Facebook ads are highly targeted and can be very effective at generating new “likes” and new customers.
Facebook lets you go beyond demographics—age, kids, location and drill down into the psychographics of your target market. You can find LOST fans around Sacramento for example, or cat lovers below the age of 40 who live on the Lower East Side.
Social Proof
You can target friends of people who already like your Page. This gives you social proof. Meaning, if their friends already trust you, “like” you and your prospects see that, they’re more open to you.
And, you don’t have to spend thousands to see results. Basically, you choose your demographics, set your daily budget amount and in some cases, plan your ad. Then you wait til it goes live and you monitor the results to see if you need to make changes.
A participant in my local, in person social media classes sent me this note and said she didn’t mind if I shared it with you. I thought it was pretty powerful.
Here’s what one local yoga studio did.
“I don’t know if you’ll find this useful or not, but I thought I’d let you know my latest experience with FB ads. Previously I ran 3 ads on FB–all for our online video classes. Two ads did ok, and one totally bombed.
This time I ran a very simple ad with the logo photo (just the face of Saraswati) that said “Like Local Yoga Studio for inspiration and useful information about Yoga.”
I ran it for a total of 8 days (this is day 7) and so far I’ve gotten 24 new likes. I’m really happy with the results. The clicks for likes were cheaper than the ones for the other ads and yesterday I actually hit my daily limit of $15….
I targeted the ad to friends of those who had liked Local Yoga Studio. There were 44K of them at the time. Now there are more than 54K friends of “likers” but the ad is still only going to the original 44K because FB doesn’t update this as often. Now that I know this, if I run this kind of ad again, I’ll run it for a shorter time, than re-run the same ad the next day (but going through the whole set-up process) in order to maximize my reach to the new people garnered by the ad’s results.
If I had it to do over again, I would run an ad to increase the number of “likes” before running the ads for the online yoga class subscription. My number of likes had hovered between 150-155 for MONTHS. One ad got me at least 10K’s worth of new social reach, and I wish those people had all seen the ads for the online videos in January!”
She achieved 24 new “likes” on her page for about $1.50 a click. Plus, another 10K people saw her ad. It’s a marketing standard that people need to see something 7-9 times before they start to “see” it and react. So, she could generate many more “likes” when she runs the next campaign.
Compare that to learning the complexities of Adwords or running $600+ traditional ads in local magazines/newspapers and you’ll see the ROI is greater.
When it comes to creating an effective Facebook ad, there are a few things to consider.
1- Define your purpose – Do you want to grow your “likes”? Encourage people to sign up for your newsletter or simply increase the likelihood that more of your audience sees your posts?
2- Determine your budget – you can run as little as a $1.00 or two a day. If you want to increase your likes and engagement, you may decide to spend a $100 over the course of a month and divvy up the money a little at a time.
If you’re running a contest, you’ll want to spend your ad budget during the time of the contest and create ads relevant to the contest.
3- Which type of Facebook ad will you use? Sponsored Stories? Promoted Posts? Marketplace Ads? The reasons to use each differ.
Sponsored Stories show your friends liked something for that social proof. They’re good for increasing “likes” .
Promoted posts help your posts gain more reach and visibility. You need over 400 “likes” to promote a post.
Then, there are Marketplace ads, the typical ads running down the side with an image, headline and call to action.
Facebook is constantly changing the ad types. The important thing for you to know is, plan your desired result and experiment with them.
Good luck! I’d love to hear your experience with Facebook ads. Please share in the comments below.
