If we could fill up a room with your ideal target audience, would you attend to pitch your business? You likely know by now that most, if not all, prospective consumers are part of the Facebook community. With 900 million daily users, your target audience is on Facebook. Everybody knows how effective Facebook is for networking. A Product or Company Page can provide meaningful interaction with your network. Gaining followers, posting engaging and relevant updates, promotions and responding to complaints/requests are effective ways to build relationships and inspire customer/consumer loyalty.
Once you have obtained followers through sending requests to your network and posting engaging content, growing your follower base can become challenging. Even further, friends and supporters following your Company Page is nice, but what if yor friends/family are not ideal prospects? How do you go about reaching your target audience? How can you get your content in front of the ideal customer/consumer?
Advertising on Facebook can accomplish expanding your reach and getting in front of those ideal prospects. Increasing exposure and product/service awareness is a competitive advantage, and especially in front of those that would be interested in your offering. Facebook advertising allows you to dig into demographics and determine who you would like to target with your content based on user activity – Facebook essentially tracks user information (about section), interests, activity and patterns. Therefore, when going through the target audience section during ad set-up, you can target people who are more likely to be interested in the content you wish to promote.
As an example, lawyers are the biggest source of referrals for fellow lawyers. Let’s say that you wish to run an advertisement promoting the blog post you just wrote regarding the practice areas that you service. You can target “lawyer” “lawyers” “legal” “law” “law firm”, etc. as job titles, interests, employer, etc. You can even tag “personal injury lawyer” or “real estate lawyer” if you are targeting specific practicing lawyers. You can also run your ad in certain geographic locations. This will ensure that your ad is being shown to the right people.
Below are our three top tips and “best practices” for Facebook Advertising:
1. The size of your audience – you do not want to exhaust a small number of people with your ad. The rule of thumb is that you want to set your target audience between 500K to 1 million people. This is a large enough demographic that you can run your ad for a longer period of time to reach a broad audience without oversaturating a small audience more frequently.
2. Test optimization – try adding different pictures, creative and headlines in the same ad set to test which photos/copy get more traction. People are, for the most part, visually enticed. Bright colours and interesting headlines can entice interest. Further, running multiple ads simultaneously with different objectives can provide insight. You can even try running the same ad separately in different geographic locations to test engagement as well.
3. Activate, Test, Fine Tune and Optimize – advertising is really about trial and error. There are no guarantees for engagement but you will be able to gather intel and engagement patterns that will make your ads more efficient and effective for your specific target audience.
If you find that you do not have time to implement Facebook advertising, feel free to contact us. We are happy to help optimize your business for you on social, while you do what matters most – your job!
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