How Facebook ads can get you better bang for your buck?

So, how do you create posts that will obtain greater engagement and drive people to take action? Start creating Facebook advertisements. There is often some confusion around the difference between boosted posts and Facebook ads.  Simply, boosted posts allow you to promote an already existing post on your page, set a target audience and budget and the duration you want it to run. The aim of boosted posts is to achieve as much engagement as possible, so they are great for brand awareness, however they are significantly more limited than Facebook ads.

Facebook ads allow you to set multiple objectives, detailed placement options, targeted optimisation and allow for more creativity and adjustments.

Here are three reasons how Facebook ads will get you better bang for your buck:

1. Talk to the right people

Gone are the days of measuring the success of a Facebook post based on reach. No longer is it about reaching the greatest number of people, it’s about reaching the right people. While having big numbers on your monthly social media report looks great, if the audience isn’t taking any action on your post, was it worth the effort you went to finding a pretty picture and nailing the caption? Unlike boosted posts, Facebook ads allow you to not only target an audience based on demographics and location, you can also customise your audience based on interests, behaviours and even job title. You can also create a Lookalike Audience based on followers that are currently engaging with you, generating a new audience group that you can guarantee will be interested in your business.

Get to know your audience by visiting Audience Insights and start talking to people who are interested in your brand.

2. Test, test and test again

Your first ad won’t be perfect. It probably won’t have a high click through rate, strong engagement or impressive reach…that’s okay! It takes a lot of experimenting and testing of ads before you start to see real results.

Unlike boosted posts, Facebook ads allows you to create multiple ad sets in order to optimise your audience that will ultimately deliver results for your business. Within Ads Manager you can create an overarching campaign which defines your objective. You can then break this campaign into separate audience groups, demographic, gender or age range. Within these audience groups you can create multiple ads containing different messaging, imagery, video, button, call to action or website link.  On the conclusion of your campaign you can use the Facebook reporting tool to understand the types of content your individual audience groups are responding to, meaning the next time you roll out a campaign you know what will deliver a response. Every time you implement a campaign you start to learn more and more about your audience.

Not only can you analyse results post campaign, you can also monitor performance and adjust your campaign in real time. Unlike a print ad, TV commercial, billboard or any other form of traditional media, Facebook ads can be changed at any time during the campaign. It’s important you follow the progress of your ad, if you’re not getting clicks, engagement or reach you need to investigate why and try adjusting the call to action or creative.

3. Tell your brands unique story followed by a direct call to action

We know storytelling is a great way of bringing life to your brand. Unlike boosted posts, Facebook ads provide more flexibility to be creative with how your pictures and videos are presented and most importantly they allow you to create clear and direct call to actions. In the last couple of years, you will have noticed carousel Facebook ads in your feed. This is a great example of how you can tell your brands story through a selection of images presented in a specific order. They are incredibly engaging and according to data collected by Kinetic Social, these ads can drive up to 10 times more traffic to your websites than boosted posts. Another great storytelling strategy is to create ‘sequence ads’ which allows you to create 50 ads that are displayed in a specific order. For example, if you want to build narrative, your first ad may contain the beginning of your story. Your second ad will build on the story with more information and so on. The second ad will not be shown unless your audience has seen the first ad. Read more about sequencing in this great case study from Refinery29.

When you’re working on your social media strategy, think about how you can tell a great story and use Facebook ads to capture an audience group that will be interested in your brand, followed by a clear call to action.

There you have it, some really valuable reasons as to why you should consider investing your time and effort into Facebook advertising opposed to boosting posts. At Tower we understand it can be daunting but the best thing to do is jump into the Ads Manager page and have a play. Don’t let the complexity of Ads Manager frighten you away, Google always has the answers. And if it becomes too complicated, speak with #TeamTower about how we can help you implement Facebook ads that drive real results for your business.

Let us leave you with a quote from media guru Gary Vaynerchuk: “If you’re a practitioner, if you really had to sell to survive, you would realise that the most under-priced ad product right now is Facebook Advertising. If you had to sell to feed your children, you would put your money there.”