By
Jen Bales
Digital Marketing Manager - My Business
With so many online advertising competitors, what makes Facebook advertising the best option for SMBs to use?
Facebook delivers value to businesses big and small, by giving them the power to connect with customers and grow. Around 2.6 billion people use our apps each day, and more than 200 million businesses use our free tools to reach customers.
Our platform is designed to engage people with their family and friends and through targeted advertising we can help businesses find the right customers. It’s also a powerful tool to keep your audience engaged, reach new people, and share your newest products or services.
Facebook ads are also integrated across other social media platforms. When you advertise with Facebook, you can show your ads in places beyond Facebook's news feed. Depending on where you create your ad and the type of ad you create, you can choose to show your ads on Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. This means your ads may reach people whether they're on Facebook or a different app or website entirely.
What’s the difference between “boosting” content on a Facebook page versus setting up advertising campaigns in Facebook Ads Manager?
A boosted post is a post to your Page's timeline that you can apply money to in order to boost it to an audience of your choosing. This is the simplest way to advertise on Facebook.
Boosted posts differ from Facebook ads because they are not created in Ads Manager and don't have all the same customisation features.
Facebook ads are created through Ads Manager and offer more advanced customisation solutions. There are many advertising objectives to help you reach your specific business goals and the audiences you care about most. Some of the customisations you can tweak include:
- Choose different ad placements: when you boost a post, you'll only be able to check or uncheck whether or not you want to place your ad in Instagram in addition to Facebook mobile and desktop News Feed.
- Use specific ad objectives: choosing an ad objective early on will help you focus on which campaign type best aligns with your current business goals.
- Maintain creative control: with Facebook Ads created through Ads Manager, you can design an ad that fits your goals.
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WHAT TYPES OF CONTENT (E.G. VIDEO, IMAGE, LONG OR SHORT COPY) WORK BEST FOR ADVERTISING ON FACEBOOK? IN OTHER WORDS, WHAT BEST HELPS TO STOP THE SCROLL?
The success of a campaign ultimately hinges on using the right creative to the right audience to achieve the best results. We’ve found static image and video formats work better together in one campaign, the two formats may complement each other in messaging and/or attract different audiences.
For static image: ensure you have a clear message and focal point on the product or service being advertised to inspire action.
For videos: it is key to ensure you are creating mobile-first videos that aligns best with mobile phone viewing. Make sure you are creating short videos to keep to shorter attention spans (under 15 seconds) and create vertical formats to align with mobile screens. Also:
- make sure your logo is prominent within the first few seconds
- choose attention-grabbing video thumbnails
- lead with shots of your products against vivid backgrounds, and make use of contrasting colors
- put your “hero” front and center
- try using quick movements and transitions in between scenes.
Ultimately, test different creatives to find out what works best for your audience.
WHEN BUILDING AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN, FACEBOOK ASKS USERS TO SELECT A CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE. WHICH CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES SHOULD SMBS CONSIDER USING AND WHY?
First consider what your business goals are. It's important to know what you want to achieve in order to choose the right objective. Your advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads.
The machine on the backend optimises towards those outcomes you’ve selected based on the campaign objectives selected. For example, if your goal was to get more website visitors, using a Traffic objective campaign will allow you to optimise for more landing page views.
There is a categorisation of different campaign objectives when you go into Facebook Ad Manager to create your campaign. You can use that as a guide to select objectives from awareness, consideration and conversion.
It is also important to think long term and ensure you have a strategy that can nurture new audiences across the sales funnel. For example, prospect new audiences using awareness campaigns, then nurture them down the funnel and retarget using conversions campaigns. In this case, you may leverage the power of different campaign objectives that can cater to different parts of the funnel and audience.
COULD YOU EXPLAIN BRIEFLY WHAT THE FACEBOOK PIXEL IS AND WHY BUSINESSES WITH A WEBSITE WOULD FIND IT USEFUL?
A Facebook pixel is a piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimise and build audiences for your advertising campaigns.
When someone visits your website and takes an action (for example, buying something), the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. This way, you'll know when a customer took an action after seeing your Facebook ad. You'll also be able to reach this customer again by using a Custom Audience.
When more and more conversions happen on your website, Facebook gets better at delivering your ads to people who are more likely to take certain actions. This is called conversion optimisation.
HOW CAN USERS OPTIMISE THEIR ADS ONCE THEY’RE RUNNING, FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE?
It is crucial to set yourself up for success by letting the machine work for you. This can be done by using features such as automatic placement. Automatic placements enable you to get the best results available from across all available placements in Facebook’s family of apps, for example, Facebook feed, Instagram stories and Messenger.
Machine learning ensures your budgets are spent on the most cost-efficient placement at any given point of time.
Once the campaign is running, ensure to give it time to learn (at least seven days or to get 50 conversions) before it exits its learning phase.
You can then monitor the key metrics that align with that campaign’s objective, for example, cost per conversions and make adjustments, changing up creatives and broadening target audiences.
WHAT ARE SOME SIGNS THAT INDICATE IT’S TIME TO STOP RUNNING AN AD?
When you don’t see much delivery being sent to a specific ad creative, it could be a sign the creative is not as efficient as the other creatives used in the campaign to drive results. You can consider turning that ad creative off. If the results in your key performance metrics are not within an acceptable range. Some examples include:
If the cost per result goes beyond your threshold, you can consider making adjustments to your target audiences or creatives to try bringing down the cost.
If the creative has been used for a while then creative fatigue may have set in. This is when your audiences have seen the creative too much and it doesn’t convert.
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST MISTAKES YOU’VE SEEN PEOPLE MAKE WITH FACEBOOK ADS?
Some of the biggest mistakes commonly made include making changes to the advertising when the system is still learning. Or making changes too frequently and often sending the campaign back into the learning phase.
It is important to give the campaign some time to optimise and get out of the learning phase (usually beyond seven days or when it has at least 50 conversions). During the learning phase, the results may be volatile as the campaign is still learning and therefore it is not wise to make any decisions based on those performance results.
Making significant changes to the campaign mid-flight will also send the system back into learning. The key is to let the system work for you and not the other way around. Use the tools to optimise your campaigns towards your business goals and give you the time back to focus on running your business.
