It is easy to access countless guides on “how to advertise on Facebook” using a basic internet search. There’s even an eHow.com page dedicated to the topic. These pages will offer fundamental guides with varying degrees of importance and usefulness, all speaking to the basic fact that anyone can inexpensively start their own Facebook marketing campaign, no matter how big or small. But the messages behind these simple offerings are also valuable for large merchants with significant advertising budgets and a tendency to leave the advertising initiative in the hands of their ad agency.
The biggest advantage of Facebook over other types of advertising, online or otherwise, is that Facebook marketing approaches can be delivered based on superior demographics target marketing from the outset of a campaign, and they use performance metrics to further tailor the advertisements so that those with a high likelihood of conversion see the ads. This offers the parallel benefits of decreasing the costs of the ads and increasing site traffic and resultant income. This process of continually improving the targeting means that an advertising firm can make a Facebook campaign very effective and targeted, given time, even with only the most general information about the client’s market and goals.
But when a merchant understands something of how to advertise on Facebook already, it can contribute significantly more information at the outset of the campaign, further reducing costs, increasing the campaign’s pace, and freeing up resources to devote to more creative approaches across a wider spectrum of strategies.
The first and most obvious thing for merchants to do is set specific goals for their Facebook ad campaign. They don’t have to be overly detailed, but it is helpful to know if, for example, the company just wants to increase brand awareness and visibility, needs a higher quantity of unique page views because to take advantage of efficient conversion strategies, wants to generate more revenue from existing customers, or is trying to break into new markets and expand your pool of potential customers. This will make it easier to choose the payment structure, design ad copy, and make future decisions about how to modify the campaign.
Next, every online guide emphasizes knowing your audience, and using this to target everything. So spend some time looking at the data you have to determine which groups of potential customers find your products most appealing and what it is about your previous advertisements and products that they like. This information facilitates developing effective and exciting copy for ads and other pages and choosing the groups that ad efforts should prioritize. Not only will this preparation give you a better grasp of the process and thus enable you to participate more effectively, it will make the ad agency you hire more effective in the campaign’s early stages.
The last point that we can draw from free online guides designed to teach amateurs how to advertise on Facebook is that with all the tracking and testing data that Facebook makes available, you should keep track of this information yourself. It probably won’t be cost-efficient to do anything advanced with it and the online marketing firm will be better equipped to make effective changes based on testing and this data. But it behooves you to know what works and doesn’t, and how well your understanding of your client base reflects who actually clicks on your ads.
Being informed and active at every stage of the Facebook advertising process costs little in the way of time or money, but can yield significant productivity results and should make the act of increasing the portion of your ad budget devoted to social networks much easier.