Our dedicated Paid Media Managers at Smartson work on a daily basis with campaigns on Facebook and Instagram and have great knowledge on how to reach a high number of people and convert traffic into sales.
“Facebook is today the biggest worldwide social media platform, with roughly 2.9 billion users every month”
Many companies tend to spend excessive amounts of money without getting any major conversions. A useful tip is to study your target audience before spending a high amount of budget on content creation. Once you have enough information and useful details about your target audience, you can start driving traffic to your website, app, sign up to newsletter etc.
Smartsons Paid media team helps companies and organisations to achieve their goals, from building a social media strategy to planning and executing campaigns. Below we list 8 smart steps on how to achieve your goals on social media.
1. Define the target audience
In order to advertise successfully, you will need to know who your target audience is. Information such as location, interests, age, what kind of jobs and education they have and when they are active on Facebook is essential to reach relevant people. You can find further information about your target audience through Facebook Audience Insights.
Our recommendation is to work in different steps by using the funnel-model. It is a good idea to start with an awareness campaign as a first step to make your audience curious about your brand. In the next step you are able to retarget the users that have previously shown interest in your brand, for instance clicked on a link.
2. Set Smart Goals
In order to create a strong Facebook marketing strategy, we recommend using the recognised SMART model to effectively achieve your goals.
Primarily you will have to define your main goals, and thereafter consider the objectives for each campaign. Knowing what you are aiming for is essential in order to pick the right objective for your campaigns. The right objective will depend on what action you want people to take when they see your ad. There are three different categories that your objectives will fall under:
Awareness: Objectives that generate interest in your product or service. Increasing brand awareness is about telling people what makes your business valuable.
Consideration: Objectives that get people to think about your business and seek more information. Using the Traffic objective, they can create a campaign that encourages people to visit their site to learn more.
Conversions: Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to buy or use your product or service. Using the Store Traffic objective, they can create a campaign to encourage potential customers to stop by their nearest shop.
Your campaign goals will change over time. You may focus more on brand awareness at first, and eventually encourage people to take an action, for instance make a purchase.
3. Content
Once you have figured out the target audience and set your goals, you will need to thoroughly find out what sort of content is appropriate and appealing for your particular audience. A tip is to post content that inspires, educates, informs or entertains your target audience in some such way, which will result in higher engagement.
An efficient way to find out this is to create two fairly similar ads and target identical audiences. Thereafter you will be able to evaluate which content is more appealing to your audience and optimise your ads accordingly.
4. Budget
You can set a daily budget or life-time budget during the period you will run your sponsored ads. If you use a daily budget, it is important that you keep track of how much it spends.
If you are not familiar with advertising on Facebook and you are unsure of which of your target groups performs better, we recommend you to use budget optimisation. The campaign budget optimisation function allows Facebook to take control over your campaign budget and distribute it across the ad sets that will give you the best result.
5. Placement
You can choose to run your ads from a wide range of different placements, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network through Facebook ads. Our recommendation is to try different placements to get insights on which placement performs best with your audience. A good start is to try the “automatic placements”' setting in Ads Manager, which lets Facebook decide what placement is more appropriate for your ad to be displayed.
Once you have gained insights on which placements perform better for your audience, use the gained knowledge and take control of the manual placements.
6. Format
There are nine flexible ad formats that you can choose from and all of them are designed to operate on all devices.
In fact, roughly 80% of Facebook users only access the platform on a mobile device, which makes it essential to adapt the format and consider which ad placement is most appropriate for your specific audience. The most common forms to choose from are photo, video, stories, messenger and carousel. But you can also use slideshow, collection and playables.
7. Activity plan
Posting on appropriate days and times when your audience is active is of vital importance. You can easily access this information on “page insights”. Creating a content calendar will assist you in keeping a good combination of variation of content as well as keeping consistency of your posts.
Take learnings of results from previous campaigns when planning your activity plan, since you now have a better understanding of your target audience.
8. Increase engagement
An easy way to increase engagement for free on Facebook is to use “Facebook questions”. This feature allows you to get recommendations, ask questions and conduct polls to your audience. You will not only push the engagement, but also learn more about your audience.
In fact, Facebook prioritises content that are considered “meaningful interactions” according to the algorithm, which makes it crucial to always invite dialogue with your audience. If you push your sales too hard on the other hand, Facebook will punish you and instead prioritise more valuable content.
By posting entertaining and shareable content, this will increase the likelihood of inspiring your audience to share with their contact network.
Evaluate and experiment
Keep in mind that social media continuously changes, therefore it is crucial to always continue to measure and evaluate your results and thereafter optimise your presence in terms of achieving the best possible outcome of your goals.
Do not be afraid of trying out new ways of approaching your target audience. Your gained knowledge can then be used as guidelines for your work ahead.
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