Member Article

Andrew Trotman – MD of It’s Gone Viral – on the secrets to facebook adverts that agencies don’t want you to know.

When deciding upon which type of facebook advertising method to use for your business, it’s important to be clear what the objective of your specific campaign is so that you can then use the appropriate and most effective method. A lot of businesses are happy to “boost” their posts using Facebook advertising – meaning they pay facebook to put individual posts from their page in front of users on a one off basis. This is a useful tool when specific messages are looking to be amplified but has very little long term advantage for the business doing the boosting.

If you are looking for a more advanced social media strategy that involves building a specific audience, increasing overall page reach, increasing website clicks or increasing sales then a Facebook Ad is a better option for your business.

The increase in popularity of Facebook adverts has been clear to see over the past few years, as businesses profit from the benefit of this type of advertising over more traditional methods. One of the biggest advantages, especially for smaller businesses, (and something that a lot of marketing agencies would rather you didn’t know) is that FB Ads are incredibly easy and cheap to learn the basics of. You can start an ad today and reach 1000 users of the platform for around just £5. Being able to target people incredibly accurately via their age, gender, interests and location are all options.

If you are using ads to promote a specific page, product or website traffic, it’s also incredibly easy to measure the success and ROI of campaigns compared to say a TV, for example. This means you can ensure that you are investing money in to advertising options at a much lower risk than before.

The biggest mistake we see with businesses running facebook adverts is that they try one advert copy and judge the success of the campaign on that one advert’s ROI. When you pay facebook to get your advert in users’ timeline, it is down to YOU to convert that reach in to grabbing that user’s attention and getting them interested in your message. If you don’t do that then you are essentially paying for useless reach.

The beauty of facebook ads is that there is no limit to different creatives you can make for a specific campaign, and no minimum budget either. This means you can try multiple ads and test the ROI of each one before scaling your budget up for the most successful ones. This has been a hugely effective method when growing smaller pages with a small budget, and a great way to counteract facebook’s diminishing organic reach.

Depending on how much work you are prepared to do you can create endless adverts, targeting different demographics with different messages to drive them to your brand. You wouldn’t necessarily target a 30 year old married female with the same message as a 25 year old single man so this should be represented by your social media adverts.

Coming up with 10-20 different variations of creative can sound daunting but even the smallest changes can influence a facebook user’s decision to want to know more about your brand. Spending your time in coming up with creative adverts (everything from the images and messaging on a static advert, the way a video advert is structured and filmed and even down to the specific words used in the advert copy) is the best way to get incredible results for your business.

Here at It’s Gone Viral we have helped several disrupter brands and pages come from facebook obscurity to challenging some if the biggest pages on facebook in a matter of months using this exact strategy.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by KOMI Group .