How to Effectively Promote Your Business With Facebook Advertising

Once you have your Facebook page all set up, Facebook advertising can be one of the most effective ways to promote your product, brand or promotion, thanks to its highly targeted nature.

Here are several simple tips on how to improve the performance of your Facebook advertising campaigns.

Note: Although these may sound simple, in most cases they will triple the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising campaigns – so pay close attention because the slightest tweak in the wrong direction can cause significant differences in the effectiveness of your facebook ad campaign.

Tip # 1: Target “Likes & Interests” Within Facebook

Note: You must be logged into Facebook to complete this tutorial. Once logged in, click here to create your first ad campaign

Facebook advertising enables you to target consumers according to highly specific demographic and geographic information. But why stop at age groups, location, or gender when you can ensure that your ad only displays to people who have explicitly stated somewhere in their profile that they share a particular “like” or “interest” that aligns with your product, brand or promotion.

For example, in setting up this sample ad campaign for Buzz Network, not only can you target Australian men and women between the ages of 25 and 55 (the target demographic for Buzz Network), you can also target people who list the following ‘likes’ or “Interests” on their Facebook profile.

In this example, I did a quick search for groups and Facebook pages on Facebook that have a good following of people who fit well into my target demographics. I then decided that the Facebook page called “Social Media Solutions” had a good number of Australian followers who might also be interested in some of the things Buzz Network Australia has to offer.

I then copied the exact name of that Facebook Page (in this case it was “Social Media Solutions”) and entered that into the “Interests” field, as shown on point number 3 below:

I now have a very specific group of about 25,020 Australian users who have shown an interest in something similar to what we’re promoting. This ensures I now have a more targeted group of people to potentially broadcast my ad to.

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Important note: Only enter ONE “interest” and “country/region” per ad.

Just like Google Adwords, the more precisely targeted your add is, the higher CTR (Click Through Rate) you will receive. Thus, reducing your cost per click.

I highly recommend that you set up individual ad campaigns (copy, images etc) for each individual “Interest”, “Demographics”, “Country/Region”, etc. That way you can test and optimize your campaign more accurately. Whereas, by entering multiple interests for the one ad campaign, you significantly reduce your chances of working out where the optimal points are in your campaign (i.e. which ads are performing the best, which ads you need to get rid of, or make tweaks to, etc), as well as significantly increasing your cost per click.

More on this in a later post.

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Another strategy that I recommend is that you access your existing Facebook page Insights report to get a glimpse of your current demographic as this will give you a good idea of who to target when you configure your ad.

To access Facebook Insights, login to your Facebook page, then click > “Edit Page” (top right hand corner of your page) > then “Insights”.

Tip # 2: Point Users to Your Facebook Page

While you can use a Facebook ad to point to anywhere on the web, your Facebook advertising will be far more effective if you point to something within the Facebook site itself, such as your Facebook Page.

Sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how many ads running on Facebook these days are taking people away from the place they wanted to be in the first place.

Imagine for a moment while you put yourself in the shoes of a Facebook user. You’ve just popped online to engage with your friends, profiles, photos and feeds and have become interested in an ad. But once you click, you’re removed from your Facebook experience and taken somewhere completely away from what it was you were initially engaged in.

Now, unless the new location you’ve come upon is especially compelling, or in some way satisfies the experience you came to Facebook to achieve in the first place, many users will simply click away from the advertised site and return to what they were originally doing online, which in this case was Facebook.

Studies have shown, and in my own experience, that up to 62.7% of surveyed users much prefer ads that are designed for destinations within Facebook, as apposed to ads where a click takes the user away from Facebook.

In fact, i’ve recently noticed that Facebook will actually REWARD it’s advertisers for keeping their users within Facebook by way of lowering their cost per click, as well as increasing your “click-through-rate”, just as Google does when you have a high Adwords quality score.

Now this hasn’t been confirmed precisely, but I have reason to believe Facebook puts more weight toward advertisers who keep their users on Facebook.

Regardless, it’s better that you do keep your users on Facebook as it provides a better experience for your potential customer. Because your goal with Facebook Marketing isn’t to directly pitch your product or service, but rather, it’s to engage, listen and interact with your customers so you can better serve their needs.

At the end of the day, if your customers don’t know, like or trust you, then it’s unlikely that they’re not going to buy from you.

SO, remember that if you point your Facebook ad to a page within the Facebook network, the user is far more likely to engage with it.

Tip # 3: Optimize Your Campaign by Targeting Friends of Fans

We learned from Facebook that the often overlooked ‘advertise to friends of your fans’ feature performs significantly better in terms of brand lift than regular Facebook ads.

The reason being is because when you advertise to the friends of your fans, every single person viewing your ad will see that someone they know is already a fan of your business or brand.

For example, if my friend John Smith has “Liked” Jill’s Jellybeans, the message ‘John Smith likes this’ will appear beneath the Jill’s Jellybeans Facebook ad when I view it.

This has been demonstrated many times before, but the fact is people will respond best to personal brand and product recommendations from their friends.

So if every person viewing your ad campaign sees that at least one of their friends is associated with your brand, the response will dramatically increase.

You might be thinking “I only have 100 fans – if I advertise to friends of fans I won’t reach anyone??”. Keep in mind that on average each Facebook user has 130 friends. So if you advertise to friends of your fans and you have 100 fans, you will be able to reach 13,000 of their friends.

On the other hand, if you have 10,000 fans, you would be able to reach 1.3MM of their friends!

Side note: Don’t be discouraged by the estimated reach box (shown below on point number 2) if your reach looks low initially when aiming to target friends of fans. Rest assure that your reach will increase exponentially as people “Like” your page.

Advertising to friends of fans is easy to do. Simply select the “Only show my advert to friends of the fans of Your Page” option under “Targeting”, as shown here:

Tip # 4: Have a Brick & Mortar Business? Target Customers Locally!

If you have a business that primarily serves customers in a particular city or region, you can drill down ad targeting to very specific locations with Facebook advertising. You can even get as close as a 16 kilometer radius of your city, which is great for localizing your ad campaigns.

If you have a good idea of the target demographics of your local business, you might also want to try targeting other businesses in your area that may have the same type of customer.

For example, if you own a beauty store, then you might want to create Facebook ads that target women with an interest in “Spas” that live within 16 kilometers of your shop.

Even better, there might be a really popular spa within a block away from your shop that also has a Facebook page with a ton of fans, so why not target their page specifically by entering the page name in your “Interests” setting for your ad campaign.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

I hope these tips will help you improve the performance of your Facebook advertising campaigns.

If you have any questions, comments or additional tips to add to this list, I would love to hear from you.

Please submit your comments below.