Thursday, October 20, 2016

Top Tips for Advertising on Facebook

By Heather Truitt 

When integrated marketing and PR agencies such as Furia Rubel create advertising campaigns for clients, one channel we often consider is Facebook. Different social media platforms are appropriate for different kinds of businesses, but Facebook is one that is often appropriate for our professional services clients.

By now, it should be no surprise that social media platforms enable companies to target advertising to very specific audiences, and Facebook certainly offers that ability. More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook, and more than 900 million of them visit the platform every day, according to statistics from the company.

To get the most out of your investment in Facebook advertising, here are some tips to keep in mind.

Advertising Goals 

Make sure to set a goal before you start to spend money. What do you want to accomplish? More Facebook likes? More website visits? More completed forms on the website? Setting a goal first is necessary in order to effectively measure the success of the campaign.

Images and Text for Your Advertisements 

When you start to design your ad, one of the decisions you will have to make is which text and which images to include – and how much of each. If you have overlaid text on your image, Facebook has a set of guidelines, which you can view here to see if you have too much text on your image.

Facebook prefers 20 percent or less of your image to contain text. Facebook ads that have little or no text will cost less money, and they will achieve better delivery rates than images that contain text. See below for different examples of image-to-text ratios.

Facebook also has a helpful automated system that you can check to see whether your image falls within Facebook guidelines.

Ad Targeting 

Ad targeting is a way of setting the parameters to determine the audience for your Facebook advertisement. You can set the targeting using the following criteria:
  • Location – by country, state, city, and/or zip code. This can be as targeted as you would like. If you want your ad to be seen only in Chicago and the surrounding areas, set the City to Chicago and then add a 10- or 20-mile radius surrounding Chicago. 
  • Age – settings range between the ages of 13 to 65+. 
  • Gender – female or male, or all. 
  • Language – reach people who have set their Facebook preferences to a specific language.
  • More Demographics – provides a listing of other items including relationship status, education, work, financial, home, ethnic affinity, generation, parents, politics (US), and life events. 
  • Interests – search for specific interests, or pre-select from Facebook’s list. Facebook will show you interest levels for various topics. 
  • Behaviors – reach people based on interests such as how they shop, what kind of device they use when checking Facebook, specific job roles, if they are a homeowner, etc. 
  • Connections – add people who like certain pages, or exclude people who like certain pages. This is helpful if you want to reach new customers that aren’t already connected to your Facebook page.
While you are setting your ad targeting, watch the “Audience Definition” meter to the right of the page. As you start to narrow down your target market, the numbers will diminish for your audience selection. If you target too specifically, the daily reach could be less than 100, which would not be ideal.

How to Measure Success 

Facebook offers robust tracking systems. If you are tracking people who go to your website to fill out a specific form, or purchase an item, you would install a small snippet of code, and then Facebook will know if the action was completed. If you were driving traffic to your website to have a form filled out, you would place the tracking code snippet on the “Thank you for filling out this form” page. By adding tracking code, Facebook will track the “completed” actions for the advertisement.

If you are considering whether a Facebook advertising campaign is right for your marketing strategy, contact the experienced marketing and PR team at Furia Rubel Communications.

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