How does Facebook advertising work?
Facebook advertising in its simplest form allows social media posts to be boosted to gain engagement. Moving beyond that simplistic model you can elect to route traffic to your website or Facebook brand page or to install apps and more. Facebook advertising only works when used in conjunction with a funnel.
A Facebook Advertising Case Study
Facebook Vs Google
Facebook is 'interruption advertising'. Potential customers are looking through their feed scrolling down and depending on their interests which Facebook knows very well they will get served an appropriate ad. Consider the way Google delivers ads, you go to Google and type in an INTENT "FLOWERS ONLINE NEAR ME". You are looking for something! Google is giving the user what they want at that moment in time. The advantage Facebook has is different. Facebook has a logged-in and authenticated person (a cohort), their behaviors and personality, and knowing a lot about what the user likes. For example, Facebook knows if you click through an ad and buy something. It knows if you like buying gadgets for yourself it knows what celebrities you like and your politics.
"One unique advantage for Facebook is what they know about us."
You need to evaluate both platforms against your goals. Facebook is also able to multiply a potential audience with LLA's (LOOK ALIKE AUDIENCES) and of course retargeting. If you ever almost bought something in a store adding it to a cart and then abandoning the process Facebook tracks that action and offers the chance for the customer to buy again perhaps at a discount. This is retargeting at a glance.
If you are generating leads you might be able to directly gain the information you would otherwise have to get entered from a form such as an email (an obvious pain point). Pick from 6 kinds of advert, your product never looked so good and reached the person hopefully likely to buy. Having the ability to take the user on a full-page mobile ad story where the user scrolls down is exciting for advertising things you would never normally search for. Some of the formats require videos to be created or at least good images. With Google ads, you can get going faster with simple text. Sure you can boost a post with Facebook at the click of a button but all you will do is get irrelevant social interactions with your post. So setup with Facebook tends to take longer but it's not a deciding issue.
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You will most likely need some product/service visuals developing especially if you want your Ad to resonate with the audience. Facebook Ads rely on imagery heavily and indeed discourage too much text. So attention to the Ad copy also is vital. We can help you here. Developing the idea/story and assets for your campaign.
Facebook ad formats and placement options to choose from
Instagram advertising is a subset of Facebook advertising and you can lump them together indeed facebook sees it as a kind of advert (a different placement) rather than a completely different platform.
Other 3rd party platforms and 'messenger' advertising also exist. It gets complicated quickly for the small business owner or sales and marketing team.
Facebook Boost Post
Just boosting a post is not the best format for getting traffic. Boosting a post is an ad format and a PPE objective for getting more likes and shares for your post. You may get very few clicks toward your funnel and be disappointed if you just try boosting a post. Boosting a post is an easy way for Facebook to make money from the average user. Be warned against that easy route.
Is Facebook advertising for me?
The only time that I consider Facebook to be limited in reach is for B2B. LinkedIn advertising is much more suited to targeting companies though you might still find ingenious routes to target people who act for companies with Facebook. So in short probably facebook can be a source of fast traffic and new business/leads for you.
What does Facebook advertising cost?
There are 3 things to look at with the costs when you break it down. This is ignoring that you will need a landing page and funnel which you might already have. That part is vital that you have a converting well funnel and this we can help you with alongside the Facebook setup and management.
1) Setup- depending on the size of your campaign (how many different kinds of audiences you want to target how many products or services etc)
2) Management- constantly monitoring and tweaking the ads, running AB testing, and continual iteration of the ads. Reporting to you.
3) Ad Spend- The actual cost of the clicks which you can pay yourself (through your Facebook account) or we can do that as part of a contract paid in advance.
You should be looking to spend an absolute minimum of 10 pounds per day on Ad spend because with less you won't make an impact. Don't forget you won't be advertising all the time just for the duration of a campaign. You should never look to accumulate leads slowly in this way. Social media advertising is for rapid results you should look at SEO for a more gradual lead-generating effect.
Your Business Plan and Objectives
We need to understand your business objectives to be able to create the content for your campaign and deliver leads.
We discuss to see if you need organic traffic, paid advertising, social media advertising, or a mix of all channels. You might be better off using Google Search or Content advertising. We need to look at the profiling for your ideal customer and move forward from that discussion.
Your Budget
We need to have an idea of your budget you can allocate. Producing images and videos along with the wording for your ads needs to be in line with your budget. You may be a smaller company and not require too much work keeping things simple will help a lot. This is an important part of our service. We tailor the traffic to what you need. For example, we can halve the cost per click and keep the volume and intent! That's pretty powerful :)
We can start things off for you and eventually onboard you to manage your own campaigns and ads if you like or enjoy our fully managed DONE FOR YOU Facebook advertising service.
In any case, we would love to hear from you!
Pinterest is also a service we offer similar to Facebook sponsored posts.
