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The advertising landscape can be overwhelming, with countless platforms vying for your attention. It’s easy to get lost in the complexities of targeting, bidding, and analytics, leaving you questioning if your advertising efforts are delivering results.
Facebook advertising offers a clear path to overcoming these challenges. With its massive user base, targeting capabilities, and measurable outcomes, it allows businesses to connect with their ideal customers effectively.
By following the strategies outlined in this article, you can unlock the potential of Facebook advertising and drive substantial growth for your business. But first, let’s take a look at WHY you should advertise on Facebook.
Facebook has an Unparalleled Audience Reach
Facebook is a big part of everyone’s lives.
Over 26% of the world’s population (that’s 2.1 billion people of all ages) are spending time on Facebook EVERY. SINGLE. DAY (Source: Statista).
This means that there is close to a 100% chance that your target audience is active on Facebook already.
People from all walks of life use Facebook, allowing you to cater to various customer segments. You can expand your audience and build strong brand recognition, increasing the likelihood of potential customers encountering your brand and becoming familiar with your offerings.
Facebook Advertising Can Sky-Rocket Your Revenue
There are hundreds of articles written about different reasons why you should advertise on Facebook.
But if you really dig to the core of it, you’ll see that the biggest advantage of Facebook advertising services is that it has …
… An incredible potential to reach your target audience at scale while keeping your costs down.
In other words, Facebook has the potential to skyrocket your return on investment (if you know what you’re doing).
What is the difference between a company that makes £5,000 and £50,000 a day?
It’s the SCALE.
Facebook allows scaling of hyper-targeted ad campaigns. Scaling hyper-targeted ads means that you can put more money into ads that are actually making you money. The great thing about scaling is that it allows you to increase your revenue 10 X without having to work 10 X harder.
You’ve just got to push the right buttons.
But to get to that stage, you need to go through a set of processes.
Because if you scale too soon, you risk wasting money.
Cost-effective Advertising with Precise Targeting Capabilities
Facebook advertising offers exceptional control and efficiency.
Flexible budgeting allows you to manage ad spend precisely through bidding options and daily limits, optimising ROI. The platform’s advanced targeting means you can reach specific demographics, interests, and behaviours, maximising ad impact.
Moreover, you can directly connect with existing customers through custom audiences and expand your reach by finding similar potential customers using lookalike audiences.
Facebook Advertising Offers Measurable Results
Facebook advertising provides you with so much data you’re guaranteed to always be making informed decisions for your marketing strategy.
Through in-depth analytics, you can meticulously track ad performance using key metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend. With this data, you can make data-driven decisions to optimise your campaigns.
Plus, by analysing performance metrics, you can identify which ad variations, targeting options, and bidding strategies are most effective. Therefore you can refine your campaigns over time, increasing their efficiency and driving better results.
When you understand what works and what doesn’t, you can allocate your budget more effectively, improve ad relevance, and ultimately achieve a higher return on investment.
How to Advertise on Facebook
Below are the stages the Digivate social media team goes through when advertising on Facebook:
- Launch your ads
- Optimise your best-performing ads
- Scale your best–performing ads
Let’s look into each stage in more detail …
#1. LAUNCH STAGE: Set Up the Audience Targeting
The launch stage is the first step of the Facebook advertising process.
In this phase of your campaign setup, you have two options:
- Create a new Facebook target audience
- Use a Custom Audience
Let’s go over them below …
A) Create a new Facebook target audience
If you have an idea of who your target audience might be, you can easily create an audience from scratch.
All you have to do is log on to Facebook Ads Manager, set up your targeting and the amount you are willing to pay, and launch your campaign.
Facebook has a wealth of information about its users.
You can target people by interests, demographics, online behaviours, major life events like engagements, baby showers, funerals, weddings and many more.
SPECIAL NOTE! Remember that even though you might think that certain types of people will be interested in your brand or offer, it may not actually be the case. This is why the launch stage is where you A/B test your targeting, copy and/or image. A/B testing allows you to improve your ad for better performance.
B) Use a Custom Audience
Setting up a Custom Audience on Facebook requires more technical knowledge than setting up audiences from scratch.
This is because you need to create these Custom Audiences from your pre-existing assets, which can be:
- Your email list
- People who visited your website
- People who only visited a particular section of your website
- Your existing customers
- Your Facebook followers
The biggest benefit of Custom Audiences is getting in front of people who are already familiar with your brand.
Facebook Customer Audience is also great for when you want to exclude your existing contacts from your advertising campaigns.
Excluding your existing customers helps you to avoid wasted clicks or views. For example, if you’re offering a free trial to new users, there’s no reason to show it to your loyal customers.
#2. OPTIMISATION STAGE: Determine Your Best-Performing Ads
During the optimisation stage, you want to narrow down your core users into segments.
You don’t want to waste money targeting as many people as possible.
Instead, you want to target only those people who are likely to convert.
And only those people.
This is the stage where you find out what messaging, ad formats and offers work with which audiences and segment your ads accordingly.
You might discover that men engage with carousel ads whereas women prefer video, so you run carousel ads for men and video ads for women.
It’s normal to have 50 hyper-targeted ads running at the same time.
Once you’ve determined your best-performing ads, don’t rush scaling them too soon.
You can squeeze even more value out of your existing best converting ads by expanding your reach to Facebook Lookalike Audiences.
Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences
If you can master Facebook Lookalike Audiences, then you’re on your way to serious profits.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences feature allows you to target audiences that very closely match people who already took action on your ads, but are currently outside of your Facebook reach.
The Facebook algorithm knows a whole lot about your audiences’ medical problems, income, reading habits, living arrangements, and attitudes– this insane amount of data is not always available to you as a Facebook advertiser! The data isn’t available to anyone but Facebook.
SPECIAL NOTE! Facebook knows much more about its users than the generic targeting parameters they allow you to play within Facebook Ads Manager. The good thing about Facebook Lookalike Audiences is that Facebook uses their own super-intelligent data to build Lookalike Audiences for you.
#3. SCALING STAGE: Scale Your Best-Performing Ads
This is the final stage of campaign management where you increase the budget for your winning ads.
You mustn’t scale too fast, because if you scale the barely profitable ads – you risk throwing money away.
Our experience shows that increasing your ad budget without taking the right precautions often increases your CPA (cost-per-acquisition) which reduces your return on investment.
This is because if you increase your budget too fast, it can destabilise the Facebook algorithm which can cause your ROI to drop massively.
To avoid a massive drop in your ROI as you scale, don’t increase your budget all at once. Instead, increase the budget by about 20% each day while paying close attention to your ROI.
Conclusion
Facebook advertising is a good opportunity for businesses of all sizes to expand their reach, engage customers, and drive sales. By harnessing the platform’s extensive user base, precise targeting options, and measurable results, you can create effective campaigns that deliver tangible outcomes.
While the platform offers a wealth of potential, success hinges on understanding your audience, crafting compelling ad creative, and continuously optimising your campaigns based on data-driven insights.
By following the strategies outlined in this article, you can unlock the full potential of Facebook advertising and achieve your business objectives.
Article by
Nicholas Turner
