment they add it to the cart. Boosted posts do not have this option, so they leave out many other important marketing opportunities such as retargeting;
● More ad formats – A boosted post is just that: a regular post, which can be a photo or video. However, Facebook ads offer many more formats to reach target audiences, such as Carousels or adding specific calls to action buttons.
These features present in Ads Manager are not available for boosted posts. While technically both Facebook ads and boosted posts are considered paid advertising, it’s clear that facebook’s ad system is much more advanced.
Of course, it doesn’t mean boosted posts cannot help a business. But if you’re looking to make a greater impact, a Facebook ad campaign is much more efficient.
How Can You Set up Your Facebook Ads Campaign Correctly?
Boosted posts have the benefit of being very simple to set up. With ad campaigns, it’s a bit more of a hassle, which is why many businesses should consider some outside help.
Australian Internet Advertising is here to help all Australian business owners reach their goals through highly effective and creative Facebook campaigns. Contact us today for more information!
