Facebook seems to be changing. On the one hand, advertising revenues are high like never before, on the other hand, usage is declining. In addition, there are updates for the newsfeed, which is to become more personal and relevant. But Facebook ads can be particularly effective right now, as these advertising tips show.
5 advertising tips from social media experts
Advertising on Facebook is for most marketers one of the first options in social media marketing. In Buffer’s State of Social 2018 – which focuses on US marketers – 94 percent of respondents said they had invested in Facebook advertising. The social network thus remains the first address for the advertising messages of many brands. No wonder, considering the 1.4 billion daily active users worldwide. After all, this dominant position in the Facebook advertising market generated almost 40 billion US dollars in advertising revenue in 2017.
In fact, the importance of Facebook advertising is likely to increase if it becomes more difficult for brands to generate organic reach on the platform. In any case, social media marketing, including ads, is considered to be much more effective than without it.
Therefore, the possibilities offered by Facebook ads should be optimally exploited. Garett Sloane, too, confirms with Ad Age that the changes for the feed could at least theoretically lead to more scrolling and more views of advertisements. In addition, he believes Facebook wants to make it clear that posts experience significantly less commitment and views organically than in the paid area.
ADVERTISING TIPS:
Targeting
The storytelling
Monitoring and adjusting campaigns in real time
The right metrics
The sustainability of campaigns
We’ll get a small overview to identify the key aspects of these tips for effective Facebook marketing.
Which target groups should be addressed?
The ongoing question about audiences is certainly the most important one for all marketers. As Read writes, you can initially concentrate on three important questions:
Which platforms does the target group use?
Which language usage prevails among the group?
Which content do the users of the target group interact with most frequently?
In order to determine such things, a data-supported analysis is required.
All the values are displayed as comparative values. If you want to explore your own audience, you must select the group of people associated with your Facebook page as your group in advance.
The first step is to select the target group to be analyzed, Screenshot Facebook. The left tab at the Insights then allows you to narrow down your target group very specifically: by age, gender, interests, connections, pages that have been clicked, etc.
In this way, Buffer has created a successful campaign for its own podcasts by targeting users who had already visited the Buffer blog and are using an iPad, iPhone, etc. Then the most popular podcast episodes were promoted.
Just try out the insights for your own campaign. It is clear that not every adjustment fits immediately. But it helps if the followers show a lot of commitment, which gives you further insights.
The target group knowledge could be extremely intensified
At this point, reference should be made to the media reports on a Facebook patent, according to which this patent describes an algorithm that is intended to enable more targeted targeting. The explosive thing about it is that the socio-economic group of the individual user is to be determined.
Since the user will be reluctant to give any information about his salary, Facebook would try to establish these groups through other surveys – travel histories, possession of terminal devices, etc. – but the researchers are not convinced that this is the case. This should provide advertisers with better targeting opportunities.
Whether this patent will be applied remains unclear. Nevertheless, it remains very critical, as it could, relatively unsecured, create a class society among Facebook users.
Telling stories helps the brand presence
Ash Read names two central options for integrating a storytelling aspect into Facebook advertising. On the one hand, campaigns can be combined with CTAs and creativity. This is not new and always depends on the quality of your own ad. In addition, however, there is the option of really adding a narrative to a campaign.
First a few days are spent on brand awareness, while in the following days the product information etc. is highlighted. After a little more than a week of playing out these ads to a target group, another one follows with concrete CTA for the hoped-for conversions. The specific example, for example, showed a 56 percent increase in target group registrations compared to a non-sequential ad.
Check your campaigns in real time
The Facebook Ad Manager allows you to examine and adjust your campaigns in real time without having to recreate them completely. There you can change the targeting parameters or customize your call-to-action. Read uses GIF to show you how to edit a campaign directly.
Concrete options include changing the schedule for the ad or budget. It takes a series of experiments with different parameters to create truly successful campaigns. If you run different campaigns for your brand on Facebook, it can be productive to run them in parallel and then take out the weakest performers. Rather try to reproduce the more promising campaigns based on their presets.
Know the right metrics
What are Facebook Ads best suited for? That’s the question brands have to ask themselves. The State of Social report makes it clear that engagement is by far the most important measure of ROI in social media advertising.
Leads also play a very important role in this. Traffic or reach generation, on the other hand, are rather secondary goals. In fact, Facebook is now more of a branding platform; and this should be clear when it comes to advertising creation. Of course, brands ultimately want to increase their revenues. But in the age of social media, this requires a strategy that users will also remember.
Keeping an eye on sustainability
A campaign that is intended to establish itself with users in the long term also promotes a willingness to do more than just show commitment. Although this is the first goal in social media, results such as conversions must also be achieved in the long run.
