Unless you live under a rock, I am sure you are aware that advertising has become one of the most prevailing aspects of Facebook. Let’s face it…it has become almost impossible for your business to successfully promote on Facebook with only organic strategies. I think that buying paid advertising has become necessity to make the most of this popular social media platform.
Target, Target, Target
Targeting is the first and most important rule of digital advertising, if you ask me. One of the biggest advantages of Facebook over other similar platforms is the vast amount of information it can provide you about particular users, the target audience for your online ads. After some initial hiccups, I realised that I would end up wasting money unless I start using the available information to my advantage and accurately target which audience views my ads.
Just like you choose keywords in Google AdWords, Facebook provides the option for you select your target audience when you start creating your ad. You should invest significant amount of time and attention in choosing the Facebook audience. I customised my target audience by narrowing the scope by selecting users by their interests, gender, age, location etc. By specifying my target, I was able to create customised text for my ads which was particularly relevant for my audience.
You can also choose to create custom audiences through Facebook Ids, phone numbers, email addresses and other personal information. Make sure you experiment with various audience groups and ad texts to know which combination is best suited for your business.
Use Lookalike Audiences
Facebook has recently started trying out a new feature Lookalike Audiences. This is a radical new technique for targeting your audience that closely resembles the existing ones. The social media platform will use the same information provided by you for target viewers and develop a new list of users with similar profiles.
Facebook utilises specific information along with basic demographic data to accumulate the lookalike profiles. I found this new feature particularly interesting and useful as Facebook offered me a ready list audience that are similar to the people in my existing list.
Avoid Spending Money On Getting Likes
Mark my words…do not pay money to promote a Facebook page and getting likes. I have learned this the hard way. Before I knew better, I ended up spending a lot of money for advertising on Facebook and was left with doubtful results. Trust me when I say that without getting immersed in dubious likes you cannot promote your Facebook page. It does not matter if you promote your Facebook page with genuine ads, you will still be infested with spammy likes.
There are a lot of “like farms” that like numerous pages, whether paid or not, to cover their illegitimate paid action on the platform. Hence you only end up with questionable likes and it will become more challenging to communicate with users who actually like your Facebook page. This is what happened with me and eventually I had to pay again to reach genuine viewers with a fresh ad campaign.
Use Ads Smartly
So there you have it! These were my simple yet effective tips for using Facebook ads in way that will benefit your business in the long run. I would suggest you to steer clear of promoting pages and get people directly to your blog or website. This way you will have better control over the ensuing activities and see greater returns as well.
