Let's Talk Facebook Advertising!
In our previous blog, we discussed why, as a business, you should be investing in social media advertising.
As promised, in this blog we’re taking a closer look at Facebook advertising and we’ll provide you with an overview on the three types of adverts that we mainly use here in Social Soda, because we know they bring results.
Now, there are various different Facebook ad types that you can use. However, you need to test different formats to learn which ones work best for your business, you also need to have an understanding as to what each of the different types of ads can do for you.
Before you create a campaign, you need to decide what your objective is and choose the appropriate type of advert. Facebook offers several marketing objectives, based on what you want your ad to accomplish. It is important at this stage to select the right one, in order to get results.
The three objectives that we’re concentrating on in this blog are:
- Brand awareness: Introducing your brand to a new audience
- Engagement: Reaching a wider audience to increase the number of post engagements or page likes, increase attendance at your event, or encourage people to claim a special offer
- Conversion: Get people to take a specific action on your website (like subscribe to your list or buy a product), with your app, or in Facebook Messenger.
Confused as to which one to use? Don’t panic, we’re going to break them down for you and explain what each type of advert is used for in a little more detail.
Brand Awareness
If you’re looking to increase your company’s brand awareness, then this is the advert for you!
The goal of Brand Awareness ads is to increase the recall of your ads amongst your target audience. So, it’s not about generating immediate sales, but getting people to remember your brand.
You may be wondering why you should be investing money in an advert that isn’t necessarily going to generate leads and sales straight away, and it’s natural to think this, but think of it long-term, and in the words of Philip C McGraw “it’s a marathon, not a sprint!”
You are not going to achieve great results short term, but don’t let that fool you. Brand Awareness campaigns can be a powerful part of a long-term Facebook ads strategy that can increase your overall profits.
By investing money here, you’re building up your audience over a longer period of time, which will make all your other marketing objectives much easier to achieve and trust us, it works! One thing we must point out is that Brand Awareness campaigns take time. You need to commit to at least 6 months to see results, but the long-term rewards can be incredible.
This type of campaign specifically targets people who will linger with your ad content and read it or watch your video for a longer period of time than people who you might target in a conversion campaign.
These types of ads are great for local businesses who want people to remember their brand, so that when a need for your services or products comes up, they initially think of you.
The point is for them to REMEMBER you.
Engagement
Engagement is without doubt, one of the most valuable Facebook campaign objectives. It drives users to take action within Facebook, more specifically, it relates to likes, shares and comments.
When people see posts that are relevant to them, they’re more likely to interact. So, higher post engagement indicates that your ads are relevant to your target audience.
These types of campaigns are designed to get more people to see and engage with your Facebook post or Page and can include a variety of call to actions, for example, send message, learn more, buy now etc. which encourage the audience to click the button.
With engagement as your objective, you can create ads that:
- Boost your posts (post engagement)
- Promote your page (page likes)
- Raise attendance at an event on your page (event responses)
It is important to note here that post engagement ads are not just boosted posts. Boosting a post turns an organic post into an ad, but it does so with the basic “reach” objective. Post engagement ads pay for engagement, rather than reach. This makes sense, right?!
The more comments, especially long form comments (those comments that are more than just a few words), that a post receives, the more reach it will achieve, as Facebook will deem posts that contain comment threads or long form comments as highly engaging and meaningful. This is exactly the kind of content that Facebook wants to create those ‘meaningful’ connections.
Once you’ve ran an Engagement ad, check insights to see how many users liked, shared, or commented on your ad – a method for evaluating performance of engagement ads – you can better understand the type of content your audience likes, and produce more of it. You can also evaluate the number of clicks, messages generated etc. too. To learn more about Facebook insights and what you should look out for, keep an eye out for a blog on this coming soon!
Conversion
The conversions objective is designed to drive valuable actions on your website, App, Messenger or WhatsApp. For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to be looking at website conversions.
Website conversion ads work with the Facebook pixel on your website, so you can reach site visitors who are most likely to take your desired action, whether this is page visits, sales, video views, or another action to help grow online business – and keep track of how many people convert.
This ad objective helps you:
- Grow sales by getting people to complete transactions on your website
- Prompt an action like adding an item to a shopping cart
- Increase traffic by encouraging people to visit your post-click landing page
The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.
You can use the pixel to:
- Make sure your ads are shown to the right people. Find new customers, or people who have visited a specific page or taken a desired action on your website.
- Drive more sales. Set up automatic bidding to reach people who are more likely to take an action you care about, like making a purchase.
- Measure the results of your ads. Better understand the impact of your ads by measuring what happens when people see them.
To install a Facebook pixel on to your website, we recommend speaking to your web provider. It’s a really quick and easy process and shouldn’t take too long to install.
Once you’ve got your pixel set up, you can link it to your ads and track conversions - bingo! The good news is, you only need one pixel even if you have a hundred ads in your campaign, as long as your goal is the same for each ad.
You’ll start seeing the data in your ads report, once you’re up and running. For each ad, you can see how many people have gone on to convert on your site, how much you paid to get the conversion, and how much you made from each conversion.
So, there you have it! A brief overview of three types of Facebook adverts that we know can provide great results.
We appreciate that Facebook advertising can be complicated, and it takes time to learn how each different ad works, however once you’ve got your foot on the advertising journey, we guarantee you’ll begin to see results, if you run your ads right! Don’t panic if they go wrong, all is not lost, you can always pause them or stop them and start again!
For more advice on how to run successful Facebook advertising campaigns, contact us at hello@socialsoda.co.uk