Facebook Ads Strategy, Objective and Optimization

Abstract: The purpose of this note is to provide information regarding Facebook Advertisement strategy, objective/goal setting and its optimization. We can’t ignore the potential of social marketing, there are various factors that puts social ahead of search such as it deliver brand equity and free traffic, it trigger purchases in visual product categories, it drive long term engagement, unparalleled audience granularity, incredible ROI etc. and many more.

Introduction

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn (professional network) has become significant part of our life. It endures transparency and authenticity by reflecting your real identity, by maintaining your authenticity you manage to win old and new friends that like point of view. Of course, not everyone chooses to stay authentic when posting on social networks. That’s how we end up creating a new persona, usually an improved version of your actual character, in order to make sure that you are likeable.

The greatest advantage of social connectivity is the ability to reach everyone in just a few second, in fast and reliable way. Communication has changed forever and thus, it also affected our behavior when looking for the best way to connect with our family and friends. Social media is not about connection, but also about disconnection. Our constant connectivity may lead us to social media addiction, sacrificing our real-life moments for their digital representation.

It’s amazing how social media may unite people all over the world, sharing the same interest, passion, thoughts and worries. We feel the need to be the part of a community and social networks offer the right medium to do it. Except for being the part of a team, social media can also turn us into a narcissist, due to the ease of posting pictures and sharing status updates about your daily life.

The regular use of social media allows us to learn how to juggle from one task to another, with multitasking feeling almost natural.

With the help of these facts, a strategist can improve their Facebook ads performance. They can target desired age group, community, interest etc.

Facebook Ads Strategy

If we master Facebook targeting strategy, we can get in front of very specific and often motivated segment of our audience (According to stats, people in United States religiously spend an average of 40 minutes of their day).

1.     Targeting Recent Purchasing Behavior among Facebook users: Earlier Facebook was criticized by advertising analyst as a fun place to hang out, but a network with little commercial intent or potential for consumer insight. Suddenly Facebook knew a whole lot about you more than whether you spent more time in Farmville or Candy Crush Saga. Getting married soon? Taking medication for hypertension? Love reading murder mysteries? Facebook probably knows every behavior of users. This gave advertiser the power to reach out beyond their own CRM databases and tab into insights gleaned from shopper loyalty programs of all kinds matched to individual profiles. Facebook advertisers use this data to target audience segments by thousands of different purchasing behaviors.

2.     Get Creative With Life Events Targeting: Certain types of businesses or campaigns are based on selling to people experiencing certain major life events. Funeral homes, for example, obviously want to connect with people who are planning a funeral, terminally ill, or lost/losing a loved one. Moving services want to get in front of you if you’ve just purchased a new house or apartment. Wedding photographers target people who are engaged. Facebook has pretty much every conceivable life event targeting option, since we tend to post these to our timelines. The Life Events parameter is unique in that you can choose to target people at specific intervals of time after the change. For example, a jewelry company would obviously be interested in getting in front of people celebrating their one-year anniversary, so they could target audience members who were newlyweds one year ago. The date ranges possible are 3 months, 6 months and one year.

3.     Nurture Leads & Build Loyalty with Facebook Custom Audiences: Custom Audiences are created by uploading your customer phone list, or purchaser/subscriber email list in CSV or TXT format, to Facebook. You can also create a Custom Audience based on your site visitors (and specific pages visited on your site), or on specific actions taken within your game or app. The number of different demographics points you can target and combine is staggering. Net worth, living arrangements, marital status, parental status, interests, location – it’s all in there, and more.

4.     Expand To A Lookalike Audience: Lookalike Audiences are a logical next step, once you have a good Custom Audiences strategy in place. Even if you don’t have your own email or phone list, you can mirror your Facebook fan base. Lookalikes allow you to expand beyond your reach but still target people with highly specific profiles, by creating audiences that look like your own targets. If you have neither a list nor a big enough Facebook following, you can still create a Lookalike Audience using a tracking pixel to create a Website Custom Audience to mirror. Once you’ve decided which audience you want to replicate and expand on, you can make the audience larger (more broad) or smaller (more specific and similar to your original audience). At the most similar level, Facebook is going to find you the top 1 percent of users with similar traits, in your target country. At the opposite level, optimizing for reach, Facebook will display your ads to the 10 percent of users in your target country who are most like your target audience.

5.     Granular with Layered Targeting Options: The really powerful thing about Facebook ads is in your ability to layer targeting options on top of one another, gradually making your audience more and more specific. An extreme (and hilarious) example of the power of hypertargeting was featured in AdWeek last year, when a marketing pro targeted his roommate with ads so specific the poor guy thought he was being cyberstalked. Yes, you can use combinations of behaviors, demographics, and geolocation data to reduce your audience to as little as one person. Far more useful for you, however, is the ability to match ad creative and offers to smaller audiences created using combinations of data. For example, a moving company promoting a special discount for senior citizens could target people who purchased a house within the last month, layered with an age range of 60 years old or greater and their service area locations.

Different Objective/Goal in Facebook Advertising

We can imitate people using any trigger such as photo, video, carousel, slideshow and canvas on Facebook Instagram and Audience Network to perform desired action. Advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads.

The objective you choose aligns with your overall business goals:

1.     Awareness: Generate interest in your product or service.

2.     Consideration: Get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it.

3.     Conversion: Encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service.

Various business goals as per the advertising objective

Awareness

1.     Brand awareness: Reach people more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase awareness for your brand.

2.     Local Awareness: Promote business to people in your local area.

3.     Reach: Show your ad to maximum number of people in your audience.

Consideration

1.     Traffic: Increase the number of visits to your website or get more people to use your app. With traffic as your objective, you can: Send people to your website or Get people to download your app.

2.     App installs: Send people to an app store where they can download your app.

3.     Engagement: Get more people to see and engage with your post or Page. With engagement as your objective, you can: Boost your posts (Post engagement), promote your Page (Page likes), Get people to claim an offer on your Page (Offer claims) and Raise attendance at an event on your Page (Event responses).

4.     Video views: Promote videos that show behind-the-scene footage, product launches or customer stories to raise awareness about your brand.

5.     Lead generation: Collect lead information, such as email addresses, from people interested in your business.

Conversion

1.     Conversions: Get more people to use your website, Facebook app, or mobile app. To track and measure conversions, use the Facebook pixel or app events.

2.     Product catalog sales: Show products from your product catalog based on your target audience.

3.     Store visits: Promote multiple business locations to people who are nearby.

Optimizing Facebook Advertising Campaigns

Scientific methods to optimize your Facebook Advertising campaigns:

·        Know your goal before you start

·        Create smaller audience segments

·        Monitor the right performance metrics

·        Custom audience and Look-A-Like targeting

·        Keep it short and simple

·        A/B test your ad and landing page

·        Rotate your ads

You should know your goal before starting a Facebook advertising campaign and find the proper metric to track your progress toward it. Facebook is keen to know your goal before you start creating your ad. You can monitor CPC, CPM and CTR to make sure they are on track such as to get more Likes on your Facebook Page, you should focus on Cost-Per-Like.

Conclusion

Social media marketing, when done with a proper strategy and in a right way can lead to more customer, more traffic and more customer. Just you have to follow your objective and have a right tracking metric.

Reference

1.     Facebook for business tutorial

2.     Forbes online website