Social media marketing has become a critical part of any online or offline business’s marketing plans. After all, more than half of Australia’s entire population uses Facebook. For marketers to reach their target audience members on a consistent basis, marketers have to go where those audience members are hanging out online.
Facebook marketing is extremely versatile and can help both online and offline companies increase their reach with specific geo-targeting options. If you want to increase your online or offline foot traffic, investing in Facebook advertising methods can bring new customers to your digital and brick-and-mortar stores.
Although Facebook marketing is an excellent way to reach your target audience, Facebook’s advertising platform also gives marketers valuable and highly detailed insight into their target audience’s demographic data and interests points. Facebook’s advertising platform also gives marketers many different ad format options to better meet your target customer’s expectations of your brand and reach your specific digital marketing goals. Today’s blog post will delve into more detail about how Facebook advertising works and how it can benefit your company.
Does advertising on Facebook really work?
Our client, Aussie Candles, reached out to us after running a Facebook advertising campaign for several months. Their ad text and call to action buttons weren’t optimised, which made it easy for our digital marketing specialists to use their Facebook data to optimise their ads for better conversion rates. Their brand awareness grew with a 187% increase in users, and we got them an increase in their conversion rates by 212%.
So, with the correct knowledge of how Facebook advertising works, it’s possible to optimise your Facebook ads for greater brand awareness, reach, and conversions. But the key is understanding how to leverage Facebook advertising, and how to put that understanding into results that drive action.
What’s critical is knowing how to create a Facebook post or ad that will get in front of the right people at the right time. You need to know how to use Facebook’s data to deliver your ads to the ideal target and create ad copy and ad formats that will most resonate with the viewer.
What are some of the biggest obstacles facing marketers when it comes to Facebook ads?
Facebook advertising done the right way will give your business the ability to reach a larger audience and grow your sales numbers. But more than half of all surveyed digital marketers think Facebook ads are “pay-to-play” and aren’t optimal for reaching their digital marketing goals.
When you realise how specific Facebook’s targeting is, and how many options the platform gives you, it can be incredibly challenging to know which ad formats, copy, and targeting parameters are going to be the most effective for your business and your goals. Not understanding these crucial key metrics will cause you to miss your target market, and waste precious advertising dollars.
How can you ensure that your Facebook advertising strategies will work?
The key is knowing your target audience, or buyer persona, inside and out. You can sell the best product in your industry, and serve up a Facebook ad that is highly professional and polished. But if that ad format and copy don’t speak to what your buyer persona wants to hear, and you don’t make good use of your target audience’s data, your ad won’t convert.
Also, knowing how to effectively and quickly analyse changing market trends and subsequently optimise your ads for those trends is crucial. At Australian Internet Advertising, we’ve served numerous clients who had a firm grasp on their buyer persona’s expectations and how to meet them. What we did is we helped them reach their full potential by tweaking their ads to keep them aligned with market trends that were relevant to their industry.
What are some strategies you can use to optimise your ads for your target customer?
The more you know about your target customer, the easier it will be to create and launch an effective campaign. Doing your homework in the planning stage of the advertising process will give your Facebook ad the maximum chances of success. Here are a few things to consider when planning your ad around your target customer’s expectations:
- Where is your target customer located?
- What types of ad formats have given you the best results in the past?
- What call-to-action buttons seemed to drive the most results?
- What stage of the buyer’s journey is your target customer in?
- Will the ad be aligned with your brand’s unique positioning that your customers have come to expect?
- What is the specific goal of the ad and what ad copy is most compelling for your target customer?
It’s essential that you have a firm grasp on what types of ad copy and formats your customer has engaged with the most in the past, and what compelled them to make a purchase, place a phone call, or share your offerings with their social media followers. Besides understanding your target customer’s demographics, you’ll want to create and launch Facebook ads that are designed to get micro and macro conversions from your target audience that are dependent on where those individuals are in the buyer’s journey.
When you launch ads that are crafted around understanding your target audience’s unique needs, the ad won’t seem aggressive or pushy. Ads that are focused on offering value to the viewer are naturally compelling and more likely to lead to the actions you desire from the viewer. The result is a Facebook advertising campaign that generates sales and engagements with your business Facebook page.
How do Facebook ads work?
What happens frequently is that marketers that are new to Facebook advertising fail to understand that Facebook’s marketing platform offers two different ad campaigns – paid search ads, and paid social campaigns. Not understanding the fundamental differences between these two types of campaigns can doom your Facebook ads to obscurity and you’ll fail to reach your goals.
So, what’s the difference between paid search ads and paid social campaigns?
- Paid search ads help your target audience find your business on Facebook.
- Paid social campaigns help your business find new customers.
Facebook advertising, in particular, helps your business reach out to new leads and potential customers. When you dive into Facebook advertising, you’re creating paid social campaigns to increase your brand awareness and your customer base. Reaching out to more potential customers will increase your sales and conversions.
Unlike many other online advertising platforms, the amount of granular, highly specific data on your audience that Facebook offers is unrivaled in the industry. The amount of user data on Facebook is incredible, which allows you to create ads that are more targeted and specific, increasing your chances of conversion. Before you start your paid social campaign with Facebook advertising, identify the overall goal of your campaign:
- Do you want to drive traffic to a landing page on your website?
- Are you interested in getting more leads?
- Do you want to increase sales with the campaign?
- Are you looking to get viewers to interact with your Facebook page?
The more specific your goals, the easier it will be to formulate a relevant ad that’s going to get you the results you want. In many cases, you will have to experiment with more than one ad at a time as an A/B test to see which format or copy is going to get you the best ROI.
What about audience segmentation?
Audience segmentation within the Facebook advertising platform allows you to recreate what your ideal customer looks like so your ads will be served to viewers who most likely match your buyer persona. Other advertising platforms do not give you access to this incredibly detailed information on your audience. You can see what other content on Facebook your audience has liked, or what other ad formats they’ve interacted with in the past. This will give you further insight into how to craft your ad for maximum engagement and conversions.
Answering the ultimate question: Do Facebook ads really work
If your Facebook ads are crafted with the buyer persona in mind, then absolutely yes, Facebook ads can work for your business. At Australian Internet Advertising, we have several case studies available on our site that showcase how we’ve gotten Facebook ads to work for clients in many different industries. When you contact us for Facebook advertising services, we will create ads that are highly targeted to the niche your business is in, and we will launch ads that are aligned with your specific goals, and offer value to the viewer.
Are you ready to see how much Facebook ads can expand your company’s online reach? Please contact our representatives today to get started with an optimised and effective Facebook advertising campaign for your business.
