It’s important to keep your eyes focused on growth even though your business may be in a weird spot right now. A great way to increase your visibility and contacts is to run a Facebook ad. You can focus on everything from growing likes to adding people to your email list or just building community engagement.
Before we get too far, yes, you can “Boost” a post but, without care, that’s a great way to throw money at Facebook and leave valuable customer interactions on the table.
We’ve asked TJ Murphy with Hite Digital Bend, our resident social media expert, to share his top 3 tips for running ads on Facebook and Instagram whether you’re a total newbie or run regular ad campaigns for your business. And as a bonus, there’s a 4th tip on how to make the most of boosted posts!
3 Tips to 10X Your Facebook Advertising
Make sure to use Facebook’s Business Manager tool and upload past lists of buyers to create a “Lifetime Value Lookalike” list. You can also upload your email lists to reach potential customers across multiple channels and create new audiences of people who are similar to them. These lists are some of the most potent targeting groups you can run on Facebook.
The Facebook Pixel is a little piece of code that you put on your website that lets it communicate with Facebook and track visitors (and the valuable actions they take) on your pages.
Facebook makes the process of installing the pixel very easy, so easy that I believe anyone can do it with Facebook’s instructions (and the help of a Youtube video or two).
Once installed (and you collect enough data), you can run remarketing campaigns to your website visitors based on their behavior.
For example, let’s say a potential customer views a specific product on your website and then leaves without purchasing. Well, now that you have the FB Pixel installed, you can create a custom audience of all of the people who visited that page but didn’t buy from you and run an ad talking about the benefits of that product to bring them back to make a purchase.
Writing good sales copy is an art, and there is a lot of psychology that goes into it. That said, I believe anyone can write compelling ad copy if they understand their customer’s needs and the value of their product.
Here are a few guidelines you can follow when writing the copy for your ads:
1. Lead with a strong “Hook” that addresses a core emotional or physical need.
- The hook is what brings everything into focus and gives people a reason to listen to you. For example: “How To 10X Your Social Media Marketing With 3 Easy Tips”
2. Follow a framework. Here’s one you can use today: Problem – Agitate – Solution
- Start by posing a question or making a statement that addresses a problem your customer has (identify their pain point).
- Stir it up so it hurts to the point of discomfort.
- Provide a solution that your product offers.
If you’ve made it this far, good for you! You now have a toolkit to get started with Facebook ads. As promised, here is one final tip on how to use Boosted Posts without wasting your ad budget.
Plain and simple, Boosting Posts is NOT a good advertising strategy by itself. That said, it is an important tool to take advantage of. If you didn’t know, Facebook limits the reach of your posts to around 5% of your total audience (on a good day).
So, if you invest a significant amount of time coming up with a social media posting strategy and creating content, all of your efforts are only reaching 5 out of every 100 followers of your page… Not a great ROI for most Business Pages. This is where Boosting Posts comes in handy. For as little as $5 your post can reach as many as 3,500 people per day depending on the audience you target.
Content creators put a lot of effort into crafting and curating engaging content to post on Facebook. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste, give those posts a little boost and watch your engagement, click-throughs, and purchases soar!
Pro Tip – You are not limited to targeting just the people who like your page and their friends, you can target people based on location, demographics, interests, and behaviors. Identify the target audience for the post you’re making and narrow your targeting down based on where they live, their age, gender, interests, and behaviors.
