3 ways to excel at Facebook Advertising

Target better, track smarter - Facebook Advertising yields unbelievable results when used correctly.

Early 2017, Facebook announced having over a million active advertisers on the platform. The social media mammoth, recorded a 57 per cent surge in ad revenues by mid 2016 - making Facebook advertising an indispensable tool of marketing.

Nevertheless, Facebook advertising yields best results only with right targeting, consistency, and objectivity. This three-point plan helps businesses make the most out of their investment in Facebook Advertising.

1. Narrowing your target audience

Focusing your ads on a much narrower group of audience will help your business put forth its message in a much greater way, as compared to focusing them on a broad category such as ‘women under the age of 50’.

Assuming the business manufactures a product exclusively for women in the aforementioned demographic, such as high end cutlery, it is likely to fascinate most women in the broad category, but very few would essentially act upon it.

By narrowing the approach to ‘urban women under the age of 50’, advertising your product as a luxury and a must have for the elite, your business can showcase ads to a much more refined group of potentially interested buyers.

Targeting people who are most likely to act or with whom your advertisement will resonate the most, is perhaps surest way of reducing costs for a higher yield.

These are some ways you can narrow your target audience

Add gender to your product checkout page form : Many businesses end up wasting their precious resources by advertising products or services meant for a particular gender, to both genders. As mentioned above, cutlery is a product that is predominantly purchased by women, thereby advertising such a product to men would not yield desirable results.

Know your market, and who should and will buy your products or services, and act upon it.

Use a third-party service to get detailed demographic information about your email contacts : In order to receive more information regarding your contacts, and learning crucial information based on the demographics your business requires, such as age, profession or location to effectively target more people like them, third party services offer a valuable service.

Using this information to apply it using Facebook’s ad targeting will help your business reach more people.

2. Build ads that make your audience take notice

Social media users are prone to having short attention spans, and for businesses that is bad news. Like users watching television, or in a movie theatre, most of them dislike advertisements, and therein lies the problem for most businesses.

In the stream of entertaining images and videos on social media, it is exceedingly difficult for a business to stand out with their advertisement, and grab the attention of their audience. While that too can be accomplished with catchy visuals, it may not deliver the sales you are looking for.

The most difficult part is to balance visual appeal and keeping it in line with your business’ ideals, mastering which will work wonders for your brand.

 Attract customers with a goal to retain them : One additional thing that grabs the attention of social media users is offers, and most business rely on them to break free from the clutter. With offers that guarantee action, businesses do succeed by registering sales, but it brings its own set of disadvantages.

By building your consumer base with offers, businesses hamper their potential to retain valuable consumers who in the long term are only interested in the event of discounts and offers.

Use offers as a means to bring consumers to try what you have to offer, receive something of value in return which brings them back, not the promise of low prices and discounts.

Be catchy but not forgettable: If you think about it, you can grab the attention of social media users in a lot of ways, good and bad. Crafting an advertisement that not only stands out, but is good enough to be remembered and encourages the user to click on it, which needless to say is easier said than done.

Crafting an image that keeps true with the brand’s message and is worthy of recall from your target audience ensures that your effort has been delivered.

3. Measure conversions delivered by Facebook ad clicks

Keeping a track of users who visit your website through Facebook Advertising helps you to gauge how many of them actually end up taking action, or go from visitor to consumer, thereby giving you a detailed graph of how effective your Facebook ads are.

Prompting users to click on your ads and directing users to your website ensures an enhanced interaction, giving businesses the opportunity to offer users something in return for their email address.

Create a plan and be consistent

Posting regularly may be the trick to stay present on the News Feed, but, it is crucial to not only specify timings, but also understand when and why you are posting. Your plans should not run haywire, and should be a part of a story.

Maintaining a consistency while telling a story, across platformshelps businesses form an overall marketing strategy making sure audiences are able to form a connection with the story you are telling.

Go for engagement rather than activity; Like and Share are not as reliable indicators of communication and recall, as conversation are, in leaving a lasting impression in their minds.

A lot of businesses use Facebook Advertising, but not many are able to align their business ideals, converting their target audience into consumers. Putting in efforts to connect with the right audience in the right manner is a beneficial approach that all businesses should indulge in.