If you haven’t already jumped on the Facebook gravy train, after getting to the bottom of this article you will have.
Smaller businesses regard Facebook as more of a child’s game or social fad than a valuable marketing tool. I’ve been using it a lot this year and it’s been my most lucrative paid traffic source.
If you’ve got no experience in setting up Facebook Adverts, I will show you the basic 4 step process to setting up your first ad and driving traffic to your website.
Step #1 – Selecting your goal
The first option you will have on Facebook is to select your ad objective.
You’ve got a number of objectives to pick based on your marketing goal. Personally I found that promoting high-quality blog content to my target audience peppered with passive sales links is the way to go.
Ads that provide value over sales pitch, tend to get more clicks and cost less.
For that I use the boost your posts ad objective.
Step #2 – Finding the target market
To generate leads on Facebook you must know who your ideal prospect is. For this example, I will pretend I am a gym owner in New Zealand and I want to find young men who are interested in lifting weights.
My ideal customer is 19-29 year olds, male, speaks English (my ad will be in English) likes to lift weights, into taking supplements and lives within a 20km radius from Wellington (capital of New Zealand). That’s quite specific, maybe I am being a bit too picky?
Surely it’s impossible to only market to such a unique demographic right?
Wrong.
Facebook suggests that there are 47,000 people on Facebook I can show my ads to that fit my criteria. 47,000 prospects who may want to join up to my gym.
Facebook allows me to further target people by their relationship status, their behavior patterns and even their level of education.
My ‘gym’ also has several cardio and Zumba classes that are suited more towards the female audience. I can then create a new separate audience that will be shown only to women focusing on Zumba, yoga and spin classes.
This kind of geo targeting was impossible before the Internet. 10 years ago I would need to print thousands of flyers and pass them out in shopping centers hoping someone would be kind enough to take one.
If you create a custom audience using Facebook, you can then retarget your website visitors to get a much sharper audience viewing your ads.
Step #3 – Budgeting
After selecting my target market I now need to set my budget. For boost your posts Facebook will charge per 1,000 impressions, engagements or clicks.
Given my target market is quite specific, how much do you think I need to pay per click?
$1? $2? $5?
Well the answer is as little as $0.19 according to Facebook. Whenever you create a paid ad Facebook will give you a suggested bid, this is what Facebook feels you need to bid in order to gain the best ROI.
Note: the suggested bid is shown in Thai baht as I live there.
The size of your marketing budget is pretty irreverent on Facebook as you can serve ads from as little as $1 per day.
You can set the adverts to run for a certain time frame or continuous. Facebook also has options for a maximum daily budget ensuring you never spend more than you want.
Step #4 – Writing the killer copy
This is probably the hardest step to driving traffic on Facebook. Changing a picture or the wording of text can dramatically increase or plummet your Facebook ad performance .
Facebook allows you to upload a picture along with a headline.
Once you have created your copy your ad will then go live if you meet all of Facebook’s T&Cs. You can choose to show your ad on the newsfeed, right column and on mobile devices.
Pro-tip: You will notice that after a few days the overall reach of your ad has dropped significantly. This is because everyone has seen your ad several times and if they haven’t made the intended action by now, they aren’t going to.
Ads generally have a short lifetime and need to be changed on a regular basis.
Summary
One of the coolest features about the Facebook Advert Manager is that anybody can use it. It has been created with the user experience in mind and is a total piece of cake. The difficulty is in finding your target demographic, understanding how they respond to ads and how to continually adjust and modify your ads to really make the most of Facebook advertising.
If you’re always moaning that you cannot drive targeted traffic to your landing pages now you don’t have any excuses. For bloggers and Internet marketers, Facebook Ads is a goldmine of customers and profits!
Leave a Reply