(By the way, the Huffington Post published a really informative article for stubborn business owners who don’t feel that social media marketing is worth the resources.)
When social media is implemented properly, aka: professionally, consistently and effectively, it can be a business’s biggest strengths. But, an imperative piece of the social media puzzle that cannot be overlooked is social media advertising (also known as pay-per-click ads).
These PPC ads are gold. Especially Facebook ads. The process is ingenious!
Since Facebook already collects SO much information from millions and millions of people across the globe, it is an awesome way to hone in on targeting a very specific type of person and to display your message in a space where the target audience is - every day.
Facebook ads are increasingly effective: Facebook advertisements’ click through rates increase year after year, and the cost per click has been decreasing.
If you want to get new followers to a client’s Facebook business page, if you want to get people to notice a business’s message, if you want to get more traffic to a website, the best strategy is to perform a Facebook advertising campaign. (This can also be used to open up more PPC campaign ideas in the future.)
Talk to the business owner and let him/her know the intricate ways in which you can target a particular audience on Facebook. Let him or her know that you can set a daily budget for $5 and still reach thousands of people. Let him or her know that social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. Let him or her know that the business’s target audience IS on Facebook and is already clicking on other businesses’ Facebook ads. Let him or her know that if their business does not utilize Facebook ads, their competitors WILL.
When you get confirmation from the business owner (or if you are the business owner and want to utilize Facebook ads), you should use a relatively new Facebook advertising tool called the Power Editor. In the remainder of this blog post, I am going to explain how to use it and I will mention it’s unique features.
Some tips when planning a social media advertising strategy:
- Determine your goals and what it means to succeed
- Clearly define your target audience
- Understand the target audience
- Decide on a reasonable budget
- Have at least one high-quality image or graphic to use for the advertisement (no more than 20% text)
- Feel free to refine the ads while the campaign is running - nothing is in stone
How the marketing professionals at Bloominari use the Power Editor to create an advertising campaign:
If you’re familiar with Business Manager, the Power Editor can be accessed while on the Business Manager page. It can also be accessed when in Facebook’s Ads Manager (Power Editor is listed as a link at the top navigation bar.
Once in the Power Editor, you will see a page similar to this:
Power Editor is organized very nicely, making it user-friendly. It clearly shows the separation between campaigns, ad sets and individual advertisements, as well as how to create, edit, duplicate and delete them.
First step: Create a Campaign
- While under the Manage Ads tab, click Create Campaign (a campaign is the all-encompassing name for the ad(s) that you will make for a certain audience or audiences).
- Enter a campaign name (some key words about the type of campaign and purpose), select the buying type (to specify how you are paying for the PPC ad).
- And select your objective (what you want people to do with this ad). This can be: clicks to the website, lead generation, Facebook page Likes, video views, app engagement and other types of things. You must choose only one, and then the Power Editor will keep track so that you can later judge if the campaign was successful or if you need to make changes to improve its performance.
Second step: Choose or Make an Ad Set
- In the same window, you can choose an existing ad set or create a new one. You do not need to create an ad set in that window, you can just click the Create button when finished creating a new campaign.
- After creating the campaign, make sure you immediately deactivate the campaign. (Nothing will happen until you put in payment information and create ads to display, but it’s best to be safe rather than sorry and make sure everything is deactivated.)
- Go to the second step on the very left-side of the Power Editor and select Ad Set. Above it, click Create Ad Set. An ad set is a group of advertisements that fall under the same campaign (therefore have the same goal, overall budget and relatively same information) but have different targeting criteria (aka: different audiences).
- In the window that appears, select your campaign name that you want to use and then select Create New ad set. Choose a name that is similar to the campaign name but also includes the target audience and click Create. Each new target audience will have a different ad set.
- Details about the ad set automatically appear. You can choose the daily or lifetime budget, as well as when the ad begins, when you want it to end and how often you want the ad to run.
- Before you get into those other details, it’s best to choose the audience. Scroll down to the Audience section and click Edit Audience.
- This is a really special, unique and beneficial feature of the Power Editor: it gives you the ability to deeply narrow your search and even exclude people. For example, let’s say you are trying to reach college students in San Diego to get them to buy your business’s beginning photography gear. So you need to target university students in San Diego who are interested in photography, but are not professional photographers.
a. You would select your target audience by first choosing the demographic area of San Diego, then choosing appropriate ages, then choosing the three universities in San Diego. This means that you are targeting people of a certain age range who live in San Diego, and they must have on their Facebook profile that they attend one of these three universities.
b. The next step is to click Narrow Further and then select photography as an interest they have chosen on their Facebook profile. This means that you are targeting San Diego university students who also have an interest in photography.
c. Finally, you can exclude the people who are already photographers. You click Exclude People and then choose people who have a job title as a photographer.
d. This process is the ultimate targeting strategy, which is much better than using the Ad Manager on Facebook.com.
- Lastly, you can choose to target only people who Like your Facebook business page/app/event, only people who do not Like your page/app/event or friends of people who have Liked your page/app/event.
After every change you make in this window, it will calculate the potential reach for this ad set (the number of people who fit these criteria). Click Save when you’re done. You can always open it back up and change it in any way or even delete it.
Continue to make as many ad sets as you need. To continue the example with the photography business, you may also want to target older adults who are interested in photography, people with children or people who are interested in the San Diego Museum of Art. Click Save when done.
Back on the Ad Sets page, this is when you can play with the daily budget or lifetime budget amounts and discover the potential estimated daily reach. The more money you want to spend, the more people you can reach, but this will eventually plateau.
Third Step: Create Advertisements
- Now it is time to create the individual advertisements. Go to the third step on the very left-side of the Power Editor and select Ads.
- Above it, click Create Ad.
- Fill in the correct campaign name and ad set (the target audience for this individual ad).Then type up the name for the ad (use the campaign name, ad set name and brief keywords for what this ad will entail) and then click Create.
- The next window provides all of the necessary fields you need to create an ad, including a url, ad headline, ad text and the ad’s news feed link description. You can choose exactly how you want the ad to look and what exact placement you want the ad to have on Facebook and then you can easily preview the ad. Some of the text boxes have character limits, so be careful. It is best to write out all of the text first in a Word document, have it saved and then alter it while you create the ad.
- When uploading the image for the advertisement, be sure that it is within the image size restraints, be sure to crop your image for the ad accordingly and Facebook will not allow an image that appears to be more than 20% text.
- Don’t forget to choose a call to action button.
In order to create the most effective advertisement possible, make sure the Facebook ad is:
- Visually appealing
- Relevant to the target audience
- Has a value proposition
- Has a call-to-action
The Power Editor is a very helpful, useful professional tool for marketers. It’s best to get familiar with it before the pressure is on to create a PPC campaign for a client, but hopefully these steps help guide you through how to use the Power Editor if you are planning on using it immediately.
If you are a small business owner trying to manage your Facebook page, social media ads and social media presence by yourself, please know that we are here to help. We offer competitive, affordable prices to fit your budget. You are a master at your industry, and your business needs you to focus on your business - not its social media presence.
For more information about the Power Editor, Facebook has some videos you can watch here.
