FACEBOOK ADVERTISING – TRIAL & ERROR OR TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS?

FACEBOOK ADVERTISING – TRIAL & ERROR OR TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS?

www.littlebylittlecreativesoluttions.co.uk

We have all seen the gradual commercialisation of Facebook and other social media platforms over the last year or two.

The platform is pushing quite heavily the opportunity to advertise and I am sure you will have seen many ‘promoted posts’ or adverts appearing on your feeds. It is only logical business sense that Facebook would want to monetise their creation that boasts about 1 billion users worldwide. They have a product that is now very much a major part of most people’s everyday lives. With all that engagement it is easy to see why FB would want to sell their space and why businesses would want to get use this space to get in front of their audience.

So how can you start to do this and what are the benefits and pitfalls of such a campaign?

You can find a link to the ‘how to advertise’ section from your Facebook home page situated near the top right. There is a lot of information including short videos, which are a little twee and annoying in my opinion, but it is there for you to wade through at your own pace.

The first thing to make you aware of is this is a ‘paid for’ form of advertising. It’s not free. Unlike your posts, that can reach you followers etc for the just the time and effort it takes to create your content, here you will have to pay to get in front of more potential customers.

The paid for advert campaign works on an auction system not dissimilar to that of Google’s AdWords. This is not the best system for you as an advertiser but obviously it is for Facebook. It is difficult to compete with others who are vying for the same spots and audience that you want. Thus sometimes the price can be artificially high as proven with AdWords. This is where knowing what your maximum limit is and sticking to it is crucial. My worry is that the gambling culture and mentality we all now live in will mean people will raise the stakes in order to get the advert in front of a potential customer. And may I stress ‘potential’. Just because you win the auction and your advert is presented first does not mean someone will buy. My advice is to keep your ego in check till you are confident you know what is working for you.

You will need to allocate a budget for your campaign and determine how long it will run for. This is great because you control how much your budget is and the campaign length. It also allows you to compete with competitors but to a level where you are comfortable. These factors are crucial especially for measuring ROI and assessing the success of a campaign.

You will also need to actually create / design your advert but thankfully this is free. So branding can be carried through from all other marketing channels delivering a consistent corporate message.

You can also have several adverts and campaigns running simultaneously. Different offers for different target markets. The benefit of this is that the campaigns can be monitored so you can see which is performing well and which not. You can then act upon that and put more funds into the better performing ones whilst amending the lesser performing ones to improve them. You can even freeze the campaign whilst you make the amends so you budget is not wasted.

A downside though is that it appears you cannot transfer the funds from a poor campaign to a good one. I have tried and not seen a way to do it and the information videos don’t say you can do this either. Thus, you will need to know what is making one of your campaigns a success and apply that to the other. Or run exactly the same advert but use different filters (see below about filters).

So my advice is to start all campaigns with a small minimum budget over a short period initially to ‘test the waters’ so speak. Then monitor and act accordingly.

Filters – what be they?

Though Facebook can boast 1 billion users to the majority of businesses looking to advertise 99.9% of this market is not going to buy from them for various reasons. So advertising to them all is an appalling waste of time and money. However, Facebook, in keeping with their ethos of presenting pertinent content to their users also want to do the same with promoted posts. They therefore give advertisers the opportunity to filter through their users and ask that their advert only appear on a timeline of someone who has been filtered. These filters include Male/Female, Gender, Age brackets, Device Usage, Location, Hobbies and Interests etc etc. This allows you to maximise the money you are investing because you can target the social demographic of your current clientele or look to target a different sector. The downside though is that the more filters you have the fewer leads or prospects you will create. The upside is that what prospects are created should be hotter and your campaign my run longer because your adverts are being served to fewer numbers. This aspect of the campaign needs close monitoring and management. Be prepared to be flexible and strike a balance between number of leads and hotness! 

I ran a small campaign for just ￡10 a day over a 3 day week (Weds – Fri) and 2 day weekend for the music production part my business. I ran it in conjunction with my latest music video loading it to FB natively. The results have been ok with a total of 74 downloads that more or less covered the campaign cost. The plus side was much greater engagement and likes / shares and about 20 more subscriptions to my website www.therewasatime.co.uk

I assessed the number of times the advert appeared and how many clicks came from this to how many sales.

ï¿¡50 budget @ ï¿¡10 per day

3000 views = 0.16p per view

360 clicks = 1.38p per click

70 downloads = 71p per download

21 subscribers = ï¿¡2.38 per subscriber

So I need to decide if this is a strong ROI and, thus, whether to amend the campaign variables and to do it again. What do you think?

I recommend trying it to see how it could work for you but be prepared for a trial and error campaign accompanied with some worthwhile tribulations.

#DigitalMarketing #SocialMedia #Advertising #FacebookAdvertising