Make Facebook Ads Work for Your Business
Facebook Ads provided a perfect solution for promoting yourself with local SEO. You can turn on and off ads whenever you want, add in a new campaign with ease, and the advertising itself can work well with a small budget. On top of that, your customers can promote you online and off, giving great word of mouth, which as we all know is extremely effective.
Here is how to get your company out there on Facebook using ads:
Choosing the Right Type of Ad
Facebook makes it simple to choose who you want to target your ad towards, including a number of audience options that are excellent for local marketers. We’ll get into that more below. Facebook also lets you choose the objective for each campaign you start. These include options such as “promote your page,” “increase conversions on your website,” “increase engagement in your app,” and “get people to claim your offer.”
As a local marketer, the options “raise attendance at your event,” and “reach people near your business” ad types are especially useful.
How to Target Your Audience
There are various ways to set up audience targeting and they depend on what type of ad you chose. If you choose to target those near your location, a map will pop up that allows you to dig down and choose additional options of age and gender. Anyone who is in your city or local area will see your ad, whether they are from there or visiting.
If you choose a different type of advertisement, you’ll be able to choose locations to target. You can choose an entire country, if you wish, or choose to use a specific address. Somewhere in between is often going to work better than either of those, however. Facebook also allows you to exclude locations if there’s an area you prefer not to target.
Refine Your Targeting
Beyond locational targeting, you can make other choices to drill down to the exact audience that you want. With all ads, save the one targeting your area, you can choose a whole host of other things to help you reach the people you want. Of course, age and gender are there, but so are demographics like income, education, interests, political beliefs, and hobbies. You can also browse to explore different things and learn more about them.
By default, Facebook will set things up to include people who match at least one of your targeting options, but you can also change this by hitting “narrow audience.” You can add criteria there of which the target user must match each option. So, you could target to only high school graduates who like painting or go even deeper and target graduate students of business who are interested in horses and use iPads. The sky is limit.
As with locations, you can also exclude people based on behavior, interests, and demographics if you have a certain type of person you would prefer not to advertise to.
Provide a Reason to Click
At this point you have an advertisement campaign, along with an audience who you want to advertise to. So, what you need now is to give customers a reason to click on your link. Of course, you can do that in various ways, depending on your business and needs.
One of the most common ways to do this is by offering a coupon. People love the idea of having a discount, which will make them more likely to click and check out your page. It can even lead to more sales if people feel that the coupon has a value that they are interested in.
Another option, one that is completely free, is adding in your location to the ad. People are more likely to notice the advertisement if it appeals to them and having their location listed is a good way to do so. For instance, instead of making your ad headline say, “stop in for lunch today!” try “Seattleites – stop in for lunch today.”
Pay Attention to Numbers
The first half of advertising on Facebook is creating and running the ad, the other half is tracking the statistics from your ad. Between ads manager and the coupon app, Facebook will automatically track metrics from the ad and the landing page. This includes everything from number of conversions to how many coupons have been claimed, along with how many views your advertisement has pulled in.
Take what you learn from that and use it in further campaigns. If something works well and something else doesn’t, you know what to use the next time to bring in the most views and clicks.
Follow Up with Customers
If you choose to go the route of coupons, be aware that not everyone who claims it will use it. Some will use it later but others will completely forget about them between everything else going on in their lives. A good way to deal with this situation is by following up with people, whether they use the coupon or not. An email campaign can be a great way to do this.
A drip email campaign is an option as you send out timed emails at optimal times. Of course, you can choose another route, if preferred. Whatever you choose, be sure to offer exciting content and further incentives that keep people interested in your brand and what you are doing.
Conclusion
A Facebook ad campaign can be beneficial for a business looking for a hold in the local area. By ensuring you look at each of these important aspects when building, using, and ending campaigns, you have a better chance of getting those all-important links and views, which lead to a higher ranking on the major search engines.
If you already use Facebook as a business page, it’s worth throwing a little money in and utilizing their ads, so long as you know what you want from it. Following the above suggestions is likely to help you out in the long run with getting more fans and customers.
